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A pediatrician writes that bias in the health care system accounts for illness severity in Black children.

Racial bias by physicians is a well-documented phenomenon, and pediatricians are not an exception. Black children arriving in emergency departments are perceived as less ill than their white counterparts, and are less likely to have lab and imaging studies done when presenting with fever, a cardinal symptom of Covid-19 infection.

we must also look at ourselves to ensure that we are not perpetuating disparities in the hospital and in our clinics

Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care.

Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.

The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.

The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday

with the future of the 2010 landmark health care law championed by Democrats and attacked by Republicans

two justices on the conservative wing of the bench expressing skepticism toward arguments the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety.

Monday’s vaccinations, the first in a staggeringly complicated national campaign, were a moment infused with hope and pain for hundreds of America’s health care workers.

Even as doctors and nurses lined up for the first shots, cheered on their colleagues and joked about barely feeling the prick of the syringe, they also reflected on their grueling months in the trenches of the country’s coronavirus nightmare.

Across the country, hospital auditoriums and conference rooms became makeshift vaccination sites,

China’s top leaders believe that confining residents to their homes during outbreaks is the most effective way to keep death rates low and avoid overwhelming the country’s healthcare system.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a public forum in November that China would have had about 260 million Covid-19 cases and more than three million deaths if it had adopted looser restrictions similar to those in the U.S. and U.K.

China has reported fewer than 260,000 cases and less than 5,000 deaths, compared with 80 million confirmed cases and nearly a million deaths in the U.S.

On Wednesday, the Spanish Health Ministry reported that the 14-day incidence rate had fallen 20 points to 3,286 per 100,000. This is the second day in a row that this data point has dropped after two months on the rise.

What’s more, while hospitals remain under strain, the situation is far from what it was during other waves.

In response to the surge in coronavirus infections in the leadup to Christmas, the Spanish government announced on December 23 that face masks would once again be mandatory outdoors. At the time, Darias said this measure would be in place “until the epidemiological situation improved.”

Democrats had hoped to give the federal government the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices

a promise to deliver lower drug prices this year.

Big Pharma employs roughly 1,500 lobbyists on Capitol Hill and spent more than $177 million on lobbying and campaign donations in 2021 alone.

"Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly," the court said. "Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category."

The high court, though, gave the green-light to a requirement that health care workers in facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding must be vaccinated, siding 5-4 with the Biden administration.

The decisions come less than a week after the justices heard oral arguments on the emergency requests regarding the vaccine-or-test rule and vaccine requirement for health care workers.

The gang that kidnapped a group of 17 American and Canadian missionaries in Haiti has asked for $1 million each for their release

The 16 American citizens and one Canadian were kidnapped by the powerful "400 Mawozo" gang on Saturday after visiting an orphanage in Croix-des-Bouquets, a northeast suburb of the capital Port-au-Prince

the missionaries were being held in a safe house right outside the suburb by the gang

Behind the strikes, inflation numbers and talk of all the difficult decisions politicians have to make are a multitude of trapped people, their choices shrinking. People in bad relationships who cannot leave because rents and mortgages have gone up so being single is no longer viable. People who would like to have a child, or another child, but cannot afford its care, or who would like to return to work after having a child but the sums just don’t work. People in bad jobs with no security or benefits who cannot quit and look for alternatives because they have no savings to buffer rising costs. The end result is a crisis not just of the economy, but of freedom.

With that crisis, an entire liberal ambition becomes thwarted. We talk of liberalism in grand abstract terms, as the noble heart of an ideal political order that promotes human rights, the rule of law, civil liberties and freedom from religious dogma and prejudice

But when economic arrangements themselves become coercive and abusive, then political liberalism can coexist with, and indeed mask, a state of illiberalism and bondage. In the throes of personal challenges, lofty political ideals feel remote and irrelevant. All that people like Jane and others have the time or energy to register is a set of invisible oppressive economic forces that simply must be weathered because they are facts of nature

Last year’s birthrate was 6.77 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 7.52 births in 2021, marking the lowest birthrate on record. In real numbers, there were more than one million fewer registered births in 2022 than the previous year’s total of 10.62 million.

eaths per 1,000 people compared with a rate of 7.18 deaths in 2021.

Online, some Chinese people were unsurprised by the announcement, saying the social pressures which were driving the low birthrate still remained.“Housing prices, welfare, education, healthcare – reasons why people can’t afford to have children,” said one commenter on Weibo.“Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive, no one wants to get married and even fall in love, let alone have children,” said another.

Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.

Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills

poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.

What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”

That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.

Despite the $300bn mega-bankruptcy of Evergrande, the risk of an immediate 2008-style crisis in China is slight.

let us linger over the significance of this point. What China is doing is, after all, staggering. By means of its “three red lines” credit policy, it is stopping in its tracks a gigantic real estate boom. China’s real estate sector, created from scratch since the reforms of 1998, is currently valued at $55tn. That is the most rapid accumulation of wealth in history. It is the financial reflection of the surge in China’s urban population by more than 480mn in a matter of decades.

Throughout the history of modern capitalism real estate booms have been associated with credit creation and, as the work of Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick and Alan M. Taylor has shown, with major financial crises.

China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth

Adam sees reasons for hope:

Similarly, the Chinese state’s recent intervention in the tech sector, while it has led to market volatility, is aimed at doing exactly what western regulators want to do, but can’t seem to do: stop huge companies from extracting monopoly rents from the economy. 

We cannot continue to offer healthcare free at the point of use. Those (like me) who can pay should be charged. We cannot expect to inherit our elderly parents’ houses and so require the state to pay for their old-age care. We middle classes have no right to enjoy rail travel vastly subsidised by the general taxpayer. I have no right to an old person’s London travel card saving me thousands a year when young people on a tenth of my salary must pay — nor to a winter fuel allowance.

The taxpayer should not be subsidising public-school education for the small minority who benefit from it. Pensioners should not, regardless of our wealth, expect increases in our pensions that exceed the increases working people get. Britain should not be merrily promising substantial increases in defence spending when we already shoulder a disproportionate burden in the defence of freedom.

Year on year we are loading bigger national bills on to the ever-smaller proportion of the population who are actually working. People are retiring earlier then demanding to be kept expensively alive for longer

he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood

Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer usually means a quick death—but not for Roger Royse, who was in Stage II of the disease when he got the bad news in July 2022. The five-year relative survival rate for late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer is 3%—which means that patients are 3% as likely to live five years after their diagnosis as other cancer-free individuals. But if pancreatic cancer is caught before it has spread to other organs, the survival rate is 44%.

some public-health experts think that’s just as well. They fret that widespread use of multicancer early-detection tests would cause healthcare spending to explode. Those fears have snarled Galleri and similar tests in a web of red tape.

Early diagnosis is the best defense against most cancers,