TV News LIES

Just one week after a Georgia judge restored broad access to abortion in the state by blocking its six-week abortion ban, the Georgia supreme court ruled on Monday to reinstate the ban.

The ban will take effect at 5pm local time on Monday and remain in effect while litigation over it plays out.

Abortion rights supporters quickly condemned the decision, which also came down weeks after news broke that two Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions.

“Every minute this harmful six-week abortion ban is in place, Georgians suffer,” Monica Simpson, executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said in a statement. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is a plaintiff in the legal battle over the ban.

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The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.

The justices did not detail their reasoning for keeping in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations if they would break Texas law. There were no publicly noted dissents.

The strain, known as XEC, is gaining a foothold in the United States, accounting for an estimated 5.7% of new cases in the past two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

“We don’t know if it will have legs and soar up in the charts,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But it has the features that could make it the one to watch.”

XEC caught the eye of experts as it spread quickly in parts of Europe in recent weeks. Still, a lot remains unknown about the strain.

“Once again, Covid is showing that it is not finished mutating, and we’re still seeing the limitations of our vaccines in controlling it,” said Rick Bright, an immunologist and the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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California last week clocked its fourth case of locally transmitted dengue fever this year — an alarming rise in a sometimes-deadly disease that experts fear could be fueled by climate change.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed the newest incidence of the mosquito-borne illness in a resident of Panorama City, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The department noted that the individual had not traveled to areas where dengue is endemic, and that the case appeared unrelated to three others, also locally acquired, that were reported in the county earlier this month.

“We are seeing the local transmission of dengue, which is unprecedented in Los Angeles County,” Muntu Davis, Los Angeles County health officer, said in a statement.

Advocate Health, the third largest non-profit health system in the country, has announced it will cancel more than 11,500 debt judgments it holds against people who failed to pay medical bills.

The move comes after more than a year of public scrutiny of the hospital conglomerate’s aggressive debt collection practices – including news articles by the Guardian and other media outlets and a study by the Duke University School of Law and the state treasurer of North Carolina, where the chain is headquartered.

The study, released in August 2023, found that the hospital group filed more debt lawsuits against patients – 2,482 – than any other hospital system in the state between 2017 and 2022.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.