House Democrats look to force vote on IVF
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Strict mask, vaccine rules could have saved lives, says new study
Stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them, though efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely caused more harm than good, a new study has found.
Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some restrictions practiced in Northeastern states, according to findings published on Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The most effective responses were mask mandates and vaccine requirements rest, the JAMA study found.
“COVID-19 restrictions saved lives,” the researchers wrote.
“The death toll was probably considerably higher than it would otherwise have been in states that resisted imposing these restrictions, banned their use, or implemented them for only relatively short periods of time.”
Vaccine requirements and mask mandates have been politically controversial, and continue to cast a shadow on politicians in Washington.
Bu the JAMA research extolled these policies, and said they should help guide public health response in future pandemics even as an uncontrolled rise in bird flu hits the West.
At first, there was little difference in COVID-19 response between red and blue states, the researchers noted.
For the first four months of the pandemic, most states pursued overlapping and nearly-universal strategies like closing businesses and schools and imposing mask mandates.
About 57 percent of Texans supported the mask restrictions, according to polling from The University of Texas. Those numbers are roughly in line with the 62 percent nationwide who told pollsters at Pew that the lives saved were worth what nearly 70 percent acknowledged as a considerable economic costs.
But by the middle of 2020, as right-leaning groups fomented opposition to these restrictions, conservative governments in states like Texas reacted by banning mask mandates .
As late as 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) was telling conservative talk show hosts that he would keep his pandemic-derived emergency powers in place until state legislators “codify my executive orders that ban mask mandates, that ban forced vaccines and things like that,” the Texas Tribune reported .
The cost of these reactions in conservative states was tens or hundreds of thousands of additional deaths — a cost that would have been even worse if all states had followed their lead, the JAMA researchers found.
If all states had followed more lenient practices in the Southeast or Texas, as many as 200,000 people would have died, the study found.
At its most dramatic, Mississippi — the state with the weakest restrictions — saw five times as many deaths per-capita as Massachusetts, a state with among the strongest restrictions, the study found.
The findings emphasized that all interventions weren’t equally helpful, and that particularly when it came to closures of public spaces, the costs may have outweighed benefits. As much as three-fourths of the lives saved by restrictions could be attributed to just two — masks and vaccines.
By contrast, the researchers found, benefits were weakest for school closures, which hurt students’ social development and test scores without achieving much benefit in reducing the death rate.
For high-poverty school districts, this disparity was particularly stark. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that low-income districts that went remote in the 2020 – 2021 school year, for example, “will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses.
The data suggests that school closures “may have been too aggressively pursued in some states,” the researchers found.
On the other hand, requiring students and teachers to wear masks was “probably more effective and imposed lower costs.”
Another area where researchers argued that the costs of restrictions likely outweighed benefits was social isolation for nursing home residents — which seem to have saved people from death by COVID-19 but caused them to be more likely to die overall .
The researchers acknowledged that simply saving lives was “not necessarily sufficient to justify imposing restrictions because they also imposed a variety of costs,” though they noted that some of these — like “loss of liberty” — were difficult to quantify.
But by using accepted actuarial numbers for the monetary value of a life — from about $5 million to about $12 million — they found that the lives that could have been saved by stronger restrictions was on the order of $1.2 to $5.2 trillion.
That’s the equivalent of between 6 and 22 percent of 2021-era GDP.
Nebraska Supreme Court upholds law banning transgender care for youth and abortions
The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday affirmed the state’s law banning gender affirming care for minors and abortion after 12 weeks, ruling the two issues were legally allowed to be combined.
The abortion ban was added as an amendment to Legislative Bill 574, a bill that would restrict access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender young people, in the final days of Nebraska’s legislative session last year.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, represented by American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the law as a violation of a constitutional amendment requiring bills to stick to a single subject.
But the state’s highest court said even though abortion and gender-altering care are “distinct types of medical care,” the law itself broadly encompasses the “regulation of permissible medical care.”
In a scathing partial dissent, Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman said she did not believe abortion and gender-affirming care comprise “one subject,” and said the majority gave deference to the Legislature “at the expense of the Constitution.”
“Unrelated provisions that happen to do similar things at some level of generality do not dispel the criticism that the bill contains more than one subject,” Miller-Lerman wrote. It is not the role of the court “to scour the bill in hopes of finding one subject that could conceivably explain inclusion of very different acts in one bill.”
Last year, Republican lawmakers in the officially nonpartisan Nebraska Legislature originally proposed two separate bills. One bill would have banned abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy, while another would have restricted gender-affirming treatment for minors.
But the six-week ban failed to overcome the filibuster by a single vote, so the GOP-dominated Legislature added the 12-week abortion ban as an amendment to the transgender ban.
A district judge dismissed the lawsuit last August, and the ACLU appealed.
Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, said clinics in the state “will proudly continue providing abortion care up to 12 weeks and we remain dedicated to helping our patients in Nebraska access the care they so desperately need, even if it means having to travel out of state.”
But voters could have the final say. Two competing questions on the subject are likely to appear on the November ballot: One would add a right to abortion to the state constitution, while the other would enshrine the 12-week ban.