Health News at Your Fingertips

The nine supreme court justices are meeting Thursday for the first time since last week’s leak of a draft opinion that would overrule the 1973 Roe v Wade opinion and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

According to the Associated Press, the meeting in the justices’ private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. Nobody other than the justices attends, with the most junior, Amy Coney Barrett, responsible for taking notes.

As the AP recognizes, Thursday’s conference comes at a fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court’s marshal to undertake an investigation.
Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court’s final word.

Supreme court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices’ initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

On Wednesday, a Democrat-led effort to enshrine abortion rights into federal law failed in the UN Senate.

Read more:

Joe Biden marked the imminent “tragic milestone” of 1m deaths in the US in his address to the second global Covid-19 summit this morning, and renewed his call to Congress to strike a deal on a coronavirus relief package.

Biden highlighted the urgency of his $22.5bn request, which he says is crucial to fund vaccines, treatments and testing domestically, as well as boosting global efforts to end the emergency:

Today, we’re at a new stage in fighting this pandemic, facing an evolving set of challenges. We have to double down on our efforts to get shots in people’s arms, country by country, community by community, ensure we have reliable and predictable supplies of vaccines and boosters for everyone, everywhere, expand access globally to testing and treatments. And we have to prevent complacency.

Biden’s demand of US lawmakers has stumbled, one of a number of growing headaches for the president amid crises over inflation and abortion rights. An on-again, off-again bipartisan Covid deal was scuppered by political wrangling over immigration specifically.

Republicans agreed to a $10bn compromise “in principle”, without money for global initiatives, then backed out when the Biden administration insisted on pushing ahead with the termination of the Trump-era Title 42 policy that blocked refugees at the southern border because of coronavirus concerns.

Officially, the Covid-19 death toll in the US is not yet at 1m, Johns Hopkins reporting on Thursday a tally of 999,000.

But the inevitable reaching of that grim figure in the coming few days fired Biden’s new call to action, at home and internationally:

I continue to call on Congress to take urgent action to provide emergency Covid-19 funding that is vital to protect Americans, to make sure that we maintain our supplies and Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines, including next-generation vaccines that are being developed.

The request also includes $5bn to keep up our global partnership in the fight against Covid-19 and sustain our efforts to get shots in people around the world, expand access to treatments and save lives everywhere.

We can do this, we can control Covid-19, we can start to build a better, healthier and more secure future today if we all do our part, and if we step up together.

He announced new global initiatives including sharing of US Covid-19 technologies, partnerships to expand access to rapid testing and antiviral treatments in harder to reach areas, and $450m seed funding for a pandemic preparedness and global health security fund to be established this summer:

The US has provided more than $19bn to help countries fight Covid-19, life saving medicines, oxygen, tests, equipment, supplies, and partnered with countries to improve their capacity to manufacture vaccines.

We’ve delivered more than 500m vaccines to 115 countries and we’re going to… deliver another 500m doses.

But there’s still so much left to do. This pandemic isn’t over. We mark a tragic milestone here in the US, 1m empty chairs around the family dinner table, irreplaceable losses that each leave behind a family or community forever change because of this pandemic.

Read the White House proclamation on 1m Covid-19 deaths here.

Good morning blog readers, welcome to Thursday’s edition of US politics live!

We’re kicking off with Joe Biden’s appearance later this morning at the second virtual global Covid-19 summit, and his commemoration of 1 million lives lost in the US since the beginning of the pandemic.

The president is under pressure on multiple fronts domestically, with soaring prices, raging inflation, and the furore over the supreme court’s stripping abortion rights uppermost on voters’ minds as November’s midterm elections approach.

Central to Biden’s woes has been his inability to strike a deal with Congress over his $22.5bn coronavirus relief package request, which got mired in political wrangling over both immigration and abortion. His speech this morning will include a new demand for lawmakers to get a deal done, aides say.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

• Leaders from the association of southeast Asian nations (Asean) are in Washington DC, meeting lawmakers and, later, Biden at the White House to discuss the pandemic, climate crisis and economic cooperation.
• Yesterday’s defeat in the Senate of Democrat-proposed legislation on abortion rights could come up during Nancy Pelosi’s weekly briefing.
• The House natural resources committee will evaluate a disturbing report on the discovery of dozens of burial sites at historic Native American boarding schools.
• Outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki will give what could be her second-to-last briefing set for 2.30pm.