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Patients with asthma and diabetes told to enter three-month quarantine – Pulse

Posted: March 21, 2020 at 9:43 am

Patients with underlying health conditions, including asthma and diabetes, have been instructed by the Government to take extreme measures to shield themselves from the coronavirus (Covid-19), starting this weekend.

Yesterday Prime Minister Boris Johnson said anyone over 70, pregnant women and people with certain underlying health conditions making them more vulnerable to serious Covid-19 complications, should isolate themselves for at least 12 weeks starting this weekend.

The Government has now published a list of the conditions affected, including severe illnesses such as patients undergoing cancer treatment, but also anyone who would normally be eligible for a free flu jab.

The specific at-risk patients are those with:

The Government also went on to list a group of patients who are at even greater risk, saying these will be contacted specially by the NHS with more stringent measures they should take. For now, they are told to'rigourously follow' social distancing advice.

The groups most at risk are:

At yesterday's daily coronavirus briefing, chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said they hope the 12 weeks will cover the peak of the virus outbreak in the UK, but could end up lasting longer.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said people in at-risk group should shield themselves away from social contact, only leaving the house for exercise, during which they should keep their distance from others. If at all possible, they should have their essential items brought to them.

In the unprecedented message, all members of the public were urged to avoid non-essential contact with others in a bid to delay the spread of Covid-19 until the NHS is prepared.

Social distancing measures the public is urged to undertake include working from home where possible; avoiding large gatherings, including in public venues; only engaging in essential contact; and entire households staying at home for two weeks if just one member displays symptoms such as a continuous cough or high temperature.

Speaking in Parliament yesterday, health secretary Matt Hancock noted that these nationwide proposals are unprecedented in peacetime and urged people to look out for the vulnerable members of their community.

Source: UK Government

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Punjabs first coronavirus death is 70-year-old man with diabetes who travelled via Italy – ThePrint

Posted: March 21, 2020 at 9:43 am

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Chandigarh: Punjab announced its first death due to COVID-19 Thursday, taking the toll in India to four. The deceased was a 70-year-old man who had arrived at Delhi airport from Germany via Italy on 7 March, before proceeding to his home in Banga, in Nawanshahr district.

A known case of diabetes and hypertension,according to a state government press note, the man was being monitored for coronavirus symptoms by health officials. He died Wednesday morning of what seemed to be a heart attack, but was confirmed as coronavirus-positive late at night.

As many as 17 people who he had come in contact with him, including three health officials, have been quarantined following his death. His village too has been locked down for screening.

Also read: Modi govt COVID-19 advisory: Those above 65, below 10 must stay home, no concessional travel

Chandigarh, the union territory that serves as the capital of Punjab and Haryana, reported its first COVID-19 case Wednesday night when a 23-year-old resident of Sector 21 was found positive. She had arrived from London on 15 March, and is undergoing treatment at the government medical college in Sector 32.

Another coronavirus-positive patient from Punjab is undergoing treatment in Amritsar. He was hospitalised on arrival from Italy on 9 March. His condition is said to be stable.

Taking note of these cases, the Punjab government has launched a door-to-door awareness and surveillance campaign to assess if the virus has managed to find its way into the community. The campaign will involve health officials, police and village-level workers.

Punjab is the first Indian state to start a campaign to stem the coronavirus involving the entire population. Until now, like other states, Punjabs efforts were limited to checking and quarantining persons arriving from countries already affected by the virus.

Punjabs principal secretary for health, Anurag Aggarwal, told ThePrint that special teams will be covering villages and urban areas beginning this week.

Apart from generating awareness about the disease and how to prevent it, these teams have also been authorised to report to the headquarters in case any member of the family they visit is showing signs of a suspected infection. In such cases, another team of health officials will go and conduct the screening, he said.

The health teams have been grouped in accordance with the system followed during polio vaccination drives. In many districts, village-level police officials, anganwadi and Asha workers have also been made part of the teams.

The first COVID-19 death in the state has also prompted the group of ministers authorised by the CM to monitor the situation to suspend all private and government bus services in the state from Friday midnight.

The number of people allowed to gather has been reduced from 50 to 20, and health officials have been asked to start stamping quarantine time dates on the arms of suspected patients.

Briefing journalists following an emergent meeting Thursday morning, cabinet minister Brahm Mohindra, who heads the group of ministers, said the Punjab School Education Board would follow the decision taken by the CBSE to postpone all board examinations until 31 March, after which fresh dates will be announced.

CM Amarinder Singh has also urged the central government to allow private hospitals and labs to conduct tests in order to ensure access to all people. He said he would take up the issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday, during his proposed video conference with all CMs.

Amarinder also offered to allow the 20 million tonnes of food grains currently stored in Punjabs godowns to be distributed to the poor whose earnings were impacted due to the coronavirus outbreak, instead of letting them rot in the storage areas.

The CM also issued an appeal to gurudwaras and other religious places to limit gatherings.

The Golden Temple in Amritsar witnesses thousands of visitors each day, but has not shut its doors to devotees due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee that runs the Golden Temple has allowed people to visit the gurudwara, but only after thermal screening and three-stage sanitisation.

Also read: Donkey poop a COVID-19 hack? Kolkata police take down 600 social media posts for rumours

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The Sound of Science – ‘Nina Tandon’ | WNIJ and WNIU – WNIJ and WNIU

Posted: March 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

The Sound of Science - 'Nina Tandon' (March 20, 2020)

Alexis: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. Im Alexis from NIUSTEM Outreach.

Idalia: And Im Idalia. Todaywe will be discussing American biomedical engineer, Nina Tandon.

Alexis:Dr. Tandongrew upin New York City with two siblings with visual impairments. Its no wonder why she chose toinvestigatethe electrical currents that underline the nervous system.

Idalia:As a kid, she often took apart electronics to try to understand them from the inside out.

Alexis:Tandon went on to study Biomedical Engineering and earned her PhD from Columbia. She focused her research on studying electrical signals in engineered tissues, such as cardiac, skin, bone, and neural tissues.

Idalia:Her studies in both bioengineering and business came together as she and a colleague created EpiBone, the worlds first company to grow living human bones for skeletal reconstruction. EpiBoneuses stem cells from patients in need of new bones to produce skeletal structures based on each individual DNA profile.This decreases rejection, simplifies surgeries, and shortens recovery time.

Alexis:SinceDr. Tandon madesuch a giant leap for bioengineering innovation, its clear why she received awards such as "One of the 100 Most Creative People in Business" byFast Companyand "Global Thinker" byForeignPolicy.

Idalia:She is an inspirational woman who completed what was once thought to be impossible.Yet, sheis far from being done.Her companys bioengineered tissues are being used for testing pharmaceuticals without using rats or humans. She says Our process is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively.

Alexis: Tune in next week where wego into detail aboutmore women in STEM.This has been the Sound of Science on WNIJ.

Idalia: Where you learn something new every day.

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Fearing outbreaks and riots, nations prison and jail wardens scramble to respond to coronavirus threat – ABC News

Posted: March 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

As much of the nation adjusts this week to sudden and indefinite home confinement, prison and jail wardens across the U.S. are scrambling to forestall an outbreak of COVID-19 inside a crowded U.S. correctional facility.

With the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, the U.S. faces unique challenges among its roughly 2.3 million inmates as the coronavirus surges silently through all 50 states.

As projected staff shortages and fears of thinning medical resources cascade through the nations patchwork of federal, state, county and private prisons and jails -- where even rudimentary protective measures like alcohol-based hand sanitizers are considered contraband in many facilities -- officials told ABC News they are preparing for the worst.

I think the threat level is at 10 now, said Scott Kernan, a former secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The [nations] corrections leaders are struggling to figure out what the national response will be.

Burdened by often crowded and at times unsanitary conditions, a generation of aging inmates, and a large portion of its population suffering underlying chronic health issues, the tinderbox conditions inside at least some of the nations more than 6,000 incarceration facilities have corrections officials and organizations stockpiling supplies and hustling out medical guidance through webinars.

People refer to cruise ships as petri dishes, but nobody has invented a more effective vector for transmitting disease than a city jail, said Martin Horn, a former New York City corrections commissioner.

Earlier this week, Los Angeles officials began releasing hundreds of inmates incarcerated for low-level offenses in order to guard against infection, and on Wednesday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said his city was considering similar measures. Calls are growing nationwide for the release of lower-level inmates to stem the spread of the virus.

On Tuesday, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said his office would immediately cease prosecuting low-level offenses and consider freeing jailed suspects vulnerable to infection, part of a harm-reduction strategy among U.S. law enforcement -- unthinkable just months ago -- thats also beginning to take hold across the U.S.

Only a handful of corrections officers nationwide have so far tested positive one died earlier this week but if that number climbs, experts say the calls for wider inmate releases could, too. (On Thursday morning, the New York City Department of Corrections reported its first case of inmate Covid-19, and said that the inmate has been isolated from the general population, and authorities are identifying anyone with whom the inmate came into contact.)

Theres also a fear of staff shortages if the COVID-19 crisis deepens.

Some staff are thinking, "Gimme a break. Time to call in sick. Time to think of my family first,' said Robert Hood, a former warden of Colorados Supermax federal penitentiary.

The nations incarcerated population includes about 1.3 million in state prisons, another quarter million in federal prisons, and about three-quarters of a million in local jails, according to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative.

Corrections experts who spoke to ABC News said the success or failure of a response to a COVID-19 outbreak could depend to some extent on the size and location of the facility.

These are the forgotten people, said Hood. Theres a lot of good people in prison. Theres not probably a lot of sympathy out there for them now, but I have to be candid with you -- theres a crisis going on.

Inside prisons and jails from Washington state to southern Florida, wardens and sheriffs are facing the challenge of not just containing an unprecedented health crisis, but the potential ripple effects of riots and violence if inmates learn the highly contagious virus is sweeping through their facility.

Those natural fears would be exacerbated by growing inmate isolation as family visits dry up and virtually all rehabilitation programs cease -- and millions of Americans face the encroaching uncertainty of life with the coronavirus alone, from inside a cell.

Earlier this week, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) issued an order suspending inmate visits and transfers for 30 days, and issued fresh guidance for protecting against an outbreak. Yet on Thursday, corrections sources at a federal facility in the southern U.S. told ABC News that inmate transfers were still being accepted at their facility.

At Manhattans federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, local corrections union president Tyrone Covington told ABC News on Thursday that the staff there was already running short of hand sanitizer, gloves and N-95 masks.

Tim Lloyd, a former associate warden and 20-year veteran of the federal Bureau of Prisons told ABC News that while the bureau has plans in place, it would be a disaster if an inmate or staff member were to contract the coronavirus.

If inmates feel that they arent getting proper treatment, there is definitely the possibility of a riot, he said.

That could get ugly pretty quick, he explained.

Hood told ABC News that the coronavirus threat has turned the whole U.S. corrections system upside down.

All of the sudden the guys that are the best inmates, the 50 to 60% who are in for drug-related, non-violent offenses, the guys in the dormitories -- not the lockdown guys -- all of the sudden theyre at the most risk. What would I do if I was an inmate in a dormitory? Id go smack someone in the head -- and I mean that. Id want to go on lockdown, because then Id be a little better off.

But then Id realize Im still on the same ventilation system. Im still breathing the same air. Think about it this way: if a [corrections] officer didnt care about you on a good day, are they going to be overly-concerned about germs on my [cell] table on a bad day?

Hood said that even fear factors inside the nations prisons have been turned inside out.

Instead of worrying, Whos carrying the shanks? he said, its Whos coughing?

Kernan now runs a tech firm called LEO Technologies, which uses artificial intelligence to mass-monitor millions of inmate phone calls annually from jails and prisons in five states.

A tenth of all inmate phone calls the firm monitors touch on the spreading virus.

Its on the forefront of their minds, said James Sexton, an executive at Kernans firm. Were seeing 10% of calls in some form or fashion talking about the coronavirus, whether its the [call] recipient or inmate."

Prisoners are literally trapped inside cells as the virus spreads all around them, experts contend.

Jail is already an isolating place -- youre already ostracized from society, said Sexton, a former California law enforcement official who also served time in prison.

In a situation like this, where things are already beyond your control -- and they become beyond the institutions control? Its an immense amount of anxiety when youre locked down like that and you know that you dont have control over your own destiny, he said.

As one inmate incarcerated less than 20 miles from the Washington state nursing home considered ground zero for the virus in the U.S. wrote in a story published jointly on Wednesday by the non-profit Marshall Project and BuzzFeed News: "When I walk through the unit now, I cannot help but linger on the faces of the elderly prisoners, some of them who have been like father figures to us younger men, and think about how they are unlikely to survive this."

Kernan said hes worried about the ability of most prisons or jails to treat or contain an outbreak within their facility.

The point should be made that prison and jails across the country use the local hospital to take care of the inmate population, he said. Every day, thousands of inmates are taken to hospitals for care. If those are not available, it could be a really big deal.

Were going to see a dramatic drop in [medical] services to inmates in a second or third [wave] thats going to play out in May or June, Kernan predicted. "Theres going to be a drawdown on the people that can be found to treat our inmate populations.

Yet other corrections industry leaders and organizations told ABC News that they are prepared for anything.

Theres no question that the jails and the prisons are going to face challenges, but they are as prepared -- or perhaps more prepared -- than society at large because theyve always planned for contagious disease outbreaks, said Horn.

I think theres a distinction between a large sophisticated system like the state of New York or the state of Pennsylvanias corrections system and a small jail in Podunk, Mississippi, but measles, chickenpox -- these things happen all the time and most large correctional agencies have plans to deal with them, Horn said.

Having said that, he added, I dont think anybody was prepared for something like this, and were still not even sure what this even is.

Other industry leaders were optimistic in interviews this week.

"Correctional professionals are first responders," said Elizabeth Gondels of the American Correctional Association, the oldest and largest corrections industry accrediting body in the world. And in my heart of hearts? Our prison systems are on this. They talk. They've got great networks. Our jails are doing a lot of outreach.

Gondels said that she isnt worried about shortages of medical supplies.

We've always done a lot with less, she said. "Theyre a phenomenal group of people, of first responders, and were going to get the job done. I dont even know of an inmate thats gotten it yet."

The Rikers Island jail complex stands in New York with the Manhattan skyline in the background, June 20, 2014.

Some leaders in U.S. corrections health care told ABC News that fears of outbreaks may be overblown.

In terms of like this sort of seething, ready-to-blow prison environment that people maybe think about? I just dont think its the reality, said Dr. Brent Gibson, chief medical officer for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), an organization that creates health care corrections standards and offers voluntary accreditation. About 500 facilities nationwide are accredited by NCCHC, Gibson said.

I hear stuff like, Theres no soap and water, Its just a festering cesspool. Thats just not true. If theyre doing a good job, they have excellent hygiene, sinks and soaps.

Its in their DNA, its part of their contingency [plan] to plan for emergencies, Gibson said. It is day-to-day operations to be prepared for weather emergency, a fire -- so in a sense the tempo of operations, whatever happens, I think theyll be able to handle.

For sure there are shortages of things like masks, and people come to us wondering, Where can we get a supply of respirators? and those kind of potential supply chain disruption [questions], he said. But I cant -- literally three days in a row -- cant find any toilet paper [anywhere] in Chicago. So I dont think supply chain disruptions are unique to the corrections industry.

Gibson also pointed out that inmate populations have dropped significantly in the past decade or more. Between 2007 and 2016, the total inmate population of both jails and prisons in the U.S. dropped by 18%, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

"Every place is different, and Im not saying theres not overcrowded facilities, but we have firsthand experience with jails that are far less at capacity than where they were even a couple years ago," he said.

Despite the challenges, many veteran corrections leaders said they are confident that sick inmates would get the medical treatment they need.

The only group in American society which has an absolute, Constitutional right to health care is prisoners, said Horn, the former New York City corrections commissioner.

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Magenta Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:MGTA) Given Average Recommendation of Hold by Analysts – Redmond Register

Posted: March 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

Shares of Magenta Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:MGTA) have been given a consensus recommendation of Hold by the seven brokerages that are currently covering the firm, Marketbeat reports. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month price objective among brokers that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $20.00.

Several research analysts have recently weighed in on MGTA shares. ValuEngine raised Magenta Therapeutics from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research report on Tuesday, February 25th. Goldman Sachs Group reissued a neutral rating and issued a $18.00 price objective on shares of Magenta Therapeutics in a research report on Friday, December 6th. Cowen reissued a buy rating on shares of Magenta Therapeutics in a research report on Monday, January 13th. Zacks Investment Research raised Magenta Therapeutics from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research report on Tuesday, February 11th. Finally, BTIG Research started coverage on Magenta Therapeutics in a research report on Friday, December 6th. They issued a buy rating and a $20.00 price objective for the company.

Shares of NASDAQ:MGTA opened at $6.70 on Friday. The firm has a market cap of $273.72 million, a P/E ratio of -3.27 and a beta of 2.77. Magenta Therapeutics has a 12-month low of $6.18 and a 12-month high of $21.00. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $11.43 and a 200 day simple moving average of $11.87.

In other news, insider John C. Davis, Jr. sold 11,294 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, January 2nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $15.04, for a total value of $169,861.76. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 19,598 shares in the company, valued at approximately $294,753.92. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. Also, insider Jason Gardner sold 2,897 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Monday, December 23rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $15.10, for a total value of $43,744.70. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now owns 265,212 shares of the companys stock, valued at $4,004,701.20. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last three months, insiders sold 25,391 shares of company stock valued at $384,406. Corporate insiders own 10.90% of the companys stock.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of the company. Bank of Montreal Can grew its stake in shares of Magenta Therapeutics by 57.3% in the 4th quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 2,652 shares of the companys stock valued at $40,000 after buying an additional 966 shares during the period. Bank of New York Mellon Corp grew its stake in shares of Magenta Therapeutics by 5.0% in the 4th quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 62,868 shares of the companys stock valued at $953,000 after buying an additional 2,985 shares during the period. Citigroup Inc. grew its stake in shares of Magenta Therapeutics by 248.7% in the 4th quarter. Citigroup Inc. now owns 6,876 shares of the companys stock valued at $104,000 after buying an additional 4,904 shares during the period. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co NY acquired a new stake in shares of Magenta Therapeutics in the 3rd quarter valued at about $76,000. Finally, Ikarian Capital LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Magenta Therapeutics in the 4th quarter valued at about $131,000. Institutional investors own 65.41% of the companys stock.

About Magenta Therapeutics

Magenta Therapeutics, Inc, a clinical-stage biotechnology company, develops novel medicines to extend the curative power of stem cell transplant, gene therapy, genome editing, and cell therapy to patients. It is developing C100, C200, and C300 targeted antibody-drug conjugates for transplant conditioning; MGTA-145, a novel stem cell mobilization product candidate to control stem cell mobilization; MGTA-456, an allogeneic stem cell therapy to control stem cell growth; E478, a small molecule aryl hydrocarbon receptor antagonist for the expansion of gene-modified stem cells; and G100, an antibody-drug conjugate program to prevent acute graft and host diseases.

Read More: What is Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)?

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Stem Cell Therapy Colorado – thriveMD Denver & Vail, CO

Posted: March 20, 2020 at 8:45 am

Do you have an idea of the natural healing potential that is available in your body?

Read on to find out where your body stores these powerful stem cells.

Adult stem cells are found in the highest concentration in adipose (fat) tissue. In smaller concentrations, they are additionally found in your bone marrow. Beyond what is used for harvesting, stem cells are also found in blood, skin, muscles, and organs.

Adipose tissue provides the largest volume of adult stem cells (1,000 to 2,000 times the number of cells per volume found in bone marrow). Bone marrow provides some stem cells but more importantly provides a large volume of growth factors to aid in the repair process. In addition to adult stem cells, fat tissue also contains numerous other regenerative cells that are important to the healing process.

Stem cells derived from adipose fat tissue have been shown to be a much better source for the repair of cartilage degeneration and recent studies have demonstrated its superior ability to differentiate into cartilage.

There are some myths and misconceptions about stem cells and where the cells come from. Dr. Brandt has dedicated a blog post to the important topic.

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If Social Distancing Is Impossible in Prisons, People Should Be Freed – Truthout

Posted: March 20, 2020 at 8:44 am

In early March, Michelle Tran drove 1,500 miles from her home in Wichita, Kansas, to visit her husband Thai at Californias Avenal State Prison.

Its a trek that Tran makes every 45 to 60 days. She typically spends a week in California so that she can visit her husband for two weekends. During the week, she visits family in Fresno and drives to Los Angeles to check on Thais mother, who is battling Stage IV cancer.

That first weekend, the couple sat at the small round tables in the prisons visiting room. They were able to hold hands, hug, kiss and eat snacks from the prisons vending machines. On Sunday, Tran ended their visit after two hours to drive to Sacramento for a Drop LWOP rally urging lawmakers to change laws and end sentences of life without the possibility of parole. The couple planned to say their goodbyes during her visit the following weekend.

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That visit never happened. On Wednesday, March 11, Tran received a memo announcing that, to stem possible exposure to COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was canceling all visits until further notice.

I traveled 1500 miles to see my husband for basically eight hours, recalled Tran. Despite her disappointment, she understands the need for caution, especially in a prison like Avenal where men live in dormitories with 200 beds and in a prison system which has long had problems with inadequate, substandard and even life-threatening medical care.

California is not the only prison system to cancel visits to stem possible exposure to COVID-19. Across the country, as health officials urge people to keep their distance and cities institute shutdowns of nonessential businesses and issue orders to shelter in place, 47 state prison systems, the federal prison system and Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons have canceled in-person visits. As of March 16, only Arkansas, Nebraska and Wyoming are still allowing visits in their state prisons.

Given that social distancing has been the most effective preventive measure thus far for this rapidly spreading virus for which we have no vaccine, treatment or cure, its reasonable to believe that minimizing outside visitations can reduce the risk of transmission/exposure, Lipi Roy, the former chief of addiction medicine for New York Citys jail system, told Truthout. For the time being, we need to aggressively minimize exposure and optimize ALL preventive measures.

But, she adds, the minimization or ban on visits should be temporary.

Jack Beck, a correctional health expert and former director of the Prison Visiting Project at the Correctional Association of New York, noted that suspending visits wont prevent COVID-19 from entering state prisons. In my view, the most likely way COVID-19 will enter prisons is through the jails, he told Truthout. In 2018, over 19,000 people entered the New York state prison system. Many had previously been held in local jails where turnover and risks of exposure to COVID-19 as well as other viruses and diseases is high. Even if they discover it [COVID-19] a week after [admission], that person will have spread it to a number of other people.

On March 15, a New York City jail investigator became the first city worker to die from the COVID-19. Jail commissioner Cynthia Brann stated that, as an investigator, the man had limited contact with the incarcerated population. Two others, an incarcerated man and a correctional officer, at Rikers have also tested positive. In the state prison system, an employee at Sing Sing, one of New Yorks maximum-security prisons, also tested positive for COVID-19.

Furthermore, Beck noted that prison policies make hygienic practices recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as washing hands frequently with soap and water, nearly impossible. Hand sanitizer, which has alcohol, is prohibited in prisons (though New York prisoners are manufacturing hand sanitizer for outside use, and are paid an average of 65 cents per hour). Many people are in cells without hot water and, sometimes, without working sinks.

At the same time, social distancing is impossible in a prison setting. You cant control who youre interacting with, Beck noted. At meal times, for instance, people are herded into meal halls where they sit where someone else ate 15 minutes ago. But that area hasnt been sterilized.

Thats true in Michigan as well. Tara, imprisoned in Michigans sole womens prison, told Truthout that, although two of the prisons 36 housing units have been quarantined because of women with flu-like symptoms, women still go to the cafeteria together with the quarantined women going after those in general population. When I asked security, Isnt this a crowd over 100? they called me smarty pants, she stated.

Texas prisons have also not reported any cases of COVID-19. But Coretta, currently imprisoned in Texas, worries that exposure will come from a staff member. In a letter to Truthout, she wrote, these COs [correctional officers] are always sick. They are constantly coughing and sneezing.

Coretta is in the prisons restricted housing unit, where she and others are locked in their cells nearly 24 hours each day. But even in isolation, incarcerated people are at risk for exposure. Prison policy dictates that officers conduct cell inspections every three days. They take us out of our cell handcuffed, she described. They enter, flush our toilets, turn on the faucets, hit the walls with a black rubber mallet, then return us to the cell. When we are waiting beside our cell door, there [are] two officers, one on each side, holding each arm. Theyre coughing and sneezing. Im fussing, Sneeze in your elbow! Use that Purell before you touch me!

Indiana prisons have not reported cases of COVID-19. Its only a matter of time though, wrote Sarah Pender, currently imprisoned at the womens Rockville Correctional Facility, in an e-message to Truthout. We understand that when it comes here, we will not get any kind of treatment except Tylenol and temperature monitoring. We will suffer, and there will be people who die. There are several women who have compromised immune systems, are diabetic, who have lung issues, or are over 60. Since the death rate is 2 to 3 percent, that means we will inevitably have some deaths here.

In another e-message, Pender added, I dont want to think about what they will do with women who need ICU treatment or ventilators. We only have 13 beds in the infirmary, and only one isolation room. I hope we dont have to find out.

For the past three years, Donna Robinson has traveled over 400 miles from her home in Buffalo, New York, to visit her daughter Missy, who is serving a 15 years-to-life sentence at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Robinson has no car, so she must travel from Buffalo to New York City where she then boards a Metro-North train. Once at Bedford Hills, she takes a five-minute taxi ride to the prison.

The last time she visited Missy was in late January. By then, cases of COVID-19 had already been confirmed outside of China and the World Health Organization was days away from declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. In the prison visiting room, however, there was no hand sanitizer or soap for visitors or their incarcerated loved ones.

Even before New York suspended prison visits on March 13, Robinson, now age 64, realized that she could no longer visit. Im in the high-risk category, she told Truthout. Im over 60. I have a lowered immune system. I have diabetes.

New York prisons offer video visits (or televisits) and, in some cities such as Buffalo and New York City, have satellite locations where family members can video visit with their loved ones for free. Robinson has signed up for video visits and is now awaiting both approval and information on where she can go to access these visits for free. Video visits will never take the place of in-person visits, Robinson acknowledges. Theres nothing like that hug, she said. During their six-hour visits, mother and daughter play Uno, eat food from the prison vending machines, and take pictures together. Now, she and Missy stay in touch by phone at the cost of 43 cents per minute.

At 10 cents per minute, the cost of prison phone calls in Massachusetts is less than a quarter of the cost of calls in New York state. Even so, many families struggle with the cost of staying in contact with their incarcerated loved ones.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley knows about these difficulties. Her father was in and out of prison throughout her childhood. As an adult, Pressley married a man who had served 10 years in prison. Though Conan Harris had already been released and successfully rebuilt his life in Boston by the time they met and married, hearing about his struggles gave the lawmaker insight into the challenges faced by many families, including the high price to stay connected.

Any avenue to maintain familial bonds should be free, Pressley said in a webinar about COVID-19 and the prison system. If visits are going to be cancelled as a strategy of containment, then video conferencing and phone calls should be free.

Jack Beck noted that phone time is already limited and, with visits canceled, there will be greater demand for the limited number of phones inside the prison. At the same time, calls continue to be restricted to small blocks of time, typically 15 to 20 minutes.

For Cat Perkins and her husband Gary, that 15-minute call ends way too quickly. He always asks, Why do those 15 minutes go by so fast? Perkins told Truthout. Her husband is in Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, California, where 2,733 people are incarcerated in a prison designed for 1,738 people. Many of the men around him cannot afford phone calls or have families in other countries, so Gary does not face longer phone lines. Nonetheless, Perkins pays $1.30 for a 15-minute call, a sharp decrease from the previous $5 per call.

In Georgia, a 15-minute phone call ranges from $1.95 to $2.40, depending on the distance. Thats now the only way that Cynthia Holland can stay in touch with her daughter Michelle, who is serving a life sentence at Georgias Arrendale State Prison.

For the past 11 years, Holland has visited Michelle every weekend, driving the 90 miles from her home in Atlanta. Now, like Robinson and Missy in New York and families across the country, the two must rely on phone calls and e-messages.

But Holland now gets fewer phone calls from Michelle. It makes you worry more, she told Truthout. She has avoided using video visits because of the cost (33 cents per minute as of 2016). If it [the ban on visits] goes on too long, I guess Ill have to start, she said. She, too, thinks that prisons should decrease the cost of video visits and phone calls, especially while visits are suspended. (The company JPay, which provides e-messages for Georgia prisons, has stated that it will now provide two free e-messages per week while visits are suspended.)

Michelle Tran spends between $100 to $150 each month for phone calls and knows many family members who spend twice that amount. She expects that, as businesses close and employees lose paychecks and possibly jobs in attempts to prevent COVID-19 exposure, the cost of prison calls will become increasingly prohibitive. That, in turn, adds to the stress of not being able to see an incarcerated loved one. She thinks prison phone companies should offer free calls during this time. We know its a billion-dollar industry, she reflected.

In some states, prisons and private contractors are offering reduced rates to keep in touch. In New York, while visits are suspended, incarcerated people will receive five free postage stamps, two free e-messages and one free phone call per week. Incarcerated people in Connecticut will receive two free phone calls each week. Illinois prisons are allowing two free 20-minute calls and one free video visit during this time. This is not a weekly offer, noted Alexis Mansfield of the Womens Justice Institute. Mansfield also noted that Illinois prisons do not have enough phones to meet demand even during non-pandemic times.

Officials in Shelby County, Tennessee, announced that they would waive all fees for phone calls and video visits in its jails. Utah prison officials are offering 10 free 15-minute phone calls per week. On March 17, California followed suit, announcing that prison phone calls will be free from March 19 to March 26. At Chuckawalla Valley, however, people were issued a memo stating that they would only be allowed free phone calls on March 19 and March 26, not continually throughout that week. For many inside that prison, even two days of free calls was a boon. In his nightly call on March 18, Perkinss husband told her that men had started lining up at 6 pm so that they could call their families for free once midnight struck.

However, many other state prisons and the private telecommunications companies with which they contract have been slow to offer similar cost reductions.

Meanwhile, at least one other country is taking more dramatic steps in the face of the virus: Iran temporarily released 85,000 prisoners to slow the spread of COVID-19.

In the United States, advocates in Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, California and New York are demanding that their states do the same. They have issued open letters to their respective governors calling on them to release people who are most vulnerable, including people who are over the age of 60 and/or medically fragile.

Cat Perkinss husband Gary, age 56, does not fall into either category. Nonetheless, shes advocating that California Gov. Gavin Newsom consider early release for people who are over age 60, medically fragile or have anticipated release dates in 2020 or 2021.

We have a lot of inmates who are sickly. Why not release them? she asked. She notes that her husband, who has been incarcerated since 1986 and is serving a life without parole sentence, is no longer the same man that he was at age 22. The same holds true for the many other people who have spent decades in prison. Theyve done 30, 40 years. Why not give them a little bit of freedom?

Across the country, in New York, Donna Robinson, a member of Release Aging People in Prison, has joined the call for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to release incarcerated people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. That would not affect her daughter Missy, now in her 40s, but Robinson remembers and is still outraged by the death of 61-year-old Valerie Gaiter. Gaiter was 40 years into a 50-to-life sentence and 10 years from her first parole hearing when she died of esophageal cancer. That could be my daughter dying behind bars at the age of 61 after complaining about pain for a year, Robinson reflected.

No governors have yet responded to this call for releasing the most vulnerable people.

On the city level, however, judges, jail officials, jail oversight monitors and even prosecutors are considering mass release as a way to slow exposure. In Chicago, the Cook County sheriffs office has already released several people who were determined to be at higher risk, including a pregnant person and a person who had been hospitalized for treatment not related to coronavirus.

The Los Angeles sheriffs department and judges in Cleveland are considering doing the same. In New York City, the Board of Correction, which oversees conditions in the citys jails, recommended the immediate release of people over age 50, those with underlying health conditions, people detained for technical violations of probation or parole, and those sentenced to less than one year behind bars.

Thirty-one prosecutors, in places ranging from San Francisco and Brooklyn to Mississippi and Alabama, issued a joint statement pledging to reduce the numbers held in jails by releasing people detained because they cant afford cash bail, those with six months or less to serve, and people considered at high risk for COVID-19.

Not every county official is taking measures to reduce the flow of people into jails and prisons. Andrea James, co-founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, stated that a federal judge recently denied a motion from a woman who was scheduled to self-surrender and begin her prison sentence. The woman, said James, has a severely compromised immune system, recently underwent surgery, and is about to begin chemotherapy.

We need to start from the framework of release, not hand sanitizers, said James.

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Coronavirus treatment research is delayed by Trumps ban on the use of fetal tissue – Vox.com

Posted: March 20, 2020 at 8:42 am

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the US is working to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, as quickly as possible. But one of his own administrations policies appears to be standing in the way of at least one scientist.

According to a report by the Washington Posts Amy Goldstein, Kim Hasenkrug, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Healths Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, wants to test potential treatments for Covid-19 in mice with humanized lungs. But as the Post first reported, the work is being held up by officials at the Department of Health and Human Services due to a 2019 ban on NIH scientists using donated fetal tissue from abortions in their research.

While fetal tissue isnt typically used to develop actual therapies or treatments, it has one particularly key use for researchers: the ability to create mice with human tissue suitable for medical testing. Mice, generally, have similar immune systems to humans, making them particularly useful for early medical testing.

Humanized mice have been key to developing several important medical treatments for diseases like the Zika virus or HIV/AIDS, which was Hasenkrugs previous research focus. The calculation is simple. You cant test certain treatments without humanized mice, and you cant get humanized mice without fetal tissue.

There are, of course, many avenues of research using other kinds of tissue, but fetal cells can rapidly divide, grow, and adapt to new environments in ways that make them the gold standard for some disease research. And in other research areas, we dont yet know if there is anything that could substitute, R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015.

And as the Posts Goldstein noted, scientists have already shown that humanized mice could make good test subjects for coronavirus treatments specifically:

Just months ago, before the new coronavirus began to infect people around the world, other U.S. scientists made two highly relevant discoveries. They found that specialized mice could be transplanted with human fetal tissue that develops into lungs the part of the body the new coronavirus invades. These humanized mice, they also found, could then be infected with coronaviruses to which ordinary mice are not susceptible closely related to the one that causes the new disease, Covid-19.

Outside researchers have offered the mice to Hasenkrug for coronavirus research. But so far, Hasenkrug and other government researchers havent been allowed to obtain the mice they need to perform testing, the Post reported, thanks to a June 2019 HHS directive banning fetal tissue research for those employed by the government.

Caitlin Oakley, a HHS spokesperson, told the Post that no decision has been made about Hasenkrugs request. A separate HHS spokesperson confirmed that in a statement to Vox.

The spokesperson also pointed to an HHS statement from last June detailing the administrations policy on fetal tissue research. Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trumps administration, reads the statement.

Hasenkrug, and the potentially millions of Americans who may benefit from his research, now find themselves caught in a deeply divisive political issue thats been years in the making.

The US government had funded fetal tissue research efforts since the 1950s and for nearly as long, anti-abortion activists have opposed the practice.

In the Trump era, they finally found an administration ready to listen.

In 2018, the US government spent $115 million on about 173 research projects utilizing fetal tissue, a third of which were devoted to developing therapies for HIV/AIDS.

Research using fetal tissue has led to the development of vaccines such as those for polio, rubella, and measles, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) said in a statement last September. Fetal tissue is still helping advance science, with research underway using cells from fetal tissue to evaluate conditions including Parkinsons disease, ALS, and spinal cord injury. Fetal tissue is also necessary for the development of potential treatments for Zika virus and HIV/AIDS.

But anti-abortion activists argue it incentivizes abortion providers to perform more abortions in order to procure more tissue they could sell to third-party companies, which then provide the tissue directly to researchers. Fetal tissue procurement has been heavily regulated since enactment of the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, which states that profits cannot be made in the transfer or acceptance of fetal tissue for research purposes.

That hasnt stopped anti-abortion activists from continuing to call into question the ethics of abortion providers or procurement companies. In 2000, the anti-abortion rights group Life Dynamics seemingly began the practice of releasing false or deceptively edited videos targeting the fetal tissue sales process. The main source in their videos was found to be not credible.

The George W. Bush administration did not take action against fetal tissue research, instead enacting restrictions on stem cell research derived from embryos in an August 2001 executive order. Those restrictions were later rolled back by an executive order from President Barack Obama in 2009.

More recently, the anti-abortion rights group Center for Medical Progress, run by activist David Daleiden, infamously released heavily edited videos appearing to show a Planned Parenthood employee negotiating prices for fetal tissue, and CMP accused the abortion care provider of illegally profiting from sales.

The videos caught the attention of Republican lawmakers. Investigations by the House Energy and Commerce, House Judiciary, and Oversight and Government Reform committees found no wrongdoing. Further investigations into Planned Parenthood and fetal tissue transfer proceeded with the creation of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives in October 2015, chaired by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), leading to $1.59 million in spending and a 471-page final report making numerable anti-abortion recommendations.

Among those requests was a call for the government to ban fetal tissue research by government scientists, which Barack Obamas administration, which favored the practice, ultimately ignored.

Democrats on the committee released their own report, disputing the conclusions of their Republican colleagues. At the end of their crusade, the conclusion was undeniable: There was no wrongdoing on behalf of fetal tissue researchers, including Advanced Bioscience Resources, or anyone else in the fetal tissue research space, said Rep. Jan Schakowksy (D-IL), who served as the ranking Democrat on the select committee, in a statement to Rewire.News in October 2018.

Anti-abortion activists saw an opportunity to advance their agenda on fetal tissue research when President Donald Trump won election in 2016, but it took a conservative media freakout in 2018 to enact new restrictions.

Over the summer of 2018, conservative media focused on several transactions by Advanced Bioscience Resources, a company that procured fetal tissue from abortion providers and shipped it to researchers for use. ABR was also one of the subjects of the 2015 select committee investigation.

HHS decided to cancel the governments contract with ABR in late September 2018 and began a review of the agencys rules and processes for procuring fetal tissue for research. That review concluded last summer, with HHS announcing in June that it would ban any fetal tissue studies by in-house NIH scientists, like Hasenkrug. It also introduced strict paperwork requirements for any outside scientists conducting research funded by the government.

The decision came as welcome news to anti-abortion activists. The language is trying to hold an ethical standard for the research proposals and the research that might be done. The policy is not just about science. Its also about ethics, David Prentice, vice president and research director at the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, told Science magazine last July.

For his part, Hasenkrug has reportedly asked the Trump administration several times for permission to begin working with UNCs humanized mice for a coronavirus cure, but is still waiting on permission. Per the Post:

On Feb. 19, two people said, Hasenkrug wrote to a senior NIH official, asking for permission to use those mice and run experiments related to covid-19. He eventually was told that his request had been passed on to senior HHS officials.

Since then, he has written repeatedly to NIH, laying out in greater detail the experiments he wants to undertake and why several alternatives to the fetal tissue-implanted mice would not be as useful. In one appeal to NIH, Hasenkrug wrote that the mice he was offered are more than a year old and have a relatively short time remaining to live, so they should be used quickly, according to Kerry Lavender, a Canadian researcher familiar with the correspondence.

Hasenkrugs request has reportedly been forwarded to the White House Domestic Policy Council, which is chaired by Trump himself, but the government has not made a decision on the research as of yet.

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The Pro-Life Movement Youve Never Heard Of – National Review

Posted: March 20, 2020 at 8:41 am

At the March for Life rally, Washington, D.C., January 27, 2017(The Washington Post/Contributor/Getty Images)Its not just white Christian conservatives

When Ryan Bomberger, an African-American pro-life activist and the founder of the Radiance Foundation, launched one of his groups first major advertising campaigns drawing attention to the disproportionate effect of abortion on black communities National Public Radio produced a segment covering it and interviewed him extensively before the segment was finalized.

When the show came out, they had omitted me from the entire piece, Bomberger says. This was a segment about a campaign that I had designed, that my group had put together. They didnt mention me at all. They had three pro-abortion perspectives, and one of our colleagues who is pro-life, Catherine Davis. I was cut out completely.

For black pro-lifers, this is a common problem. Abortion-rights advocates often have an advantage in the public debate because, with the help of media allies, they disregard anti-abortion activists whose witness undercuts their narrative. They claim that the pro-life movement is a monolith uniformly conservative, white, religious, and male and ignore or dismiss all evidence to the contrary.

In reality, the anti-abortion movement is one of the most diverse political coalitions in the nation, united by a belief in the sanctity of every human life. For decades, groups and individuals with vastly different cultural backgrounds, religious views, and political goals have set aside their conflicting preferences on other issues to campaign against abortion.

One of the best modern examples of this reality is Katrina Jackson, who, as an African-American Democrat in Louisianas state legislature, sponsored a bill to extend basic medical-safety standards to abortion clinics. In early March, she addressed supporters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, surrounded by signs reading Protect Women, Protect Life, as the justices heard oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo, in which abortion clinics are challenging her legislation.

Interviews with more than a dozen anti-abortion leaders with stories like those of Bomberger and Jackson underscore that, far from being dominated by Republican men with traditional Christian values, the pro-life movement features prominent female leaders and black activists, and it has far more support from Democrats and non-religious Americans than abortion supporters admit.

In November, the Church of God in Christ unveiled its Resolution on the Sanctity of Human Life. It is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with more than 5 million members, overwhelmingly African-American and Democratic.

Abortion is genocide. Abortion must end to protect the life of the unborn. The Church of God in Christ opposes elective abortions, the resolution reads. This issue of personhood has haunted America since the Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Roe v. Wade decisions. Just as slavery was overturned in America, Jim Crow was defeated, and Nazi Germany was overthrown, it is our prayer that the heinous industry of abortion will become morally reprehensible worldwide.

Reverend Dean Nelson, executive director of the pro-life Human Coalition, tells me that the resolution is historic and phenomenal. Nelson is one of a number of African-American leaders who work with the National Black Pro-Life Coalition, a network of groups seeking to restore life, family and hope in the Black community, according to its website.

As far as Im aware, you havent seen a major black denomination have a pro-life resolution since 1973, Nelson adds. Those of us in the black pro-life movement have already begun to use this as leverage to get some of the other black denominations to make similar resolutions. The Church of God in Christ is one of the largest and most influential, so I think it was good for us to start there.

Catherine Davis, another pro-life activist who partners with the National Black Pro-Life Coalition, worked with Nelson to bring about the Church of God in Christ resolution. Both of them helped one of the churchs bishops, Vincent Matthews Jr., to write the resolutions language.

Their denomination is going to offer alternatives to abortion, as well as counseling and support for women and men who have post-abortive trauma, Davis says. Davis often speaks about her own experience of having had two abortions. She is the founder of the Restoration Project, which, she explains, educates about abortion and the genocidal impact that it is having in the black community.

Several of the leaders with whom I spoke mentioned the deep ties between the earliest legal-abortion advocates and the eugenics movement, noting that Planned Parenthoods founder, Margaret Sanger, wanted to decrease what she saw as unfit populations, including, in her view, blacks. Though she wasnt an abortion proponent, she promoted birth control as a means of limiting low-income and minority groups and proposed a regime of mandatory sterilization for those she deemed feeble-minded. Those views were widely shared among the earliest abortion advocates.

Their vision has been realized to some extent: White women are underrepresented among abortion patients, while black and Hispanic women are overrepresented. Abortion in the U.S. is also highly concentrated among low-income women; it is not privileged white progressives who most often avail themselves of this right they so zealously champion.

Roland Warren is another African-American activist. He became pro-life after his college girlfriend became pregnant and was encouraged by a nurse to abort. Instead, she and Warren got married, she went on to become a doctor, and their first child graduated from Harvard. Today Warren leads CareNet, a network of pregnancy-resource centers.

He laments that people support abortion despite its disproportionate effect on minorities. Theres a view that on average theres nothing good that can come from a black child coming into the world as opposed to a white child, he says, noting that this makes it more difficult for pro-choice people to acknowledge that black pro-lifers exist.

The black community doesnt have another 46 years to suffer at the hands of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, because 20 million black lives have already been lost to abortion since 1973, Davis says. Thats more than the entire black population in 1960s America.

Polling shows that black Democrats tend to be more opposed to abortion than white Democrats are. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that while 83 percent of white Democrats support legal abortion, only 66 percent of black Democrats do. Thirty-five percent of white Democrats say voters should support only candidates who favor legal abortion; only 7 percent of black Democrats say the same.

Since African Americans perceive the Democratic Party as the facilitator of their civil rights and the party that would represent them the best, they have turned a deaf ear and accepted abortion as a part of their political platform, says Reverend Clenard Childress, who founded the group Black Genocide to publicize the negative effects of widespread abortion in black communities.

Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation has similar concerns. It is mystifying to me that even with decades of the results of undying devotion toward the Democratic Party, African Americans still give the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow, the party of separate and unequal, the party of unlimited abortion their allegiance, he says.

Bomberger has a compelling personal story: He was conceived in rape and adopted into a multiracial family as one of 13 children, most of whom also were adopted, and he and his wife are adoptive parents. He says that because his foundation publicizes information that abortion-rights advocates try to downplay such as the fact that Planned Parenthood facilities are highly concentrated in neighborhoods with low-income, minority populations they often accuse him of racism.

The Left demonizes people based on whatever group theyve shoved them into, Bomberger says, explaining why abortion-rights supporters often pretend that black pro-lifers dont exist. They talk about nuances, but they never act as if there are any. To them, all black people think alike. All black people do the same thing.

According to many of these leaders, people in their communities realize that abortion is not the boon that its advocates attest. Abortion supporters talk about things like reproductive justice or reproductive freedom, but this language doesnt trickle down, says Christina Bennett, a pro-life activist of more than a decade who worked for several years as a counselor at a pregnancy-resource center in Connecticut. The women having the abortions arent thinking in this language. Its really the elite, privileged women who push this message that abortion is health care.

I cant tell you how many women have fallen into my arms in tears because their significant other put a gun to their head or threatened to kill them or had someone escort them into an abortion clinic to keep them there to make them have an abortion, Catherine Davis, founder of the Restoration Project, says of her work with post-abortive women, especially those in black communities.

Bennett relates the story of a pro-choice group that recently created candles marked with the phrase Abortions are magical to give to volunteers. If I was to take those to the inner-city abortion clinic in Hartford and try to hand them out, Bennett says, the girls actually getting abortions wouldnt want those candles. Thats not their reality. Theyre getting an abortion because they have to feed their kids. They already have another child at home or theyre thinking about how their man is going to leave if they have that kid.

If black women are aborting their children at a disproportionately high rate, why is the response that we must need more abortion clinics so they can do this even more? Warren muses. We wouldnt do that with animals. Wed say we need to figure out whats happening in this environment thats causing this animal to believe they have no choice but to end the life of their offspring. Why would we not say that about my people? Arent we worth that much?

Over the last couple of decades, it has become increasingly common to see signs at anti-abortion events with messages such as I am an atheist, and I am pro-life. Though supporters of legal abortion often claim that efforts to limit it stem from a theocratic desire to impose the religious views of some on the rest of the country, the existence of a growing number of secular pro-lifers undercuts this assertion.

One of the largest groups representing them is Secular Pro-Life, founded in 2009 by Kelsey Hazzard, who says she noticed the need for a non-religious pro-life group during college.

You would find a prenatal-development pamphlet, and it would have all these wonderful pictures, but then it would have that quote from Jeremiah about Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, she recalls. These encounters inspired her to make brochures aimed at informing readers from an exclusively secular perspective, and she went on to create a group with the same purpose.

For people who are religiously unaffiliated, its so needed, Hazzard says. We became a gathering place for people who didnt feel at home in the religious-Right label, whether thats members of liberal Christian denominations, Catholics disillusioned by the Republican Party, religious-minority groups such as atheists, agnostics, Mormons, Buddhists, Jews, Wiccans people who could all put aside their differences and work together on this because we werent making it a God thing.

Today, Hazzard leads the group with the help of two fellow atheist Millennials, Monica Snyder and Terrisa Bukovinac, the latter of whom is a member of Democrats for Life and the founder of Pro-Life San Francisco, which aims to galvanize young people on the West Coast.

Bukovinac says she was instinctively pro-choice growing up but changed her mind after seeing videos of what happens during an abortion procedure. You cant justify abortion any more than you can justify the killing of a born person, she says. There is no consistent, objective distinction between an unborn person and a human being.

This insight drives much of the work that pro-life atheists do in the anti-abortion movement, aiming to refute the notion that religious dogma animates policies to restrict abortion. A recent Gallup poll found that about 20 percent of Americans who are either non-religious, atheist, or agnostic say theyre pro-life, which translates to roughly 15 million people in the U.S.

Aimee Murphy, who leads the group Rehumanize International, is another activist with this perspective. Murphy became strongly pro-life as a teenager after she was raped by an ex-boyfriend and became pregnant. She said that at the time she felt she should consider abortion, but after her rapist threatened to kill her if she didnt abort, she realized she was pro-life.

There was something about my own life being threatened that I felt a solidarity with the preborn child, Murphy explains. I said to myself, If I were to be killed by my rapist, I would be victim to this gruesome violence. If it turns out I am pregnant, then who am I to threaten this same sort of violence against a completely defenseless human being? Who am I to perpetuate that same cycle of oppression and violence against someone else?

Her organization promotes the consistent life ethic, which embraces the central principles of human dignity and nonviolence, including protection of unborn human beings.

The dominant narrative is either youre pro-choice or youre a person of faith pick your tribe, is how Kelsey Hazzard puts it. Its refreshing for people to know, okay, maybe Im having some doubts about supernatural claims or the Bible, but that doesnt mean I have to be in favor of killing babies now.

In late January, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life, marking the 47th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. The theme for this years march was Life Empowers: Pro-Life Is Pro-Woman. In conjunction with the event, the March for Life organization produced a series of articles highlighting how the earliest feminists in the U.S. suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul opposed abortion, calling it an exploitation of women (I co-authored one such article with March for Life president Jeanne Mancini). This has long been a central contention of the pro-life movement, perhaps best synthesized in a line coined by Feminists for Life president Serrin Foster: Women deserve better than abortion.

Foster has been president of Feminists for Life since 1994, when she began visiting college campuses to deliver a speech called The Feminist Case against Abortion. In her speech, Foster contends that feminism properly understood embraces basic rights for all human beings without exception and rejects the use of force to dominate, control, or destroy anyone.

Along with many in the pro-life movement, she objects to the way that feminism and abortion rights have become synonymous in the U.S. since second-wave feminists drove pro-life women out of their movement in the 1960s and 70s.

Whos having abortions? The majority of them are the financially challenged, Foster says in an interview with National Review. In this country, its students. Its young women who are challenged in the workplace. We are here to end the feminization of poverty that leads to abortion. We want to make abortion unthinkable through resources and support.

If we want to build a future thats abortion-free, where we have completely not only legally abolished abortion but really made it unthinkable, Aimee Murphy says, you need everyone to believe that abortion is a crime against mothers and their preborn children.

Todays pro-life movement is predominantly represented by leaders and groups that use this language, talking not only about the violence done to the unborn child but also about the harm that it does to mothers. Many of the most prominent groups in the movement are led by women: Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List, Jeanne Mancini of the March for Life, Carol Tobias of the National Right to Life Committee, Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, Lila Rose of Live Action, and several others.

The notion that its just a white, male, conservative, Republican movement is just an old way of thinking and not the reality of today, says Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life. On the subject of feminism, Day pointed to a recent controversy over a Kentucky bill requiring abortionists to describe ultrasound imaging to pregnant women: The abortion-rights side and even the Democrats are taking the position that we shouldnt show this information to women. . . . Women fought hard for rights, and they deserve the right to know exactly whats going on. They deserve to know that its a baby growing inside them, not a clump of cells. Its so anti-feminist to say they shouldnt.

Another controversy illuminates just how much abortion-rights advocates want to squelch pro-life feminists: In 2017, the leadership of the first anti-Trump Womens March on Washington removed the group New Wave Feminists from its sponsor list after discovering that the organization opposes abortion.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists, calls that incident one of the best things that ever happened to us, saying it brought attention to pro-life feminism. Her opposition to abortion stems from the fact that her mother became pregnant with her at the age of 19. She chose life for me even though I know that was really hard and ended up leading to her having a decade of trials and failed marriages, and it took her that long to finish her degree, she says.

De La Rosa herself also became pregnant as a teenager and was a single mom for two years: I saw from a feminist perspective the world is not built for mothers, . . . and I didnt see feminists talking about that.

Like most pro-life feminists, De La Rosa is frustrated by the way abortion forces women to deal with the consequences of pregnancy alone and allows men to avoid taking responsibility. Abortion culture has allowed us to let men off the hook, because women have their choice and so men should have their choice, too, she says. They can decide to step away from parenthood even though they participated in the act that created this life.

Despite the hostility they encounter from the other side, most of these leaders remain hopeful. For black pro-life leaders, the Church of God in Christ resolution illustrated that their quiet lobbying is bearing fruit and that more African Americans will discover the ways in which abortion is devastating their communities. For secular, pro-life Millennials, it is polling data that have been most heartening: Young people by and large dont call themselves pro-life, but scientific developments have made it more difficult for them to deny the humanity of the unborn child. For the female leaders of the pro-life movement, pregnancy-resource centers and growing programs to help young mothers stay in school are signs of cultural change.

Powerful supporters of abortion dismiss or attack these voices because their witness undercuts the false narrative underlying the case for abortion. Pro-choice advocates insist that feminism requires women to have the right to abortion, that it is racist to lament the disproportionate abortion rate among black women, and that only religious zealots would oppose abortion rights. There are thousands of people in the pro-life movement who prove each of these claims wrong.

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The Pro-Life Movement Youve Never Heard Of - National Review

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CLARUS THERAPEUTICS ANNOUNCES FINANCING TO SUPPORT THE COMMERCIAL LAUNCH AND AVAILABILITY OF JATENZO (TESTOSTERONE UNDECANOATE) CAPSULES, CIII FOR THE…

Posted: March 18, 2020 at 9:45 pm

Financing to speed commercialization of the only FDA-approved oral treatment of its kind for testosterone deficiency1,2

NORTHBROOK, Ill., March 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Clarus Therapeutics, Inc., a commercial mens health specialty pharmaceutical company, announced today that it has completed a senior debt financing of up to $75M. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC acted as sole placement agent for the transaction.

Clarus will use the proceeds from this financing to accelerate the commercialization strategy and launch for JATENZO (testosterone undecanoate) capsules, CIII, the first and only FDA-approved oral softgel testosterone replacement therapy for the treatment of men with hypogonadism due to certain medical conditions. This additional investment builds on an exceptional year for the company, which includes hiring multiple key executives and making JATENZO available for patients.

We are thrilled to have this investment as we bring JATENZO to market, said Dr. Robert Dudley, Chief Executive Officer of Clarus Therapeutics, Inc. We can now fully implement JATENZOs commercialization strategy and move Clarus closer to profitability.

About HypogonadismHypogonadism, also known as testosterone deficiency, is a condition in men in which the body does not produce enough testosterone.3 Only those men who are symptomatic and have consistently low results on a reliable testosterone assay should be offered testosterone replacement therapy, according to current treatment guidelines from both the Endocrine Society and the American Urological Association.3,4 Treatment is meant to induce and maintain secondary sex characteristics and improve clinical symptoms associated with testosterone deficiency.4About Clarus Therapeutics, Inc.Clarus is a men's specialty pharmaceutical company developing and commercializing JATENZO, a product protected by patents issued in the United States and in other major pharmaceutical markets around the world. Clarus owns the worldwide, royalty-free commercialization rights for JATENZO.For more information, please visit:www.clarustherapeutics.com.

About JATENZO JATENZO is the first and only FDA-approved oral testosterone undecanoate for testosterone replacement therapy in adult males for conditions associated with a deficiency or absence of endogenous testosterone: primary hypogonadism (congenital or acquired) and hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (congenital or acquired).1,2

JATENZOs proprietary formulation is built around testosterone undecanoatea testosterone prodrug that the body converts to testosterone. In the JATENZO pivotal inTUne (investigational testosterone undecanoate) clinical trial, 87 percent of hypogonadal men treated with JATENZO achieved a mean total testosterone concentration in the eugonadal range at the end of treatment.1 The efficacy and safety of JATENZO was evaluated in 166 adult, hypogonadal males in a 4-month, open-label study. The primary endpoint was the percentage of patients with mean plasma total testosterone concentration (Cavg) over 24 hours within the normal eugonadal range on the final pharmacokinetic visit of the study.

INDICATIONJATENZO (testosterone undecanoate) capsules, CIII, is an androgen indicated for testosterone replacement therapy in adult males for conditions associated with a deficiency or absence of endogenous testosterone:

Limitation of use

Safety and efficacy of JATENZO in males less than 18 years old have not been established.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

WARNING: INCREASES IN BLOOD PRESSURE

CONTRAINDICATIONS

JATENZO is contraindicated in men with carcinoma of the breast or known or suspected carcinoma of the prostate, in women who are pregnant, in men with a known hypersensitivity to JATENZO or its ingredients, or in men with hypogonadal conditions that are not associated with structural or genetic etiologies as JATENZO has not been established for these conditions and there is a risk of increased blood pressure with JATENZO that can increase the risk of MACE.

WARNINGS AND PRECAUTIONS

ADVERSE EVENTS

The most common adverse events of JATENZO (incidence 2%) are headache (5%), increased hematocrit (5%), hypertension (4%), decreased HDL (3%), and nausea (2%).

DRUG INTERACTIONS

USE IN SPECIFIC POPULATIONS

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The safety and efficacy of JATENZO in pediatric patients less than 18 years old have not been established. Improper use may result in acceleration of bone age and premature closure of epiphyses.

There have not been sufficient numbers of geriatric patients involved in controlled clinical studies utilizing JATENZO to determine whether efficacy or safety in those over 65 years of age differs from younger subjects. There is insufficient long-term safety data in geriatric patients utilizing JATENZO to assess the potentially increased risk of cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer.

Please click here for full Prescribing Information, including BOXED WARNING on increases in blood pressure.

Media ContactAmir KhanPhone: (212) 462-8767Email: Amir.Khan@Syneoshealth.com

1JATENZO (testosterone undecanoate) [prescribing information]. Clarus Therapeutics, Inc.

2US Food & Drug Administration. FDA Approved Drug Products. Available at: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/daf/index.cfm?event=overview.process&ApplNo=206089. Accessed October 1, 2019.

3Bhasin S, et al. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2018;103(5):1715-1744.

4Mulhall JP, et al. J Urol. 2018;200(2):423-432.

2020 Clarus Therapeutics, Inc. All rights reserved.

JATENZO is a registered trademark of Clarus Therapeutics, Inc.

COR-US-0038 03/2020

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CLARUS THERAPEUTICS ANNOUNCES FINANCING TO SUPPORT THE COMMERCIAL LAUNCH AND AVAILABILITY OF JATENZO (TESTOSTERONE UNDECANOATE) CAPSULES, CIII FOR THE...

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