Global COVID-19 Death Toll Surpasses 3 Million
MONDAY, April 19, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The official global COVID-19 death toll surpassed 3 million on the weekend, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
But the actual number of people who’ve died during the pandemic is believed to be much higher because some governments may be concealing numbers and many cases were missed in the early stages of the pandemic, according to the Associated Press.
Despite vaccination programs in many countries, COVID-19 deaths are on the rise again, with an average of about 12,000 a day. New cases are increasing too, with more than 700,000 a day.
“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months into a pandemic, where we have proven control measures,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the World Health Organization’s leaders on COVID-19, the AP reported.
Biden Administration Lifts Restrictions on Medical Research Using Fetal Tissues
Trump-era restrictions on the use of fetal tissue for medical research have been lifted by the Biden administration.
The reversal of the restrictions essentially restore the guidelines in place during the Obama administration, The New York Times reported.
That means that scientists will again be permitted to use tissue from elective abortions in research to learn more about and try to find treatments for a number of diseases, including diabetes, cancer, AIDS and COVID-19.
Scientists will be allowed to buy fetal tissue from sources approved before the ban, and all projects that had been approved before the Trump administration’s restrictions “will be reinstated without further review,” according to an email sent to scientists by the National Institutes of Health, the Times reported.
Scientists applauded the decision.
“That’s fantastic,” said Dr. Mike McCune, an H.I.V. expert at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Times. But he said the Trump Administration’s bans had done serious damage to research involving fetal tissue.
“People with decades of experience had to find other jobs,” McCune said. “All of that will have to be reconstituted to make it start again — but they will.”
Conservative groups were opposed to the Biden Administration’s move, however.
“The H.H.S. decision to resume experiments using the body parts of aborted children defies both the best ethics and most promising science,” Tara Sander Lee, senior fellow and director of life sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said in a statement.
“Exploiting the bodies of these young human beings is unnecessary and grotesque,” she said. “There are superior and ethical alternatives available.”
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