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(NEW YORK) — The federal government is investing in the health and wellness of individuals at risk for or living with HIV/AIDS through mental health and substance use services from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In a release sent to ABC News, HHS announced Friday that $43.7 million from the agency’s Overdose Prevention Strategy will go towards three new grant opportunities that will be especially be targeted to underserved communities of color.

In 2020, there were almost 40 million people around the world living with HIV, according to the HHS. In the U.S., there are approximately 1.2 million people who have HIV, though about 13% don’t know it and need to be tested.

In the U.S., people of color have been majorly overrepresented in HIV diagnoses, due to a range of socioeconomic factors that increase their risk for HIV and HIV-related outcomes.

Black people represent approximately 40% of people with HIV, but make up only 13% of the U.S. population, according to HHS’ latest statistics from 2019. Hispanics and Latinos composed 25% of people with HIV, but make up 18.5% of the population.

The HHS reports that this disproportionate impact of Black and brown communities is also reflected in the demographics of newfound infections, demonstrating that prevention and treatment services are not reaching those who need it most.

“We remain committed to providing people at risk for, or living with HIV/AIDS, with the support and services they need to thrive – no matter who they are or where they live,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

According to HHS, the funding targets areas of the country with the greatest disparities in HIV-related health outcomes and aligns with the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

“We must increase supports and services for those who are at risk for or living with HIV/AIDS and have mental health and substance use needs,” said Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, HHS Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use and the leader of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

She added, “This means connecting them to easy-to-access, culturally appropriate prevention, treatment, and recovery services.”

One grant will fund substance use disorder treatment programs for racial or ethnic minority populations at high risk for HIV/AIDs.

Another program will provide training and education around the risks of substance use and HIV/AIDS, as well as with community health workers, neighborhood navigators and peer support specialists to ensure that services are reaching those in need.

The third program, the Minority AIDS Initiative, aims to reduced the “co-occurring epidemics of HIV, Hepatitis, and mental health challenges through accessible, evidence-based, culturally appropriate treatment that is integrated with HIV primary care and prevention services.”

Anyone seeking treatment for mental health or substance use issues is urged to call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 800-662-HELP (4357) or visit findtreatment.samhsa.gov.

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(NEW YORK) — The United Nations-backed Medicines Patent Pool announced Thursday it has signed an agreement with 35 companies around the globe to produce generic versions of Pfizer’s COVID-19 antiviral pill.

The agreement will allow the treatment to be supplied to 95 low- and middle-income countries, home to more than half of the world’s population, according to the MPP.

Clinical trial data has shown the pill, sold under the brand name Paxlovid, reduces the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID by 89% if taken within three days of the onset of symptoms.

Paxlovid is currently given as three pills twice daily over the course of five days.

The pill will be easier to distribute to hard-to-reach areas than monoclonal antibodies, which are given intravenously and require a medical professional to administer the treatment.

“We have established a comprehensive strategy in partnership with worldwide governments, international global health leaders and global manufacturers to help ensure access to our oral COVID-19 treatment for patients in need around the world,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.

The statement continued: “The MPP sublicensees and the additional capacity for COVID-19 treatment they will supply will play a critical role to help ensure that people everywhere, particularly those living in the poorest parts of the world, have equitable access to an oral treatment option against COVID-19.”

Paxlovid is made up of two medications: ritonavir, which is commonly used to treat HIV and AIDS, and nirmatrelvir, an antiviral that Pfizer developed to boost the strength of the first drug.

Together, they prevent an enzyme the virus uses to make copies of itself inside human cells and spread throughout the body.

According to the agreement, the companies will be able to take out sublicenses to produce raw ingredients of nirmatrelvir, co-package it with ritonavir or both steps.

Six of the companies will produce the raw ingredients, nine companies will co-package it and the remaining companies will do both, the MPP said.

The companies producing the drug span 12 countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, Jordan, India, Israel, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia, South Korea and Vietnam.

The MPP said a license was offered to a 36th company in Ukraine, but it was unable to sign due to the war with Russia.

Under the agreement, the 35 companies will not be required to pay Pfizer royalties as long as COVID-19 is classified as a public health emergency by the World Health Organization.

However, after the emergency ends, the manufacturers will be able to sell their pills to low-income countries without royalties but will be subject to a 5% to 10% royalty for sales to middle-income countries.

The MPP expects some of these companies could submit their drugs for regulatory review to health agencies in their home countries or to the WHO later this year.

In January, the group signed a similar agreement with Merck for two dozen companies to produce a generic version of its COVID-19 pill, molnupiravir.

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(NEW YORK) — When the omicron wave hit the United States, it spread throughout the country like wildfire.

Different models estimate that anywhere from 50% to 75% of Americans had been infected with the variant by the end of the surge.

So, what does that mean for the rest of the U.S. population that did not contract COVID-19 during the last wave?

Because omicron has shown the ability to cause breakthrough infections despite vaccination status, this has led to fears that everyone will catch the virus at some point. However, it is important to clarify that the COVID vaccines continue to be highly effective in its primary purpose in preventing hospitalization and death.

However, public health experts said it’s not inevitable Americans who have not gotten COVID yet eventually will, and that there are several reasons people have been able to avoid infection so far, including certain behaviors such as being serious about masking and social distancing, vaccination rates and maybe even genetics.

Why some people haven’t gotten COVID yet

Doctors said there are several reasons millions of Americans have yet to contract the virus.

One of those reasons is human behaviors, meaning people take proper precautions to lower their risk of getting infected.

“Sometimes people don’t get infected because they’re extremely cautious,” Dr. Mark Siedner, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News. “There are people who have their own health behaviors or are concerned about their own health or their loved ones’ health.”

He continued, “Maybe they have comorbidities … they may be the kind of people who are largely homebound, or not really interacting with others or are particularly careful with things like social distancing and masking, and that certainly can stop a lion’s share of infections or certainly decrease the risk to where it’s unlikely you’d be infected.”

These people are also more likely to have been vaccinated and boosted, and the experts said it’s impossible to disregard the effect vaccination rates have had on preventing infections among Americans.

Dr. Jonathan Grein said there are also social and environmental reasons that could determine why some Americans have been infected and others haven’t, including how much time people spend with others and where they interact.

“Some people may come into more contact with people more regularly than others,” Grein, director of hospital epidemiology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told ABC News. “There’s probably environmental reasons as well, the virus is probably transmitted more efficiently in certain circumstances like classically the indoor, poorly-ventilated space compared to outside.”

However, genetics could also be playing a role.

Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, said similar circumstances have been seen in people who were at high risk for HIV but did not contract the disease.

“One of the things that was discovered was people who had mutations in [a certain] receptor … and that was associated with not getting infected with HIV and in the uncommon people who do get infected, very slow progression to AIDS,” he told ABC News.

Although there has not yet been a clearly identified gene, Ray said it’s feasible some people are genetically less susceptible to COVID.

Is infection with COVID-19 inevitable?

The experts said they don’t believe that infection with COVID-19 is inevitable or at least inevitable for everyone.

“The fact that we’re now two years in and a substantial number of people have not yet been infected is good evidence that it’s not inevitable everyone will get it,” Grein said. “One thing we’ve clearly identified is that being vaccinated is the most important variable in deciding how protected somebody may be.

However, Ray said he thinks Americans who are unvaccinated but haven’t contracted the virus yet eventually will.

“As these variants have become more and more infectious, the likelihood that those people will get infected seems significant,” he said. “I do think it’s likely that people who have not been vaccinated and not had COVID will eventually get it because we are not going to be tracking infections as closely as we have in the past and so there will be less awareness as the virus renters the community … and at some point their bubble will burst if they are not immune.”

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said the COVID situation in Hong Kong is a “horror story” of what can happen in an unvaccinated country.

Hong Kong currently has the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate with a seven-day rolling average of 37.68 per million people, according to Our World in Data.

“Many people were vaccinated in Hong Kong, but it was the reverse of the U.S.,” he said. “In the U.S, so many seniors are vaccinated and boosted, but in Hong Kong, it was the opposite. Very few seniors were vaccinated so that when they did get it, even something ‘milder’ like omicron, many people were still dying, so that is a cautionary tale.”

There is no number that determines when the U.S. has enough immunity

Early in the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health experts said the U.S. needed to vaccinate 75% to 85% to achieve herd immunity.

Currently, only 65.3% of all Americans are fully vaccinated.

Then, when U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced last month he would be dropping the remaining COVID-19 restrictions in England, supporters said one of the reasons was because government figures showed more than 98% of the adult population in England has detectable COVID-19 antibodies either from previous infection or from vaccination.

But officials said there is no number in the U.S. for which officials can declare there is “enough immunity.”

“The game has been changed to some extent because the virus has been able to infect so many people and evolve,” Ray said. “It’s level of infectivity right now is so high that the levels of antibodies required to prevent infection, the level we need to achieve is hard to sustain for a long period of time.”

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(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.) — A hospital in Michigan is giving birthing parents a new way to stay connected during a cesarean section delivery.

Spectrum Health Butterworth, a hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, allows parents to watch the birth on a monitor display next to the operating table.

That’s how Amanda Koop got the first glimpse of her son, Charlie, when she gave birth to him at Spectrum Health Butterworth on Nov. 24, 2021.

“They turned the camera toward me right when they were going to pull him out,” Koop told “Good Morning America.” So, similar to a vaginal birth, I saw him come up and out, which was great.”

Koop, 36, had an unplanned C-section with Charlie, her first child.

She said that once it was decided she would be undergoing a C-section, a nurse asked her if she wanted the option to watch the delivery, which she otherwise would have not been able to witness. As is typical with a C-section, Spectrum Health Butterworth uses a drape to separate the expectant parents from the surgical procedure.

“I wanted to use the camera, because it could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss those moments, his first breath, that can be something that sometimes you could miss in a C-section,” said Koop, who added that the camera also made the C-section “less anxiety-provoking.”

“For me to be able to see him in those moments, OK, he’s out and he looks great, that was extremely calming and reassuring,” she said. “There’s a lot happening in those [operating rooms]. They’re loud and they’re bright, and I could kind of focus right on him, which was really nice.”

The camera and monitor system is the same one that doctors themselves use in other surgical procedures, such as laparoscopic surgeries, according to Dr. Cheryl Wolfe, a practicing, board-certified OBGYN and vice president and department chief of women’s health at Spectrum Health, a Michigan-based health system.

Wolfe said Spectrum Health Butterworth, which delivers around 7,500 babies annually, is the only hospital she knows of in the country that has applied surgical camera technology to C-sections.

“We’re using this technology that’s been around but using it in a different way, and that is not the norm across the country,” she said. “I’m hoping that there will be more hospitals and labor and delivery units that opt to put this in place. I think their patients will be asking for it.”

Nearly 32% of all births in the United States are done by C-section, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since the majority of C-sections are not expected, it can often feel startling for expectant parents to go from the comfort of the labor and delivery room to the sterility of the operating room, according to Wolfe.

She said the goal of giving parents the option to watch the delivery is to “flip the script” and make it a more personal experience.

“Anytime you have something unplanned, especially around something as momentous as having your child, you’re going to have some trepidation about, ‘Oh, now I need a C-section. Now I need surgery. What does that mean?'” Wolfe said. “Now you’re given an option where you can actually … watch the process, something previously you were unable to do because the technology wasn’t in place.”

The medical team is able to move the monitor so that parents can watch what they want of the delivery, as was the case during Koop’s C-section.

“I did not want to see the initial incision and getting down to the baby, so I just saw those parts that I thought were important,” Koop said, adding that the monitor’s location and flexibility also gave her husband the chance to stay by her side while choosing what he wanted to see.

“I think it can be kind of scary for people, what am I going to see, but the team does an amazing job of kind of blocking things that you don’t need to see and really focusing on that little baby,” she said. “I just thought it made such a difference in my delivery. I didn’t miss a thing.”

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