A couple years ago, just before the pandemic, Alpesh and Manish Patel were struggling businessmen running a network of failing pharmacies. They faced more than a decade's worth of lawsuits alleging they owed millions of dollars to pharmaceutical suppliers and shipping companies, and their employees and patients were calling fraud.
Then the outbreak presented an opportunity: rules around telehealth and prescription writing were relaxed, while there was suddenly massive demand for unproven treatments. The duo capitalized.
In Oct. 2020, with the help of Paycheck Protection Program loans, the Patels rebranded one of their companies into a digital pharmacy named Ravkoo. As my colleague Vera Bergengruen reports, Ravkoo is charging exorbitant prices for unproven COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin. Between Nov. 2020 and Sept. 2021, Ravkoo filled at least 340,000 prescriptions, which amounts to about $8.5 million in drug costs.
Vera became suspicious about Ravkoo after working on a previous investigation about an ivermectin scheme run by anti-vax rightwing group America's Frontline Doctors, which profited off thousands of desperate Americans, many of whom were infected. "None of this would have been possible without a pharmacy willing to toe the line of legality to fill these prescriptions—and likely make a massive profit," says Vera, whose new story reveals the alarming ways in which the telemedicine boom has left hundreds of thousands of patients vulnerable.
So far, Ravkoo has faced few consequences for hawking unproven, potentially dangerous treatments to misinformed patients. But experts say some of its customers could become seriously ill. Jon Matthews, a 37-year-old sales representative in Minnesota, says he finally succeeded in getting his ivermectin prescription transferred from Ravkoo to a local pharmacy that refused to fill it. "The pharmacist said that the dosage they requested was high enough to kill me," he told Vera. As another person put it on the company's Facebook page: "Truly I have no doubt they have been responsible for deaths at this point."
About 488.1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this afternoon, of which more than 403.5 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 56.5% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
More than 238.6 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4.8 million people have died. On Oct. 12, there were 416,727 new cases and 7,973 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 4.5 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 44.5 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 716,400 people have died. On Oct. 12, there were 106,308 new cases and 2,416 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Oct. 13, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
The U.S. will reopen its land borders to fully-vaccinated travelers in early November, officials announced today. The move will allow those who are inoculated to travel to and from Canada and Mexico via car, train or ferry. Such travel had largely been restricted to essential purposes since the beginning of the pandemic, squashing tourism and separating families who live along the borders.
Big businesses are ignoring Texas's new executive order essentially prohibiting vaccine mandates, per my colleague Tara Law. Representatives from major companies like Dell and IBM told Tara that they feel federal law, as well as employee and customer safety, trumps the new rule (the Biden Administration large companies and those that do business with the federal government to issue vaccine mandates). "We support the ability of private employers to determine the best vaccine policy for their operations and employee safety," a representative from Texas Children's Hospital in Houston told Tara.
Minnesota hospitals are nearing capacity as a viral surge pummels the state, lifting daily case averages to their highest level this year. As of Monday, the state's seven-day average of new daily cases was nearly 3,000, compared to around 80 during the summer. Now, 96% of Minnesota's ICU beds and 93% of its non-intensive care beds are occupied. But the bigger issue, the state's health commissioner told the New York Times, is a shortage of medical personnel: "There are actually fewer health care workers on the job today than there were last year due to the extreme stress and burnout that they have faced for over 18 months now."
The World Health Organization (WHO) today named 26 scientists from the U.S., China and elsewhere to a new expert group that will investigate COVID-19's origins. "It's a real opportunity right now to get rid of all the noise, all the politics surrounding this and focus on what we know, what we don't know and what, urgently, we need to all focus our attention on," Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO's emerging disease and zoonosis unit, told the Washington Post, referencing tensions between China and much of the rest of the world around Beijing's interference with similar past investigations.
A half-dose of Moderna's vaccine increased antibody levels in those who had completed their two-dose regimen at least six months prior, per a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review released yesterday. However, the agency struck a neutral tone on whether a booster shot was necessary. "Overall, data indicate that currently U.S.-licensed or authorized COVID-19 vaccines still afford protection against severe COVID-19 disease and death in the United States," the reviewers wrote. An FDA advisory group will meet tomorrow and Friday to weigh approval of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson boosters.
Correction: Yesterday's edition of The Coronavirus Brief misstated the name of a non-profit organization. It is the Association of American Medical Colleges, not the American Association of Medical Colleges. It also cited outdated figures from that organization. It now estimates the U.S. could be short between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians by 2034, not between 54,100 to 139,000.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Angela Haupt and edited by Alex Fitzpatrick.
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