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A federal appeals court shot down claims Monday that New Jersey residents’ refusal to wear face masks at school board meetings during the COVID-19 outbreak constituted protected speech under the First Amendment. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in two related cases stemming from lawsuits against officials in Freehold and Cranford, New Jersey. (Catalini, 2/6)

Biden administration officials this week pushed executives from leading pharmacy chains to make sure frontline staff are providing patients with accurate information about costs of the COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid, officials told Axios first. Why it matters: Uptake of the Pfizer antiviral has remained stubbornly low since it transitioned to the commercial market in the fall, in part because of patients sometimes being charged up to the full list price of $1,400. (Reed, 2/7)

The winter respiratory virus season may have hit its peak in California, with coronavirus levels in sewage and COVID-19 hospitalizations starting to decline following weeks of steady increases. Should the trend continue, 2023–24 would be the mildest winter of the COVID era in terms of severe illness — free of anything even approximating the devastating and disruptive surges seen in prior years. (Lin II, 2/7)

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins’ 5-year-old daughter was sick a lot last year. Dorsey-Hollins followed school guidelines and kept her home when she had a cough or a sore throat — or worse — until she was completely better. Near the end of the year, the school in Fort Worth, Texas, called her in to talk about why her daughter had missed so much school. During the pandemic, schools urged parents and children to stay home at any sign of illness. Even though the emergency has ended, she said no one has clarified that those rules have changed. (Toness, 2/7)

For four years now, either as a physical virus or as a looming threat, the COVID-causing pathogen SARS-CoV-2 has been the elephant in every room—sometimes confronted and sometimes ignored but always present. While once we dreamed of eradicating COVID, now much of society has resigned itself to SARS-CoV-2’s constant presence—a surrender that would once have been unthinkable. Worldwide, there were more than 11,000 reported deaths from COVID between mid-December 2023 and mid-January 2024, and more than half of those deaths occurred in the U.S. In that same time frame, nearly one million cases were reported to the World Health Organization globally (although reduced testing and reporting means this is likely a vast undercount). In particular, epidemiologists are monitoring the newest variant of SARS-CoV-2, JN.1, and looking for any signs that it may be more severe than previous strains. (Bartels, 2/6)

Following the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 there are now seven different coronaviruses known to infect humans. Four of those are associated with generally harmless common respiratory infections, but the other three (SARS, SARS-CoV-2 and MERS) are much more dangerous. Why some coronaviruses are relatively harmless while others are incredibly lethal is still a bit of a mystery. Some answers lie in the proteins each individual virus uses to enter human cells, but what exactly makes SARS-CoV-2 so severe in some people and innocuous in others is unclear. (Haridy, 2/5)

A study today in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that while telemedicine helped some groups seeking mental health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans with serious mental health symptoms suffered from a decline in in-person outpatient mental health visits that has persisted. Moreover, this lack of outpatient care for those with significant mental illness was seen mostly in patients with lower incomes and education levels. (Soucheray, 2/6)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted GSK's application for priority review for extended use of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine Arexvy in adults ages 50 to 59 at higher risk for complications. (Schnirring, 2/6)

A California cheese and dairy company is the source of a decadelong outbreak of listeria food poisoning that killed two people and sickened more than two dozen, federal health officials said Tuesday. New lab and inspection evidence linked soft cheeses and other dairy products made by Rizo-Lopez Foods of Modesto, California, to the outbreak, which was first detected in June 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. (Aleccia, 2/6)

Officials in Ecuador have named the likely source of contaminated ground cinnamon used in fruit pouches tied to more than 400 potential cases of lead poisoning in U.S. children, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday. Carlos Aguilera, a cinnamon-processing company in Ecuador, supplied the spice added to WanaBana and other applesauce pouches sent to the U.S., according to the Ecuadorian regulatory agency ARCSA. The cinnamon, which was sent to another supplier, Negasmart, was found to be contaminated with high levels of lead and chromium, an FDA analysis showed. Carlos Aguilera is not operating at this time, ARCSA said. (Aleccia, 2/6)

The investigation by researchers with the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and several state and local health departments identified a total of 81 case-patients from 18 states in the outbreak, which stretched from May to November 2022 and was originally linked to an ophthalmology clinic in Los Angeles. Nearly a third of the patients (26) were treated at one of three healthcare facilities in three states. Four of 54 case-patients with clinical cultures died within 30 days of culture collection, 4 of 18 patients with eye infections had to have their eyes removed, and an additional 14 suffered vision loss. (Dall, 2/6)