Aurelia Butler

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Novartis AG said on Wednesday it will pay $245 million to end antitrust litigation accusing the Swiss drugmaker of trying to delay the launch in the United States of generic versions of its Exforge hypertension drug.The settlements with so-called direct purchasers, indirect purchasers and retailers require approval by a federal judge in Manhattan, and will resolve all outstanding claims against the company over the matter, Novartis said.CVS Health Corp (NYSE:CVS), Kroger (NYSE:KR) Co, Rite Aid (NYSE:RAD) Corp and Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ:WBA) Inc are among the plaintiffs in the civil litigation, which began in 2018.The class-action litigation stemmed from a 2011 licensing agreement between Novartis and Endo International (OTC:ENDPQ) Plc’s Par Pharmaceutical unit.Novartis and Par were accused of entering an illegal “reverse payment” agreement to delay launches of less expensive, generic versions of Exforge, which treats hypertension to lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of strokes.Plaintiffs said Par agreed not to launch an Exforge generic for two years after the expiration of one of Novartis’s patents, and Novartis agreed not to compete with Par by launching its own Exforge generic during the 180-day exclusivity period following Par’s entry into the market.Novartis’s annual U.S. sales of brand-name Exforge exceeded $400 million before generic versions were sold, court papers show.The case is In re Novartis and Par Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 18-04361. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Thursday told Republicans hoping to investigate President Joe Biden that their requests for information for probes, including on the Afghanistan withdrawal, are improper until those lawmakers take over the House next month.Biden’s special counsel, Richard Sauber, told two Republican lawmakers expected to hold top oversight posts in the next Congress that they lack authority now and would need to redo requests for materials they’ve already sent to the White House once they’ve taken control of Congress.Sauber told Representatives James Comer and Jim Jordan in separate letters that their demands “were not made as part of the congressional oversight process” and suggested that they would not be honored yet.The lawmakers requested documents related to probes into the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan; the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which started during the previous administration; and the federal government’s response to threats against members of local school boards over pandemic-era restrictions and curriculum disputes. “Should the Committee issue similar or other requests in the 118th Congress, we will review and respond to them in good faith, consistent with the needs and obligations of both branches,” Sauber wrote. “We expect the new Congress will undertake its oversight responsibilities in the same spirit of good faith.”Republicans, who take control of the House of Representatives next month, have also prioritized investigating the Democratic president and his son Hunter’s business dealings.Democrats, who retain control of the White House and Senate, are working to aggressively contest those investigations.Comer, a Kentucky Republican, is expected to chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Jordan, an Ohio Republican, is expected to chair the judiciary panel. Both have threatened legal action if they are rebuffed.In a statement, Comer suggested Biden was falling short on promises to be transparent and vowed to “continue pressing for the answers, transparency, and accountability that the American people deserve.” House Judiciary Republicans sent a tweet and called the latest development “ridiculous.”Biden’s lawyers and Democratic allies have dismissed the investigations as politically motivated, at odds with voters’ priorities and worked to position the probes as extreme.(This story has been refiled to add dropped word ‘and’ in paragraph 9) More

It feels eerily like early 2020 again. China is the global epicentre of Covid-19. Countries across the world are scrambling to impose restrictions on travellers from the country. Meanwhile, the severity of the outbreak within China is obscured by spin, dubious statistics, and government opacity. Xi Jinping’s botched exit from his “zero-Covid” policy earlier in December — which lifted measures including mass testing and lockdowns — has overwhelmed many hospitals. Now, after almost three years in isolation, the decision to reopen Chinese borders, from January 8, has turned its domestic mismanagement into a potential global problem — again.While the world is now better prepared to deal with a wave of Covid cases from China, significant health risks remain. Strong vaccination rates means many nations are already learning to live with the virus. But in developing countries, where inoculation remains weak, there continues to be vulnerability. There are also concerns that China may again be lax in sharing data on evolving strains that could drive new outbreaks, and that health services could be stretched over the fluey winter months. Indeed, after years of seclusion, demand for international travel among China’s 1.4bn population is soaring.The world needs to tread with care. In China, tens of millions are being infected daily. The death toll is obscured by Beijing’s recently narrowed definition of Covid-19 fatalities — but bodies seen at hospitals and crematoria paint a grimmer picture. Plans to lift quarantine requirements for inbound travellers, remove caps on flights arriving into China and ease outward travel bring significant risks from a country that under “zero-Covid” built up little immunity. Vaccination rates are low among the elderly too.Those risks threaten to spread, spurring some countries into pre-emptive action. The US this week joined others including Italy and Japan in imposing testing requirements for passengers from China. It is an understandable precaution, especially for countries like Italy, which is desperate to avoid a repeat of March 2020, when it became the first major European country to experience a severe Covid outbreak. Yet both pre-departure and on-arrival testing is far from foolproof. It also has limited worth — particularly when countries are adopting a patchwork approach and when there is no evidence as yet of a dangerous mutation. The world is also in a different position now, in terms of existing disease spread and protection. Far more important would be a revival of widespread genomic sequencing to spot dangerous new variants (which might be made easier by some on-arrival testing): many countries downgraded their capabilities as the pandemic waned, or never developed them. China’s reopening is a reminder that a more concerted push towards sequencing and global information-sharing is crucial.Beijing’s co-operation is vital. Its obfuscation over the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan three years ago was deplorable. Today’s lack of transparency is no less reprehensible. Unreliable data on cases and deaths within the country makes it harder for others to respond proportionately. Indeed, the US CDC cited the lack of “transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data” from China as a reason for its new measures. Misinformation also complicates internal efforts to lower cases. While draconian measures helped to contain Covid-19 in China, Xi’s dramatic volte-face and lack of preparation for reopening now risks it spiralling out of control across the country. To guard against a resurgence of the pandemic elsewhere, co-ordinated global vigilance, rather than scattershot restrictions, should be the priority. More

(Reuters) -The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits edged higher last week and a week earlier the total number on jobless assistance reached the highest since February, but both remain at levels indicating the U.S. job market remains tight, even as the Federal Reserve works to cool demand for labor as part of its bid to lower inflation. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 225,000 for the week ended Dec. 24, the Labor Department said on Thursday, in line with the median estimate among economists polled by Reuters.Meanwhile, the number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid rose 41,000 to 1.710 million in the week ending Dec. 17.After hitting the lowest level since 1969 in May, those so-called continuing claims, a proxy for hiring, have drifted higher since early October. The latest report is the first since February to show them breaching the lower end of the 1.7-1.8 million trend that prevailed in the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, a level seen then as emblematic of a tight labor market.And, while the figures for new benefits claims have been choppy in recent weeks, they have held well below the 270,000 threshold that economists see as a red flag for the labor market. A raft of layoffs in the technology sector and interest-rate sensitive industries like housing have yet to leave a notable imprint on claims as laid-off workers appear to cycle into new jobs with relative ease. “Given the recent uptick in layoff announcements coming from large businesses, we would expect to see more of an increase in claims than we typically see at this time of year, but so far it hasn’t happened,” Thomas Simons, money market economist at Jefferies, said in a note.It may also be that severance payments are causing a delay in when laid-off workers apply for benefits, Simons said, though “this is very hard to quantify.” ‘STRUCTURAL LABOR SHORTAGE’ Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell – the chief architect of the central bank’s aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at bringing too-high inflation to heel – earlier this month said “it feels like we have a structural labor shortage out there.” Indeed, the labor market’s resilience is a central focus for Fed policymakers, as the U.S. economy has minted an average of 392,000 new jobs a month this year despite rapid rate hikes and growing fears of a recession next year. There were about 1.7 open jobs per unemployed individual as of October, roughly half a point above the openings-to-unemployed ratio seen before the pandemic.Officials see that strength as providing ample room for them to continue to raise interest rates to bring down inflation, which by their preferred measure remains nearly three times their targeted level of 2% annually even if it has recently shown signs of heading lower.The central bank has lifted rates from near zero in March to the current range of 4.25% to 4.50% and Fed officials project it will breach the 5% mark in 2023, a level not seen since 2007. Fed officials also projected the unemployment rate could climb nearly a full percentage point to 4.6% next year, which at the current size of the U.S. workforce would equate to about 1.5 million job losses. Achieving that, however, would require a substantial reversal of an employment growth trend that has persisted across the U.S. economy for more than a decade with the exception of the two months of historic job losses early in the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. job market has recovered all of the 22 million positions cut during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and it has not experienced three or more months in a row of net payrolls declines since 2010.Job growth through November had averaged nearly 400,000 a month, although that rate has tempered in the second half of the year. The average over the past three nonfarm payrolls reports from the government has been 272,000. The Labor Department will report the U.S. employment figures for December on Jan. 6, and preliminary estimates from economists polled by Reuters see payrolls expanding this month by another 200,000. The unemployment rate is estimated to have remained unchanged at 3.7%.Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas next week will also update its tally of corporate layoff plans for December after its November report showed workforce reduction announcements were the highest since January 2021. Still, layoffs so far have been heavily concentrated in the technology sector that had boomed throughout the pandemic, and the year-to-date total number of announcements through last month were the second lowest on record dating to 1993.Economists believe that companies are likely to cut back on hiring before embarking on layoffs. Employers have been generally reluctant to lay off workers after struggling to find labor during the COVID-19 pandemic.”At least for the near-term, the JOLTS (Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey) and NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business) data suggest that small businesses remain eager to absorb some workers laid off from larger businesses,” Simons said. “This dichotomy of demand cannot persist indefinitely, but it will help the labor market achieve a softer landing than it would otherwise.” More