PANDEMIC

The Covid vaccine passport, at one time required for working in a hospital, serving in the military, attending many colleges, patronizing many theaters and eating in many restaurants, is going away.

Some of the last mandates ended today, as the Biden administration retires the public health emergency in place since January 2020. With it go the requirements that federal employees, contractors, foreign travelers to the U.S., Head Start educators and workers in facilities certified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services be vaccinated.

Courts had already held up some of those rules for federal employees, contractors and Head Start educators, but the vaccine mandate for international visitors was the last in the world, according to Sherpa, a firm that tracks travel requirements.

Peer nations had dropped theirs months ago, including Italy last June, Australia in July and Canada in October.

Congress told the Department of Defense to end its vaccine mandate for troops in December’s spending law, and the military did so in January.

What’s left? The remaining vaccine mandates are mostly in the private sector. Many businesses still require employees to be vaccinated or visitors to provide inoculation proof.

Though many others, including Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Google and JPMorgan Chase, have dropped mandates.

Some colleges, including the University of California and Harvard, still require the shot, but others have recently dropped their mandates, including Amherst College, Stanford University and Georgetown University.

State and local governments have rescinded almost all Covid vaccine mandates affecting K-12 students. New Orleans still has one, though parents can request an exemption for medical, religious or philosophical reasons. The District of Columbia has a requirement for student athletes 12 or older, but the city council delayed a mandate for all students until the next school year.

POLITICO’s Daniel Payne, David Lim and Ben Leonard have written more about what the end of the public health emergency means.

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This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care.

Forgiving those who hurt you might help your mental health. Researchers from institutions including Harvard found that people had lower levels of depression and anxiety when they used a forgiveness workbook, which prompted them to grapple with their feelings and try to empathize with the person who hurt them.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, your host Ruth talks with Katherine Ellen Foley about the decision by expert advisers to recommend that the Food and Drug Administration approve the first over-the-counter birth control pill, Opill.

DANGER ZONE

Black Americans are dying from fentanyl overdoses at much higher rates than white or Hispanic Americans — and the disparities extend to treatment, too.

White patients are much more likely to receive treatment after an opioid overdose, hospitalization or stay in a rehabilitation facility than Black and Hispanic patients, according to a new study in The New England Journal of Medicine of patients on Medicare due to a disability.

The takeaway: About a quarter of white patients got treatment compared with 19 percent of Hispanic and 13 percent of Black patients.

Access to care might not be the reason, though. Patients in different racial groups saw providers a similar number of times in the six months after the event.

The disparities in treatment could be the result of patient mistrust, doctors’ reluctance to treat people with addiction or the types of providers available for most people of color, said Michael Barnett, lead author and associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

What’s next: The findings suggest that inequities in care defy simple policy solutions.

Addiction policy has been focused mostly on “mechanical” changes — whether doctors have permission to do things like prescribe the opioid use disorder drug buprenorphine virtually or offer take-home methadone, Barnett said.

“I don’t think they’re going to get to this disparity issue,” he said since it’s “more rooted in stigma.”

TECH MAZE

Big tech firms are fighting a state-by-state battle to protect themselves from new laws regulating online content aimed at kids — and they’re landing some wins, reports POLITICO’s Rebecca Kern.

A new law in Arkansas — the Social Media Safety Act — would bar any kids under age 18 from using social media apps unless they get parental consent.

Exempt from the statute, however, is Google’s YouTube — the single most popular social media app among teenagers ages 13-17.

Utah lawmakers passed an even stricter parental consent measure in late March banning kids from apps after 10:30 p.m., but exempted certain social media sites like LinkedIn. And one of the Utah Republicans who authored the law said he’s considering rewriting it to add new legal protections for the tech companies after talking to the industry.

California’s Democrat-controlled legislature recently removed a key provision in a new kids online safety bill that would have let Californians sue tech companies over “addictive design features,” following lobbying from tech companies.

How they did it: Leading the lobbying campaigns are top trade associations for the technology industry, NetChoice, which represents Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok and Twitter, and TechNet, which represents Meta, Google, Amazon and Snapchat.

Tech’s case: They see the laws restricting access to social media “as a way of making it harder for people to do what our core values speak to — which are free enterprise and free speech,” Carl Szabo, NetChoice’s vice president and general counsel, told Rebecca.

Critics’ say: Nicole Gill, executive director of tech watchdog group Accountable Tech, said the companies “are directly lobbying Congress and state legislatures to do absolutely nothing to regulate them.”

“And they’re doing this at the detriment to our children.”