Omicron wreaks havoc on NYC, causes crippling staff shortages

 Omicron is shaking the Big Apple to its core thanks to crippling staffing shortages caused by the raging COVID-19 variant.

Between vital transportation and emergency services, retailers and schools, workers are calling in sick by the thousands while grappling with the coronavirus and mandatory quarantines.

“There’s hardly a sector that’s not impacted,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told The Post on Monday. 

“The impact is real.”

EMERGENCY SERVICES

As the Big Apple continues to battle its latest surge of COVID-19 cases, the NYPD had 14 percent – or nearly 5,000 of the force’s 35,000 uniformed officers – out sick Monday.

Almost 2,000 cops had COVID, while the other 3,000 were experiencing flu-like symptoms, a source told The Post.

“There’s hardly a sector that’s not impacted,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told The Post on Monday.

Getty Images

Meanwhile, the FDNY said 30 percent of its 4,200 EMS staff and 18 percent of its 11,000 firefighters were sick.

The state changed its isolation guidance two weeks ago — in accordance with the CDC — to allow fully vaccinated workers to quarantine for just five days instead of 10, in a bid to avoid entire industries being wiped out as the Omicron variant raged.

But even the regulations can be muddled, Levine said.

“The CDC should have specified that you needed a test to exit isolation in Day 5,” the beep said.

He noted that the agency is now suggesting it may soon recommend that, causing “unnecessary confusion in the meantime.”

People must wait in line for hours in some parts to get tested because of demand and a shortage of tests.

Xinhua News Agency via Getty Ima

City officials confirmed Monday they are adhering to the state and CDC revised isolation guidelines.

Even so, COVID-19 is leaving city departments and scores of businesses short-staffed, a bad situation worsened by the fact that people must wait in line for hours in some parts to get tested because of demand and a shortage of tests.

TRANSPORTATION

The MTA won’t say how many of its 70,000 employees have been sidelined because of Omicron, but sources said Monday that the figure is “very high” – estimated to be at least several thousand.

The transit worker shortages have already forced a cut back to train services, including shutting down three lines – the B, W and Z – through Monday. Other train and bus routes also have suffered, including the cancelation of 56 scheduled bus runs on New Year’s Eve.

By Monday afternoon, 118 flights out of LaGuardia Airport had already been canceled, according to the Flight Aware tracking site. John F. Kennedy International Airport saw 43 of its scheduled flights axed – part of a nationwide trend amid Omicron cases and wintry weather conditions.

More than 100 travelers – many of them tourists trying to return home after visiting New York City for the holidays — were forced to stand outside in freezing temperatures Monday as they waited for COVID tests at LaGuardia’s Terminal B, with some missing their connecting flights for international destinations. 

“We need a PCR test to return to Canada, and now I understand I will likely need to rebook again because these results will take a few days,” traveler Aneita Mason said. “This is tough.” 

New York allows fully vaccinated workers to quarantine for just five days instead of 10.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

HEALTH AND THE DATA

COVID cases remain high across the Big Apple, with the daily average of confirmed infections for the past seven days at nearly 27,000, city health data shows.

Nearly 34 percent of NYC residents who got tested ended up with a positive result on average in the past week.

The seven-day average for hospitalizations is at least 492 per day, according to the data.

“It is a relief that only a very small percentage of cases require hospitalization,” said Levine, former chairman of the City Council’s Health Committee. “Having said that, a small percentage of a big number is still a big number.”

“Fifteen thousand or 20,000 wasn’t imaginable two weeks ago. Because those numbers are so big, it’s now beginning to flood the hospitals.

“The impact on the hospitals where staff were – even before this wave – exhausted, this is a very, very difficult time,” he said.

Northwell Health, the largest private hospital system in the Empire state, said Monday that it hasn’t had to cancel or postpone any treatments over staffing concerns.

“Any staffing shortages we are experiencing have so far been managed with no impact to quality of patient care,” a rep told The Post.

Exact numbers of shortages at Northwell Health, which has more than 77,000 employees statewide and runs Lenox Hill Hospital, weren’t immediately available.  

Nearly 34 percent of NYC residents who got tested ended up with a positive result on average in the past week.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A spokesperson for NYC Health + Hospitals insisted Monday that the city’s public system was “stable” – although the system’s president, Dr. Mitchell Katz, had warned last month of potential shortages brought on by staffers being exposed to Omicron.

Queens city Councilman Robert Holden said he recently had to take his 3-month-old grandson to Long Island Jewish Cohen Children’s Medical Center for bronchitis — only to find the emergency room overwhelmed with COVID patients.

The pol added that half his staff of 10 people is currently out with the virus.

“We had to shut the office,” he said. 

His Middle Village office is now serving as a COVID testing site.

RESTAURANTS, NIGHTLIFE AND OTHER BUSINESSES

Rank-and-file New Yorkers have not been spared Omicron’s wrath — and consequently, nor have the establishments they visit.

“I get the feeling we’ll stay stuck in this purgatory, always waiting for things to get better,” said Brooklyn video producer Philip Sanchez, 38. 

“At the rate things are going, we’ll almost certainly get another variant after Omicron.

“I now barely eat inside at restaurants, and when I do, I go at odd hours to avoid crowds,” Sanchez said. “Occasionally, I would go for drinks with friends outdoors, but with such cold weather, I’m not even doing that.”

Caroline Larsen, 19, said she has severely curtailed her social life, too.

“Any staffing shortages we are experiencing have so far been managed with no impact to quality of patient care,” a rep told The Post.

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

“I only see a few people, and I don’t go out anymore,” the teen said. 

She said she has no idea what the future holds.

“My brother still doesn’t believe in COVID, even after everything we have been through. And while we still have such stubborn people who refuse the vaccine, I don’t think anything will change,” Larsen said.

The social-life strife was hardly news to Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance.

The city’s already struggling restaurant industry has been struck hard by Omicron — with many establishments forced to shut down during the busy holiday season as staffers tested positive or were exposed to COVID.

Rigie said Monday that staffing shortages were just part of the problem affecting the industry.

“Restaurants are facing serious challenges, from a critical labor shortage made worse by the spike and COVID cases, to fewer customers and lots of debt,” he said.

“We need government to step up and replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant program, bring back the popular ‘alcohol to go,’ and again allow propane heaters for winter outdoor dining, and a lot more.”

Firms such as Goldman Sachs were asking their workers to just stay home till at least Jan. 18 to address the surge in cases.

SCHOOLS

Newly minted Mayor Eric Adams has insisted that public schools will continue with in-person instruction amid the Omicron surge, saying administrative staffers would pinch-hit for absent teachers.

Adams and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew both said staffing was stable overall as school resumed Monday morning – and there were sufficient substitutes to fill any gaps.

“We’re going to adjust and pivot based on the numbers. We’re going to have real-time updates, creating our own command center, [if] we see a drop in staffing, we’re going to draw from our pool of employees who are waiting, and we’re going to go all out,” Adams said in an MSNBC interview.

Mayor Eric Adams has insisted that public schools will continue with in-person amid the Omicron surge.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

“If you’re a superintendent, if you’re an administrator, you have a teaching license, we want you in that school building,” he said. “We’re going to shift and adjust in real time.”

His remarks came after the principal of PS 58 in Brooklyn told families Sunday evening that it would hold remote learning Monday due to COVID-19 cases — without authorization from the city Department of Education.

Mulgrew also sent out a letter to union members over the weekend suggesting they push for remote learning this week amid the surge in new cases.

“We advised the new mayor that it would be safest to allow our school system to go remote temporarily until we could get a handle on the staffing challenges that each school is about to face as we return,” Mulgrew said in the note. “However, he feels strongly that schools need to remain open.”

The mayor doubled down later Monday, declaring: “I am keeping my schools open.”

He also claimed, “When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger.

“We’ve allowed people to beat us down so much that all we did was wallow in COVID –that’s all we did — and we no longer believed this is a city of swagger, this is a city of resiliency.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many schools staffers were out sick as students returned after winter break.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/omicron-wreaks-havoc-on-nyc-with-crippling-staff-shortages/

Virus leaves antibodies that may attack healthy tissues; B cell antibodies weakened, not defeated by Omicron

 

The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be certified by peer review.

Coronavirus leaves survivors with self-attacking antibodies

Months after recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection, survivors have elevated levels of antibodies that can mistakenly attack their own organs and tissues, even if they had not been severely ill, according to new findings.

Among 177 healthcare workers who had recovered from confirmed coronavirus infections contracted before the availability of vaccines, all had persistent autoantibodies, including ones that can cause chronic inflammation and injury of the joints, skin and nervous system. "We would not normally expect to see such a diverse array of autoantibodies elevated in these individuals or stay elevated for as long six months after full clinical recovery," said Susan Cheng of the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles. Patterns of elevated autoantibodies varied between men and women, the researchers reported on Thursday in the Journal of Translational Medicine .

"We don't yet know how much longer, beyond six months, the antibodies will stay elevated and/or lead to any important clinical symptoms," Cheng said. "It will be essential to monitor individuals moving forward." Her team is investigating whether autoantibody elevations are linked with persistent symptoms in people with long COVID and planning to study autoantibody levels after infections with newer variants of the virus.

B cells' effects weakened but not defeated by Omicron

The effects of antibodies produced by the immune system's "memory B cells" against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, while weakened, could still be significant, researchers believe.

Once the body learns to recognize SARS-CoV-2, either after infection or vaccination, B cells generate fresh antibodies against the virus if there are not already enough antibodies circulating in the blood that can neutralize it. In a study reported on bioRxiv ahead of peer review, researchers analyzed the strength of more than 300 antibodies produced by memory B cells obtained from vaccinated volunteers, including some who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.

"Omicron seemed to evade a very large share of the memory B cells pool," researchers said, adding that it "seems to still be efficiently recognized by 30% of total antibodies and close to 10% of all potent neutralizing antibodies," said Matthieu Mahevas and Pascal Chappert of Universite de Paris in a joint email. Memory B cells' robust ability to proliferate and produce antibodies might compensate "in less than two days" for those antibodies' reduced effectiveness, they speculate.

In combination with other immune system components, particularly T cells, the effects of B cells likely help to explain why most vaccinated individuals who become infected do not become sick enough to require hospitalization, they said.

Virus variants' activity in cells makes them more effective

Along with spike mutations that help the coronavirus break into cells, mutations that change how the virus behaves inside the cells are a big factor in why some variants have been more transmissible, researchers have discovered.

The findings, published in Nature, show that scientists "have to start looking at mutations outside the spike," which has so far been the main focus of vaccines and antibody drugs, said Nevan Krogan of the University of California, San Francisco. Studying the Alpha variant, his team found a mutation at a non-spike site that causes infected cells to ramp up their production of a protein called Orf9B. Orf9b in turn disables a protein called TOM70 that cells use to send signals to the immune system. With higher levels of Orf9B disabling TOM70, the immune system does not respond as well and the virus can better evade detection, the researchers said.

Referring to the increase in Orf9B, Krogan said, "It's rare that mutations 'turn up' a protein. It's a very sneaky thing for this virus to do." The same mutation was identified on Delta, "and sure enough, almost the same mutation is on Omicron," he said, which suggests they may have similar effects on the immune system. The new information could spur development of drugs that target the interaction of Orf9b and TOM70.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/BELIEVE-123488703/news/Virus-leaves-antibodies-that-may-attack-healthy-tissues-B-cell-antibodies-weakened-not-defeated-by-37457648/

Celltrion: Positive results for cocktail therapy including neutralisation data against Omicron

 

• CT-P63 demonstrated a well- established safety profile in the global Phase I trial
• CT-P63 maintained strong neutralising ability against the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) based on structural analysis by X-ray crystallography and neutralisation data from pseudo- virus testing
• Celltrion plans to provide dual treatment options for COVID-19; Regkirona™ for hospitalised patients and a nebulised cocktail therapy (CT-P63 in combination with Regkirona™) for at- home settings

Celltrion Group announced today results for its cocktail therapy candidates including neutralisation data against the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529).

The Phase I clinical trial is a randomised, double- blind and placebo- controlled trial designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of CT-P63 in 24 healthy subjects in Poland.¹ The study met its primary objectives with data showing CT-P63 to be safe and well tolerated, with no significant drug- related adverse events (AEs).

In an experiment conducted in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), CT-P63 showed strong neutralising activity against the Omicron variant based on structural analysis by X- ray crystallography and neutralisation data from pseudo- virus testing. Celltrion anticipates results of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant assays and animal model studies by the end of the first quarter this year.

In order to elicit potent neutralising antibody response against the new emerging variants, Celltrion previously identified a total of 38 potent neutralising antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in which antibody candidate No. 32 (CT-P63) produced high neutralisation titres against new emerging strains. CT-P63 has previously been demonstrated to have neutralising activity against the most common variants, including the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants.

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/celltrion-announces-positive-results-for-its-cocktail-therapy-candidates-including-neutralisation-data-against-omicron-variant/

Mesoblast Updates After FDA Meeting on Graft Versus Host Disease Therapy

 

• Meeting held with the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Tissues and Advanced Therapies (OTAT) to address potency assay and chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) items identified in the complete response letter (CRL) for remestemcel-L in the treatment of steroid-refractory acute graft versus host disease (SR-aGVHD) in children

• OTAT indicated that Mesoblast’s approach to address the outstanding CMC items is reasonable

• OTAT indicated that the in vitro immunomodulatory activity Mesoblast intends to measure for potency is a reasonable critical quality attribute (CQA) for the product, and the relevance of this activity to clinical outcomes should be established

• Mesoblast has now generated substantial new data that it believes establish the relevance of the proposed in vitro immunomodulatory activity of remestemcel-L to the in vivo clinical effect of the product in the Phase 3 trial in children with SR-aGVHD, including survival and biomarkers of in vivo activity

• Mesoblast will provide these new data to OTAT, and address other outstanding items as required for the Biologics License Application (BLA) resubmission

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mesoblast-provides-following-meeting-fda-233800804.html

Planet Fitness Not Seeing an Omicron Variant Slowdown in Gym Visits

 The omicron variant of Covid-19 has led a lot of people to change travel plans, but it has apparently not had a major effect on people going to the gym to work out. At least that's what Planet Fitness (PLNT) - Get Planet Fitness, Inc. Class A Report CEO Chris Rondeau said during his appearance today (Jan. 3) on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"In December of 2020, when we saw the spiking of the variant, the spiking of Covid back then before there was even a vaccine, we did see a pullback on workouts and cancellations spiking," he said. "During the delta variant and with omicron, we're not seeing that pullback."

Traffic Still Strong at Planet Fitness

The gym CEO said he has not seen traffic to his locations pull back nor has he seen an increase in cancellations during the latest surge of the virus.  

"I think they're feeling more comfortable with the protocols that we have out in place. I think they're realizing fitness is truly essential," he said. "The last thing we ever should have done is shut down gyms."

Planet Fitness has taken a number of steps to mitigate the transmission of Covid. These include:

• Regular and thorough cleaning of all gym equipment
• Sanitation stations on the gym floor
• Touchless check-in.

Planet Fitness does not have a company-wide mask policy for its members. Instead, it follows whatever the local applicable laws are. The company has also added a "crowd meter" on its app that allows members to see how crowded their club is before electing to visit.

Planet Fitness Is Almost Back

While there was a concern during the pandemic that people would dump their gym membership for Peloton (PTON) - Get Peloton Interactive, Inc. Class A Report and other at-home connected fitness options, that does not appear to be the case.

Rondeau told Jim Cramer on an edition of CNBC's "Mad Money" that aired in November that his company has largely completed its comeback.

“Our height was 15.5 [million members]. We’re 97% all the way recaptured back to where we were pre-Covid,” Rondeau said.

“We saw the highest third-quarter net member growth in company history,” The CEO added. “People are choosing bricks and mortar. They’re coming back faster than we’ve ever seen. They’re rejoining our clubs faster than we’ve ever seen. The Gen Z’s are joining faster than we’ve ever seen. All the winds are blowing the right direction, and the sails are wide open.”

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/planet-fitness-not-seeing-omicron-variant-slowdown-in-gym-visits

The Collins And Fauci Attack On Traditional Public Health

 by Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff via The Epoch Times,

On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection.

The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would reduce the collateral harm to the rest of the population.

The Declaration received enormous support, ultimately attracting signatures from over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and over 800,000 members of the public. Our hope in writing was two-fold.

• First, we wanted to help the public understand that—contrary to the prevailing narrative—there was no scientific consensus in favor of lockdown. In this, we succeeded.

• Second, we wanted to spur a discussion among public health scientists about how to better protect the vulnerable, both those living in nursing homes (where ~40 percent of all COVID deaths have occurred) and those living in the community. We provided specific proposals for focused protection in the GBD and supporting documents to spur the discussion. Though some in public health did engage civilly in productive discussions with us, in this aim we had limited success.

Unbeknownst to us, our call for a more focused pandemic strategy posed a political problem for Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The former is a geneticist who, until last week, was the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH); the latter is an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). They are the biggest funders of medical and infectious disease research worldwide.

Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the Declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest non-governmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated “an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions.”

Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBDl as a “let-it-rip” “herd immunity strategy,” even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It is more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a “let-it-rip” strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged “let-it-drip” pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.

When journalists started asking us why we wanted to “let the virus rip,” we were puzzled. Those words are not in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It is unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.

We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a “herd immunity strategy.” Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a “herd immunity strategy” as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a “gravity strategy” when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.

The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public’s health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other infectious diseases, as well as mental health, and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing let-it rip strategy.

Collins and Fauci surprisingly claimed that focused protection of the old is impossible without a vaccine. Scientists have their own specialties, but not every scientist has deep expertise in public health. The natural approach would have been to engage with epidemiologists and public health scientists for whom this is their bread and butter. Had they done so, Collins and Fauci would have learned that public health is fundamentally about focused protection.

It is impossible to shut down society completely. Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in necessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from COVID.

We do not know why Collins and Fauci decided to do a “take down” rather than use their esteemed positions to build and promote vigorous scientific discussions on these critical issues, engaging scientists with different expertise and perspectives. Part of the answer may lie in another puzzle—their blindness to the devastating effects of lockdowns on other public health outcomes.

Lockdown harms have affected everyone, with an extra heavy burden on the chronically ill; on children, for whom schools were closed; on the working class, especially those in the densely populated inner cities; and on the global poor, with tens of millions suffering from malnutrition and starvation. For example, Fauci was a major advocate for school closures. These are now widely recognized as an enormous mistake that harmed children without affecting disease spread. In the coming years, we must work hard to reverse the damage caused by our misguided pandemic strategy.

While tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals signed the Great Barrington Declaration, why didn’t more speak up in the media? Some did, some tried but failed, while others were very cautious about doing so. When we wrote the Declaration, we knew that we were putting our professional careers at risk, as well as our ability to provide for our families. That was a conscious decision on our part, and we fully sympathize with people who instead decided to focus on maintaining their important research laboratories and activities.

Scientists will naturally hesitate before putting themselves in a situation where the NIH Director, with an annual scientific research budget of $42.9 billion, wants to take them down. It may also be unwise to upset the director of NIAID, with an annual budget of $6.1 billion for infectious disease research, or the director of the Wellcome Trust, with an annual budget of $1.5 billion. Sitting atop powerful funding agencies, Collins, Fauci, and Farrar channel research dollars to nearly every infectious disease epidemiologist, immunologist, and virologist of note in the United States and UK.

Collins, Fauci, and Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.

We now have over 800,000 COVID deaths in the United States, plus the collateral damage. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries—less focused on lockdowns and more focused on protecting the old—have had fewer COVID deaths per population than the United States, the UK, and most other European countries. Florida, which avoided much of the collateral lockdown harms, currently ranks 22nd best in the United States in age-adjusted COVID mortality.

In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities. If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/collins-and-fauci-attack-traditional-public-health

Duke University accused of 'conspiring' to take over independent physician practice

 Duke University is facing a lawsuit alleging that it tried to absorb an affiliated independent, multispecialty physician practice through “unlawful, unfair and improper tactics.”

The suit claims that following prior unsuccessful attempts to purchase the group, the university and its health system “conspired” with department chairs to break off and assimilate five departments from the physician group into a new faculty practice, a move that would “cause irreparable harm” to the independent group and its members.

Speaking to North Carolina-based outlet The News & Observer, a representative of the university denied the lawsuit’s claims and said the organization will fight it in court. Fierce Healthcare has reached out to Duke for confirmation of these statements.

The complaint was filed Monday in Durham County Superior Court by Eugene Moretti, M.D., a Duke faculty member, on behalf of Private Diagnostic Clinic (PDC), of which he is a member.

The 80-year-old practice, which has roughly 1,850 physician members and about $1 billion in generated annual revenues, has participated in a formal partnership agreement with the university and its academic medical center for nearly 50 years, according to the suit. In October, the university delivered a notice of termination for the agreement effective at the end of 2021, according to the plaintiff.

Duke had twice looked to negotiate a merger between PDC and its health system since 2008 but could not reach terms and abandoned each attempt, per the complaint. Following these failures, the university then “devised a plan to take over the PDC without input from the PDC’s members and without paying fair compensation for the value of the enterprise,” according to the suit.

Moretti alleged “upon information and belief” that Duke University School of Medicine Dean Mary Klotman, M.D., met with five department chairs, each of whom are managers of PDC, to break off their departments from the independent group and into a new faculty practice (Duke Faculty Practice) (PDF) that would see their members become employees of Duke’s School of Medicine.

Additionally, the university announced a policy requiring physicians performing research at Duke to quit PDC and join the faculty practice by July 2022.

“At least 400 members of the PDC perform research at Duke,” the plaintiff wrote in the suit. “Duke’s mandate thus means that approximately 21% of PDC’s members have been forced to choose between, on the one hand, staying with the PDC and losing the research grants that they receive through Duke and, on the other, continuing their research but having to quit the PDC to become exclusively employed by Duke.”

The university and department chairs made these plans that threaten “hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue” without informing the “rank and file” members of PDC, Moretti alleged. The alleged plans are also a violation of the longstanding partnership agreement between the organizations, which includes language specifying that Duke would “not interfere in [PDC’s] organization and operations,” according to the suit.

Alongside the allegations against Duke, Moretti’s case also alleges that department heads including Anthony Joseph Viera, M.D., breached their fiduciary duties toward PDC. Moretti, on behalf of PDC, asked the court to award compensatory and treble damages to the physician group.

“After trying and failing for years to negotiate a purchase and merger with the PDC, Duke decided to interfere with the operations of the PDC in violation of its contractual agreements and to pressure and entice department chairs to breach their fiduciary duties to the PDC,” Erica Harris, a partner at Susman Godfrey representing Moretti, said in a statement. “Dr. Moretti has devoted the past 25 years of his career to the PDC and Duke. He is disappointed and saddened that some of Duke’s administrators have resorted to unlawful tactics to destroy what so many have worked so hard to build.”

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/duke-university-accused-conspiring-to-take-over-independent-physician-practice