TASK DEFINITION: Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: The jury in a Philadelphia court awarded the $8 billion to a man who previously won $680,000 over his claims that it failed to warn that young men using Risperdal could grow breasts. J&J called the sum "grossly disproportionate with the initial compensatory award" and said it was confident it would be overturned. Legal experts agreed that the penalty was likely to be slashed. But the verdict, which helped drive J&J's shares down 2% on Wednesday, is an example of how public outrage at the pharmaceutical industry for high drug prices has contributed to harsher verdicts against drugmakers accused of wrongdoing in recent years, legal experts said. Outsized penalties awarded by some juries highlight risks in a longstanding strategy by drugmakers such as J&J of taking their chances at trial rather then settle product liability lawsuits brought by patients. "Every pharmaceutical company needs to seriously consider if they want to litigate to verdict in the present environment, but with the settlement demands so incredibly high it's not always clear what their alternative is," said Barry Thompson, a partner at Baker McKenzie law firm who was not involved in the case. Drugmakers often prefer to litigate rather than settle in hopes of protecting their brands and discouraging future patient lawsuits, Thompson said. Companies also may use a series of early trial verdicts to gauge the size of any settlement it might eventually offer, as Merck & Co (MRK.N) did with its withdrawn Vioxx arthritis pain drug when facing thousands of lawsuits by patients who claimed harm from the drug. A 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision suggests that the upper limit of a fair punitive penalty in the Risperdal case would be about $6 million based on the earlier compensatory award. J&J could still get a favorable ruling on appeal that would give the company leverage in dealing with the remaining cases, said Benjamin McMichael, a professor at the Alabama School of Law who has researched punitive damage awards. "With such a large punitive damages award at issue, appellate courts may be more willing to come down hard on the plaintiffs," McMichael said. J&J faces more than 13,000 lawsuits tied to Risperdal alleging that it caused a condition called gynecomastia in boys, in which breast tissue becomes enlarged. The company is also facing lawsuits involving its baby powder, opioids, medical devices and other products. "We're operating within a very litigious environment, and we must at times be willing to go to trial when the science, facts and law are on our side," J&J spokesman Ernie Knewitz said in an email. "We also have to remain open to resolving cases through settlement when and where that's appropriate to do. We have a proven track record of being able to successfully and appropriately manage this balance," Knewitz added. The company has had its share of legal wins, losses and settlements. An Oklahoma judge in August ordered J&J to pay $572.1 million to that state for its part in fueling the opioid crisis by deceptively marketing addictive painkillers, although the sum was substantially less than investors had expected. Johnson & Johnson has said it plans to appeal the ruling. Earlier this month, the company agreed to pay $20.4 million to settle claims by two Ohio counties, avoiding a federal opioid trial. In 2013, J&J paid more than $2.2 billion to resolve civil and criminal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice into its marketing of Risperdal and other drugs. Claim: Massive jury award against J&J highlights risks of its legal strategy.

SOLUTION: A jury award that hit Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) with $8 billion in punitive damages for a case involving its anti-psychotic drug Risperdal highlights the risks of the drugmaker's all-or-nothing legal strategy, several legal experts told Reuters on Wednesday.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and his allies, challenged the president's top health official recently on the administration's handling of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak. Dobbs criticized Health and Human Secretary Alex Azar over a lack of transparency in the agency's handling of COVID-19, which has infected nearly 91,000 people globally across 73 countries and led to more than nine American deaths. ""There's a better ratio of testing for the coronavirus in other countries than we maintain here,"" Dobbs said during the March 2 interview on his TV show. ""We're actually screening fewer people because we don't have appropriate testing."" Azar countered that the Trump administration has taken recent steps to roll back regulations and increase the availability of diagnostic test kits to ""hundreds and thousands and millions."" The United States is set to significantly expand its testing capabilities in the coming days and weeks, but Dobbs is correct that the country has lagged behind other nations so far. ""It is true that diagnostic capacity in the U.S. has been lower than in some other countries, but that is changing,"" said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It's hard to pinpoint how many people have been tested for the coronavirus, both in the U.S. and around the world. The World Health Organization doesn't track the number of tests administered in each country, and the numbers that are available are constantly updating. In a statement to PolitiFact, a Fox News spokesperson representing Dobbs cited data from the WorldOMeter, a real-time tool that ""shows estimated current numbers based on statistics and projections from the most reputable official organizations,"" according to its website. Using estimates derived from official government sources, the WorldOMeter says at least eight countries South Korea, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Finland, Vietnam and Turkey have given more tests relative to the size of their populations than the United States. That lines up with experts' analyses and with what multiple news outlets have reported. Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said South Korea ""has screened at least thousands, and Guangdong, China, has screened at least hundreds of thousands,"" citing a WHO report on the outbreak in China, where the virus was first detected. South Korea ramped up testing by building drive-thru screening clinics for speedy assessments, according to local reports. Other countries, like Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Italy have also conducted thousands of diagnostic tests. ""We have done nothing like what other countries have done,"" Lipsitch said, noting that the U.S. had, until recently, limited not only the number of labs that were allowed to conduct tests on suspected cases, but also the number of patients that were eligible to be screened. It's difficult to say just how far behind the U.S. has fallen, due to the murkiness around the number of administered tests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing a public count of tests on March 2. The administration's public statements haven't cleared it up. On Feb. 29, the CDC reported testing 472 Americans. A day later, Azar told ABC News the U.S. had tested over 3,600 people. And a spokesperson for HHS, Azar's agency, told us on March 3 that the CDC had tested samples from more than 1,200 patients. ""I don't know how to track U.S. tests any more,"" Lipsitch said. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks at the White House about the coronavirus on Feb. 28, 2020, in Washington. (AP/Vucci) The CDC stopped posting testing data as more state and local public-health labs have been brought into the fold, said Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, said during a March 3 briefing. ""With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally,"" she said. An HHS spokesperson told us that the department doesn't know how many additional tests have been administered by those state and local labs, adding that those labs can now test up to 15,000 people and are expected to be able to test as many as 75,000 people by March 6. The U.S. test count should rise into the millions as IDT, a commercial manufacturer, and other commercial and academic labs begin producing their own tests soon, according to HHS. The government's initial testing effort was hindered by flaws with the CDC's early test kits and restrictions that had limited which labs could run the tests and which patients could be tested. When the first U.S. coronavirus was detected, the country brushed aside the WHO test used by other nations and leaned on the CDC to develop and mass produce a more complicated test capable of detecting other viruses in addition to the coronavirus, according to reports. The test kits went out in early February. But some state labs that received them reported that flaws in the tests were triggering inconclusive results. Those states had to ship samples out to the CDC's offices in Atlanta for results until the CDC fixed the problem weeks later. Since then, the Food and Drug Administration has given labs and hospitals across the country the go-ahead to administer their own tests before the FDA finishes reviewing them, so long as those tests are proven to work. That should lead to more testing, experts said. The CDC also modified its screening criteria to expand testing for some people with severe respiratory symptoms who did not travel to China or come into known contact with a coronavirus patient. Previously, travel to China or exposure to the virus were preconditions for screening. Adequate testing is essential to getting an accurate count of U.S. cases, experts said. Testing is also key for treating patients and identifying people who might be infected but don't show symptoms, said Richard Watanabe, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. ""The latest data suggests the incubation period for COVID-19 can be as long as a couple of weeks,"" Watanabe said. Despite the recent acceleration, Lipsitch said U.S. testing is happening ""very slowly and at a level that is still paltry"" compared with some other countries. Dobbs said that the United States is ""actually screening fewer people (for the coronavirus than other countries) because we don't have appropriate testing."" Experts told us that to date, the United States has lagged behind other countries, though numbers are imprecise. An error with the CDC's early test kits contributed to the United States' relatively low screening numbers. The administration has taken steps to make testing more widely available. With that additional information." Claim: The United States is "actually screening fewer people (for the coronavirus than other countries) because we don't have appropriate testing.

SOLUTION: The CDC has stopped publicly reporting the number of tests it's administered. So far, the United States has lagged behind other nations in terms of coronavirus testing. It has recently taken steps to ramp up its testing capabilities. Until recently, the U.S. had insisted that only the CDC's test could be used despite flaws in some early kits and that only certain patients could get tested.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Health workers were desperate to persuade him to get vaccinated for Ebola after a friend fell ill with the lethal and highly contagious disease. But within days, Nduhi was dead. His widow and their four young children were given his positive Ebola test result and a chilling warning from a team of health workers: "If you don't accept vaccination, you can prepare to die." Deep distrust along with political instability and deadly violence has severely undermined efforts by public health authorities in Congo to curb the outbreak by tracing and vaccinating those who may have come into contact with infected people. Health experts agree the experimental Ebola vaccine has saved multitudes in Congo. But after nearly a year and some 171,000 doses given, the epidemic shows few signs of waning. The virus has killed more than 1,700 people and has now arrived in the region's largest city, Goma. The World Health Organization last week declared the outbreak a global health emergency. During the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which left more than 11,300 people dead, health workers could only dream of a vaccine with a 97.5 percent effectiveness rate that could improve the odds of survival even in those already infected. "We have it now and it's not the miracle we wanted it to be," said Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders. "The fact that we've used so much vaccine, and the epidemic hasn't stopped, that shows us that contact tracing is not great." WHO says as many as 90 percent of those eligible for vaccination have accepted it, but that figure only includes those who gave contact tracers enough information to be included on a list. The success rate excludes those who distrusted health workers and fled, or those who couldn't be found in the first place. Health workers have been using what is known as a ring vaccination strategy: The vaccine is first given to those who were in close contact with a sick person. Then a second so-called ring is created by giving the vaccine to those who were in contact with those people. Because of the difficulties in making that strategy work, some people didn't get vaccinated until they had already been infected with the virus, and they developed Ebola anyway. That increased doubts about the vaccine in communities where the public health campaigns led by outsiders already were viewed with suspicion and hostility. "The rumors were if you got vaccinated you would die," said Liboke Kakule Muhingi, a 43-year-old farmer in Mangina, where the epidemic began last August. His mother was among the first to die. Then, one by one, six of his sisters who had cared for their ailing mother were killed by Ebola. Kakule accepted the vaccine and made sure his wife and eight children got it, too. "If I hadn't, we'd all be dead," he said. In some cases, health teams have been unable to reach certain areas because of violence or rebel activity. Earlier this month, the head of the Congolese health ministry's response efforts in Beni was at one point unable to return from a field visit while the military battled ADF rebels, who are linked to the Islamic State. More often, though, contact lists have fallen apart simply because people have deliberately evaded health workers or did not understand they shouldn't travel after being exposed. A pastor who became the first confirmed case in Goma had apparently put down fake names at health checkpoints to avoid detection. He had been sickened in the town of Butembo and then took a bus while ill. WHO and the Congolese health ministry have now switched tactics and are offering the vaccine to anyone who wants it. With Ebola's arrival in Goma, a city of more than 2 million people, some wonder whether there will be enough of the vaccine if the outbreak continues. The vaccine's manufacturer, Merck, said it has 245,000 1-millileter doses on hand and that could rise to 900,000 over the next 18 months. The dose in Congo also has been reduced to 0.5 mL, effectively doubling the supply. "Whether or not the available doses are sufficient to fulfill the demands depends on the evolution of the outbreak, the access to the communities and the successful expansion of the production of additional doses by Merck in early 2020," WHO said. There is a second experimental vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson, but health officials in Congo have said it will not be used because it needs further testing and would cause too much confusion. It requires two doses given one month apart. It's unclear how long the Merck vaccine will protect people. Scientists know from early studies that it lasts for at least a year, but the epidemic is approaching that limit. The only study to report longer vaccine durability tracked only a small number of healthy volunteers in Geneva for two years. The new strategy of giving shots to anyone who wants them involves setting up "pop-up" sites in the neighborhoods most affected. Last week a vaccination team headed to the neighborhood in Beni where Nduhi's wife had stayed after he died. Outside the mud-brick home where his children still lived, a pickup truck full of plastic tables and chairs pulled over. Soon a tent was set up, and vaccination teams donned eye protection and yellow surgical gowns. Neighborhood children climbed the trees to watch. Baraka Kathembo Makasi, a 22-year-old motorbike taxi driver, brought his wife and two children with him. "At first I refused," he said, "but I started seeing people die and decided to go." ___ Associated Press writers Al-Hadji Kudra Maliro in Beni, Congo; Lauran Neergaard in Washington; Maria Cheng in London; and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report. Claim: Ebola vaccine hampered by deep distrust in eastern Congo.

SOLUTION:
Until his last breath, Salomon Nduhi Kambale insisted he had been poisoned by someone and that was the reason he was vomiting blood. The 30-year-old man wouldn't give community health teams his phone number, and when they found it, he hung up on them.