Covid cases are again climbing, but you wouldn’t know it from the behavior of public health and elected officials, much less the general public, all of whom seem to want to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror. Meanwhile, the fallout over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on abortion continues even as the Senate fails — again — to muster the votes to write abortion rights into law. Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, and Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
The part of my London visit that I didn’t plan was testing positive for the coronavirus. I couldn’t get back to the U.S., but the U.K. didn’t care what I did or where I went.
U.S. and global drug manufacturers invested in Russia’s sizable pharmaceutical industry contend international humanitarian law requires they continue manufacturing and selling their products there, even while condemning the Ukraine invasion. Not everyone agrees.
As hospitals juggle holiday covid surges and all their other patients, the global supply chain crisis has left them short of critical supplies.
This new variant has set off alarm bells in the public health community, but much remains to be learned about it.
Covid is back with a vengeance, with some people clamoring for booster shots while others harden their resistance to getting vaccinated at all. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration is pushing hard on drugmaker Pfizer’s request to upgrade the emergency authorization for its vaccine and give it final approval. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Rachel Cohrs of Stat and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
Scientists are trying to piece together why the delta variant so readily infects unvaccinated Americans, spewing 1,000 times more virus particles.
In today’s pharmaceutical universe, a simple “safe and effective” determination by the Food and Drug Administration to approve a drug can be manipulated to sell products of questionable value. And drugmakers can profit handsomely.
Novavax is a vaccine company that, despite $2 billion in new federal and international funding, still hasn’t come through with a licensed covid vaccine. It hopes it can still help to fight the global covid scourge, but will it deliver?
The data is reassuring to people who got this shot.