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.
If international scientific sleuths are hoping to see a lab log or find a whistleblower, that sort of information won’t be revealed. In China today, it is dangerous to say what you know if it challenges the official government narrative.
The World Health Organization this week updated its guidance on children and covid vaccinations — but in a different way than alleged in a viral social media post.
About three dozen elite health systems are involved in for-profit hospital projects overseas. Though the systems are exempt from U.S. taxes for providing “community benefit,” there’s limited evidence that such business ventures benefit American patients.
Where the coronavirus originated remains a mystery and the Chinese are bucking demands to let investigators see more.
Lawmakers are working on fleshing out the concept of a “public option,” a government-run or heavily regulated insurance plan that would compete with private insurance. But the details are complicated, both substantively and politically. Meanwhile, bioethicists are debating whether the U.S. should be vaccinating low-risk adolescents against covid-19 while high-risk adults in other countries are still waiting. Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico and Rachana Pradhan of KHN join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.