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COVID Shots for Children
Much of the world has decided that most young children do not need to receive COVID booster shots. It’s true in Britain, France, Japan and Australia.
Some countries, like India, have gone further. They say that otherwise healthy children do not need even an initial COVID vaccination. In Germany, public health experts don’t recommend vaccines for any children, including teenagers, unless they have a medical condition. Scientists in these countries understand that COVID vaccines are highly effective. But the experts have concluded that the benefits for children often fail to outweigh the costs.
The benefits are modest because children are extremely unlikely to become seriously ill from COVID and are less likely to transmit the virus than an adult is. The costs include the financial price of mass vaccination, the possibility that a shot’s side effects will make a child sick enough to miss school, the tiny chance of more serious side effects and the inherent uncertainty about long-term effects.
The U.S. — as American readers have probably realized by this point in the newsletter — is a global outlier. The C.D.C. urges booster shots for all children six months and older. Yet the recommendation has failed to accomplish much. Instead, most American parents have chosen to overrule the C.D.C. Only about 40% of children under 12 have been vaccinated against COVID, and only about 5% are up to date on their boosters.
There’s a New Life-Saving Vaccine. Why Won’t People Take It?
Florence Rosen, who often films herself with her baby grandson snuggled against her shoulder, is among a contingent of “TikTok Docs” — and nurses — who have taken to the fast-growing social media video platform to try to talk Americans down from the vaccine-fearing ledge.
“Do I think this vaccine is great? I do,” she exclaims to her more than 158,000 followers. It’s an “absolutely wonderful thing,” and yes, she says, she’s gotten it herself.
But she’s not talking about the COVID vaccine. She’s praising a new shot against RSV. Would people get the jab? As this RSV season winds down, the answer is that by and large, they did not.
The latest data from the CDC shows that only 16% of eligible pregnant people got vaccinated. Among the over-60 population, it was just over one in five. And among babies and eligible young children, the uptake was “low,” the CDC said.
Was Pfizer’s ‘Here’s to Science’ Commercial During the Super Bowl a Winning Play or a Fumble?
Super Bowl ads are a show within the show, an opportunity for brands and advertising creatives to put their work in front of more than 100 million viewers. And while the occasion is most closely associated with ads for beer, cars, and soft drinks, pharma giant Pfizer dished out millions of dollars for its own message: “Here’s to science.”
The commercial was made by the advertising agency Publicis Conseil and Le Truc/Publicis NY. Pfizer declined to comment on how much it spent on the ad, though CBS has reported that the price tag for a 30-second Super Bowl ad was $6.5 million to $7 million — and Pfizer’s ad was 60 seconds (shortened from the original 90-second version). That’s a small sum for a roughly $156 billion company but is still a significant investment compared to Pfizer’s other cancer-related initiatives. Just days ago, Pfizer announced a $15 million donation to the American Cancer Society over three years but spent at least half that on the commercial alone.
Polling shows that the pharmaceutical industry remains the least-trusted sector of America’s economy. But, by focusing on cancer treatment, Pradeep Chintagunta, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who specializes in pharmaceutical marketing, says Pfizer’s ad is likely to resonate with many in the general public. “For a lot of consumers, Pfizer is probably known for Covid [vaccines]. The only other thing I think they associated Pfizer with was Viagra,” he said.
While these products may not elicit strong unifying reactions, cancer “is something that I think all Americans can relate to,” Chintagunta said. “That was a clever thing, which is to play up on something that everybody can resonate with.”
Pharmaceutical Group’s Lawsuit Over Medicare Drug Price Program Dismissed
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit by a major pharmaceutical industry trade association challenging a new program that allows Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for selected costly drugs.
U.S. District Judge David Ezra in Austin, Texas, sided with President Joe Biden‘s administration in dismissing a lawsuit by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and two other groups that argued that the program was unconstitutional.
The ruling marked another victory for the administration in its defense of the negotiation program, one of Biden’s signature initiatives and part of the Inflation Reduction Act that the Democratic president signed into law in 2022.
The program aims to save $25 billion annually by 2031 by requiring drugmakers to negotiate the prices of selected expensive drugs with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS), which oversees Medicare.
Drugmakers that refuse to participate must either pay heavy fines or withdraw altogether from Medicare, which covers 66 million Americans mostly aged 65 and older and accounts for a large share of U.S. prescription drug spending.
‘A Horrible, Perfect Storm’: Frustrations Rise as Shortage of Adderall, Other ADHD Medication Continues
In October 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration formally announced a nationwide Adderall shortage, leaving millions scrambling to obtain prescription stimulant medication. Over a year later, there’s no end in sight, and a tangled network of causes has made for no clear solution.
“It’s the single biggest crisis right now in clinical mental health,” said Greg Mattingly, president of the American Professional Society of ADHD and Related Disorders and an associate clinical professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “It touches everyone.”
Access to prescription stimulant medications first began to unravel at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Physicians started reporting a significant jump in ADHD diagnoses. Research compiled by FDA-affiliated scholars indicated that prescriptions for stimulant medications among people aged 20 to 29 rose 30% from April 2018 to March 2022. There are multiple theories on why that’s the case, including the ease of telehealth, increased ADHD awareness and the added stressors of remote work, experts say.
In 2022, manufacturers of amphetamine medications, which includes Adderall, only sold about 70% of their allotted quota, FDA and DEA officials said. That means about a billion doses were never made or shipped.
Getting Free Paxlovid Is Not Hard. But Consumers Need to Be Proactive.
When the public health emergency around COVID-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent COVID from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.
Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.
