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January 17, 2025 Toxic Exposures

Big Pharma NewsWatch

Dartmouth Health Ends COVID Vaccination Requirement for Kidney Transplants + More

The Defender’s Big Pharma Watch delivers the latest headlines related to pharmaceutical companies and their products, including vaccines, drugs, and medical devices and treatments. The views expressed in the below excerpts from other news sources do not necessarily reflect the views of The Defender. Our goal is to provide readers with breaking news that affects human health and the environment.

Dartmouth Health Ends COVID Vaccination Requirement for Kidney Transplants

NHPR reported:

Dartmouth Health will no longer require someone to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before receiving a kidney transplant, after the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office intervened on behalf of a patient. The Attorney General’s Office said the health system changed its policy after state officials raised concerns it could violate state law. The law at issue, passed in 2022, forbids health care providers from denying care to patients based solely on vaccination status.

“After reviewing the matter and engaging with Dartmouth Health, we are pleased that they have taken the steps necessary to align their policies with the rights of patients and the requirements of State law,” New Hampshire Attorney General Formella said in a news release. Organ transplant recipients have a much higher risk of dying or getting severely ill from COVID-19, in part due to immunosuppressive drugs that prevent their bodies from rejecting transplanted organs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends COVID-19 vaccinations for people with weakened immune systems, whether due to medications or a medical condition. Going forward, Dartmouth Health will strongly recommend, but not require, vaccination for kidney transplant recipients, the Attorney General’s Office said.

ACIP Immunization Schedules Issued for Children, Adults

MedicalXPress reported:

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)-approved immunization schedules for children and adolescents and for adults for 2025 have been published in the Jan. 16 issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Anindita N. Issa, M.D., from the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues issued the ACIP-approved “Recommended Immunization Schedule for Children and Adolescents Ages 18 Years or Younger, United States, 2025,” which provides a summary of current recommendations for vaccinating children and adolescents.

The authors note that changes in the 2025 immunization schedule compared with the 2024 schedule include new and updated recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccine, Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccines, influenza vaccines, and meningococcal serogroup B vaccines. Recommended influenza vaccines have been changed from the quadrivalent to the trivalent formulation.

WHO Appeals for $1.5 Billion for Emergencies With US Funding in Question

MSN reported:

The World Health Organization (WHO) launched its annual appeal for funding to respond to health emergencies on Thursday, just days before the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the U.S. — the health agency’s biggest donor — puts a question mark over its long-term finances.

The WHO is seeking $1.5 billion to help more than 300 million people living in 42 emergency zones, from Gaza to Afghanistan. “Without adequate and sustainable funding we face the impossible task of deciding who will receive care and who will not,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, deploring a growing gap between needs and available funding.

The U.S. has historically been a major contributor to both the WHO’s emergency appeal and its wider budget, fixed at $6.8 billion for 2024-2025. For the current two-year period, the U.S. provided about 34% of the funding available for health emergencies, and in the past its contribution has been as high as 50%, WHO data showed. It also contributes about a fifth of the WHO’s overall funding.

Wegovy and Zepbound Tipped to Fuel $20B Boom in Heart Failure Market

Fierce Pharma reported:

GlobalData has named heart failure as the next disease to feel the sales-boosting power of GLP-1 drugs. The analysts expect launches of medicines including Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy to help add $20 billion to the value of the market in a decade.

After a fallow period, drug developers have chalked up a series of wins in heart failure in recent years to help establish mechanisms such as SGLT2 inhibition as part of the treatment toolkit. Boehringer Ingelheim won approval for its SGLT2 inhibitor Jardiance in heart failure in 2021 and secured an expanded label in a hard-to-treat population the next year.

GlobalData’s analysis starts in the year the Food and Drug Administration expanded the Jardiance label. Back then, in 2022, sales of heart failure drugs across the U.S., the five main European markets and Japan totaled $13.5 billion, according to the analysts. By 2032, they predict the market will be worth $33.7 billion.

Online Marketing for Compounded GLP-1 Drugs Overstates Benefits and Underplays Risks

STAT News reported:

In Connecticut, where Medicaid has clamped down on covering GLP-1 medications for obesity, people are looking for alternatives. To make ends meet, some of Reshma Ramachandran’s patients at a federally qualified health center in New Haven have turned to cash-pay, compounded versions of the drugs.

But they’re sometimes confused about what they’re getting. Patients who obtain compounded GLP-1s online sometimes come into visits thinking their medications are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said Ramachandran, a physician and health services researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. “Yes, the laboratory might be registered or might be known to the FDA,” she’ll explain. “But the actual drugs themselves are not tested by the FDA beforehand.”

In an analysis published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, Ramachandran and her colleagues show that confusion may be widespread. Among 79 websites marketing compounded GLP-1s or prescriptions for them, 37% stated or implied that the drugs were FDA-approved. Nearly half didn’t include information about the drugs’ adverse effects, warnings, and contraindications.

Novo Nordisk Touts ‘Superior’ Weight Loss Results in Study of High-Dose Wegovy

Fierce Pharma reported:

In the ongoing quest to expand semaglutide’s clinical pedigree and cement the GLP-1’s market position, Novo Nordisk is rolling out new data on a higher-dose injection in obesity.

In the phase 3b STEP UP study, an experimental 7.2-mg semaglutide dose helped patients lose more weight on average at 72 weeks compared to placebo or semaglutide 2.4 mg, which is currently the highest dose of the drug marketed under the Wegovy brand for obesity.

Digging into the data, participants in the 1,407-patient trial started from a mean baseline body weight of 113 kg (about 249 pounds). Those who received once-weekly semaglutide 7.2 mg lost 20.7% of their body weight on average after 72 weeks versus 17.5% weight loss with semaglutide 2.4 mg and just 2.4% weight loss in the trial’s placebo arm.

CDC Urges Faster Testing to Find Human Bird Flu Cases

NBC News reported:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday urged labs nationwide to determine within 24 hours of admission whether people hospitalized with the flu have seasonal influenza or are infected with the bird flu that’s behind an escalating outbreak in dairy cows and poultry.

The guidance for labs to do this type of testing has been in place since last fall, but the process has been slow, with many hospitals sending flu samples out for testing in bulk every few days.

By the time those results come back, patients have often already been sent home, Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director, said during a media briefing Thursday.

That could hinder bird flu investigations. As days and weeks pass, it would be difficult for people to recall where they may have been exposed to the virus. “The more time that goes by, the more memories fade and the harder it is to identify a potential source,” Shah said.

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