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Opioids, Obesity Now Ranked as Top Public Health Threats in New Poll
Americans have ranked opioids and obesity as the top threats to public health while ranking COVID-19 toward the bottom of the list, according to a new poll.
The Axios-Ipsos poll found that 26% of Americans said opioids and fentanyl are the top public health threat, closely followed by 23% who said obesity is. Twenty percent listed access to firearms as the No. 1 threat and 11% listed cancer.
Just 2% of Americans said COVID-19 was the top threat. This comes as COVID-19 cases have increased this summer, with some areas seeing hospitalizations triple due to the cases.
GSK Stays a Step Ahead in RSV Vaccine Battle as Arexvy Becomes Available at U.S. Pharmacies
As companies have flocked to compete in the new respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine market, GSK has had the best timing.
In May, the U.K. company was the first to secure FDA approval for its shot Arexvy for adults 60 and older, beating out rivals from Pfizer and Moderna. And now — well in advance of the fall and winter RSV season — Arexvy is available in major U.S. retail pharmacies, GSK said Thursday.
GSK has also been quick on the trigger with a marketing campaign. Its “Sideline RSV” push features basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
The RSV vaccine market is one of the pharma industry’s next major battlegrounds, with analysts pegging the potential opportunity at more than $10 billion annually.
U.S. Mother Accuses GE and Bayer of Causing Son’s Cancer
A Massachusetts mother has filed a lawsuit blaming widespread PCB pollution by General Electric (GE), Monsanto and its German owner Bayer, and several other companies for causing her nine-year-old son to develop leukemia and suffer repeated debilitating medical treatments.
Crystal Czerno alleges, among other things, that GE knowingly contaminated her son Carter’s elementary school playground with PCB waste while downplaying the harm it could cause. The school is located in the town of Pittsfield, just north of a GE facility that made electrical transformers containing PCBs for more than 40 years. PCB-laden soil from the GE site was spread over the school grounds.
The lawsuit accuses the companies of using the community as a “dumping ground” for “toxic and cancerous” chemicals.
Carter has undergone multiple rounds of chemotherapy, full-body radiation, and multiple stem cell transplants and bone marrow biopsies, according to the lawsuit. Another bone marrow biopsy is scheduled next week, his mother said.
Czerno’s lawyer, Thomas Bosworth, said he has several more claims that will be filed in the coming days from other area residents struggling with health problems they believe are linked to PCB pollution.
Healthcare CEOs Hauled in $4 Billion Last Year as Inflation Pinched Workers, Analysis Shows
The healthcare industry didn’t just provide a safe haven for jittery stock investors in 2022, a year defined by inflation and higher interest rates. It also provided a stable stream of wealth for top executives, who collectively pocketed billions of dollars in what was otherwise a rough patch for the economy.
That CEO haul was down 11% from the $4.5 billion recorded in 2021. But the sizable paydays highlight how every niche of healthcare — from COVID-19 vaccines and obscure technology to orthopedic implants and providing coverage to the nation’s poor — continued to supply its leaders with substantial sums of money even as more people struggled to afford food, housing, and, yes, healthcare.
“No matter how you slice it, the people at the top — the CEOs of these companies — are making enormous gains every year compared to ordinary Americans,” said John McDonough, a health policy professor at Harvard who has studied healthcare for nearly four decades. “This is the bitter fruit that we reap from telling the healthcare industry to act more like a business.”
No CEO made more than Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel, who took in nearly $400 million after governments around the world quickly bought the biotech company’s COVID-19 shot. Bancel is in the process of donating a vast majority of his income to charities. The 10 highest-paid CEOs — a list that also includes the CEOs of Thermo Fisher and McKesson — made a combined $1.4 billion, or about a third of the total studied. That amount is roughly what the National Institutes of Health spends annually to study drug abuse and addiction.
Meet the Man Who Fought the Sacklers on Their Opioid Bankruptcy Deal
In 2015, the Sackler family was the richest newcomer to the Forbes list of America’s Richest Families, with a fortune conservatively estimated at $14 billion. Their wealth had been built from creating a controlled-release version of a World War I painkiller that their company Purdue Pharma began selling in 1996 under the brand name OxyContin.
Marketed aggressively as an addiction-proof remedy for a wide variety of aches and pains, OxyContin sales soared, as did addiction rates and overdose deaths among its users. So, too, did the number of lawsuits against Purdue and the Sacklers for their alleged roles in creating an opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives. In 2019, Purdue announced a bankruptcy settlement that included $3 billion in cash from the Sacklers — allowing them to remain billionaires.
That bankruptcy deal morphed to include a $6 billion payout from the family, which would have settled some 3,000 lawsuits and shielded the Sacklers from all future civil lawsuits. Last week, the Supreme Court blocked the bankruptcy settlement in order to review its legality this fall.
For Michael Quinn, a partner in the New York City law firm of Eisenberg & Baum, the Supreme Court decision is a temporary victory in a battle he’s been fighting on behalf of his clients for years. During Purdue’s original bankruptcy proceedings, he represented the famous photographer Nan Goldin and activists from around the country who, he says, “are really concerned about getting accountability in this case from the Sacklers.”
The White House Blasts Republicans’ Budget Plans, Saying They Want to Slash Social Security and Medicare and ‘Force Seniors to Pay Even Higher Drug Costs so Big Pharma Can Fill More Swimming Pools With Caviar and Diamonds’
Republicans may be clinging to their gas stoves, but the White House is turning up the heat ahead of what’s sure to be a fiery budget season.
In a memo, White House deputy press secretary and senior communications adviser Andrew Bates blasted Republicans’ plans for cutting the deficit — a priority among the right as they try to claw back government spending and slash programs in negotiations over funding the federal government by the end of September.
“Again, congressional Republicans claim to be champing at the bit to have a debate about deficits. In other words, they want to shine even more of a spotlight on their devotion to wealthy special interests above all else,” Bates wrote.
“On their plans to eviscerate Medicare and Social Security benefits while spending trillions on tax handouts to the rich and big corporations, and force seniors to pay even higher drug costs so Big Pharma can fill more swimming pools with caviar and diamonds. We’ll book them on TV ourselves if it’s helpful!”
Lilly’s $13.5M Insulin Pricing Settlement Gets Pushback From 9 States
Nine states are saying not so fast to a proposed $13.5 million settlement that would get Eli Lilly out of hot water over claims it jacked up the price of its lucrative insulin product Humalog. The states argue Lilly is trying to use the deal to ward off future lawsuits by U.S. states.
In a Tuesday filing in New Jersey federal court, lawyers for Arizona, Mississippi and Minnesota urged U.S. District Judge Brian Martinotti to delay approval of the deal unless it’s altered to make sure states can still file their own lawsuits over insulin prices.
The states joined Illinois, Nebraska, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas and Montana in making their objections known this week.
In a separate filing Monday, the group of six states argued that in light of local insulin price caps, Lilly was trying to settle claims valued at about $1 billion by offering price reductions that are already compelled by law.
Many Expensive Cancer Drugs Have Unclear Patient Benefit
New cancer drugs are being launched at a rapid pace before their long-term effectiveness for patients can be evaluated. Several years later, most of them still lack scientific evidence for actually increasing life expectancy or improving quality of life. This has been shown by a study at the University of Gothenburg.
Cancer drugs are a dominant area within the pharmaceutical industry, which is constantly developing and launching new treatments. Cancer drugs are approved centrally by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and are often subsequently launched in European countries after national reimbursement processes.
To reach patients sooner, it has become increasingly common for cancer drugs to be approved based on studies that show an effect on biomarkers, but without clear evidence that they extend life or improve patients’ quality of life. A study by health economics researchers at the University of Gothenburg shows that there is still a lack of such evidence for many new cancer drugs, even several years after their launch.
For seven of the 22 drug indications, at least one study clearly showed that the treatment either improved quality of life or increased life expectancy. For the other 15, randomized controlled trials failed to show any such effect, or there were no results from these trials. Only one of the drugs had scientific evidence of both increased life expectancy and improved quality of life for its indication.
Drugmaker Mallinckrodt Moves Toward Second Bankruptcy Filing
Mallinckrodt on Tuesday said it was preparing to seek bankruptcy protection for the second time in three years after struggling to make a required $200 million settlement payment to opioid victims.
The drugmaker, one of the largest makers of opioids, said it is negotiating a restructuring support agreement with its stakeholders while deferring deadlines for missed debt payments and opioid settlement payments to next week.
The Ireland-based company failed to make scheduled payments to its lenders and opioid creditors in June, and it has sought several short-term extensions of the debt deadlines.
Mallinckrodt emerged from bankruptcy last year after winning court approval for a reorganization plan that included a $1.7 billion settlement. It paid the first $450 million of that settlement after emerging from bankruptcy, but it failed to make a $200 million payment due in June.
South Africa Ordered to Disclose Contracts With Pfizer, J&J, and Other COVID Vaccine Suppliers
A South African court ruled the government must disclose contracts signed with pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 vaccines, a victory for advocates who alleged that authorities may have overpaid for the shots and that the lack of transparency masked pharmaceutical profits at the public’s expense.
At issue are contracts signed by the South African government with several companies — including Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer — that provided millions of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. The government also obtained vaccine doses through donations and a World Health Organization program called COVAX, which sought to make vaccines available to mostly low- and middle-income countries.
The contracts, however, have never been publicly disclosed. In a lawsuit, an advocacy group called Health Justice Initiative argued that speculation was rife that the South African government may have overpaid without access to more details on terms or pricing. The group also maintained that mistrust about such arrangements can contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
