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Moderna Won’t Raise Price on COVID Vaccine After Pressure
Moderna said Wednesday it wouldn’t raise the price of its COVID-19 vaccine after a public outcry.
The about-face comes after the company was harshly criticized for planning to raise the cost of a vaccine dose about 400% — to the $110-to-$130 range. The company said the decision was made because they were shifting away from government contracts despite the vaccine’s development being publicly subsidized. The government pays about $26 per dose.
Instead it will remain free — even for the uninsured — after federal funding for vaccines starts to deplete when the public health emergency ends in May.
The announcement came after leftwing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called on Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel to testify about the price hike and the pharmaceutical industry in general during a Senate hearing scheduled for next month.
WHO Says It Won’t Abandon COVID Origin Pursuit
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The World Health Organization on Wednesday pledged to continue its pursuit of the origin of COVID-19 amid a report that it abandoned part of its investigation, but the group acknowledged that it needs more cooperation from China.
The report from Nature said that WHO “quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China.”
Maria Van Kerkhove of WHO said during a press briefing on Wednesday, “I think we need to be perfectly clear that WHO has not abandoned studying the origins of COVID-19. We have not, and we will not.” She said that there “was no quiet shelving of any plans,” adding that plans were “updated” instead.
“Initially, phase two was a plan to be a continuation of that January 2021 mission to Wuhan, which was in a sense seen as phase one, but we updated our plans,” Van Kerkhove said, referring to the city in China where the virus was first reported. She said that “in a sense” phase two became the permanent establishment of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which she said “was, in effect, our best effort to move this work forward.”
U.S. Backs Moderna, Says Government Should Face COVID Vaccine Lawsuit
The U.S. government should face a patent lawsuit over COVID-19 vaccines, not vaccine maker Moderna Inc. (MRNA.O), the Department of Justice told a Delaware federal court on Tuesday.
The Justice Department’s court filing said the United States should be liable for any infringement of Arbutus Biopharma Corp. (ABUS.O) and Genevant Sciences GmbH’s patents that took place under Moderna’s contract to provide shots for the government’s nationwide vaccination effort. Moderna made the same argument last year in an unsuccessful bid to win an early dismissal of the lawsuit.
Warminster Township, Pennsylvania-based Arbutus and Genevant — a joint venture between Arbutus and Roivant Sciences Ltd (ROIV.O) — sued Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna last year for royalties on its multi-billion-dollar COVID vaccines.
Both Moderna and Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N) have been the target of multiple patent lawsuits over their COVID vaccines, including a lawsuit brought by Moderna against Pfizer in August.
U.S. NIH Starts Trial for Shionogi’s COVID Pill
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Wednesday that it had started a clinical trial to evaluate Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd’s (4507.T) experimental oral antiviral drug to treat COVID-19.
The drug, S-217622 or ensitrelvir, will be tested in adult patients hospitalized with COVID-19. It is already approved for emergency use in Japan.
The trial will enroll about 1,500 people from different sites across the world, the government health organization said in a statement.
White House Mulls Post-COVID Emergency Backstop for Uninsured
The Biden administration is zeroing in on a plan to keep COVID vaccines, treatments and tests free for the uninsured into 2024, even as it plots a quicker wind-down of its broader pandemic response, four people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.
Biden officials expect the so-called commercialization process to start in the second half of this year. But under its tentative plan, the administration would stockpile a limited supply of shots, treatments and tests that could be distributed freely to the uninsured well after the U.S. transitions out of its current crisis era.
Biden health officials are preparing to unravel a sprawling set of pandemic policies over the next several months, as the administration ends the public health emergency on May 11 and moves toward managing the virus as a long-term disease.
New Bill Would Prohibit Federal Funding for Healthcare Facilities That Deny Care to Unvaccinated Patients
A new bill in Congress would ban federal funding for institutions that deny care to patients for not having a COVID-19 vaccine, after multiple patients in the United States seeking transplants have been rejected over their vaccination status.
The 2-page bill states that “no funds authorized or appropriated by Federal law, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are authorized or appropriated by Federal law … shall be made available to a facility that refuses to provide treatment to an individual based on the COVID-19 vaccination status of such individual.” The legislation is called the COVID-19 Vaccination Non-Discrimination Act.
“No American should be denied access to critical care based on a personal medical decision, yet tragically, many hospitals and other medical facilities continue to discriminate against those unvaccinated for COVID-19,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a doctor who cosponsored the legislation, said in a statement.
Multiple patients in the United States have been denied transplants during the pandemic because of their refusal to get a COVID-19 vaccine. James Jooyandeh, a U.S. Army veteran, was denied a lung transplant because he declined to get vaccinated. Other patients have been removed from waiting lists due to their vaccination status.
The Haunting Brain Science of Long COVID
Matt Fitzgerald used to bike up and down 3,500 feet through the Santa Ana Mountains on three-hour rides just for fun. Now, nine months after being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, he can’t muster walking on flat surfaces for 20 minutes without days of exhaustion.
Another patient of mine, Barbara Nivens, was forced into early retirement as a result of long COVID. Four months after recovering from a mild case of COVID-19, “My memory began to fade,” she told me. “I struggled cognitively as a manager and then HR came after me.” But what exactly is going on inside the brains of these people from a biological and pathological perspective?
Science validates their injuries. A picture is emerging from animal models showing how ongoing inflammation of glial cells disrupts the electrical conduction highways in the brain’s white matter that link to and support the neurons in gray matter. It’s as if the bridges (white matter) linking different territories of the brain have been blown up and the land itself (nerves in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus) become scorched, leaving people with long COVID plagued by thinking and memory deficits.
An MRI study from George Washington University of people who’d had mild COVID-19 symptoms several months earlier found much less gray matter in their brains than they should have had. This ominous finding complements a large controlled study conducted as part of the U.K. Biobank showing that, as compared to people who had never tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, a loss of actual brain tissue was seen in the olfactory cortex and limbic system — think impaired smell, emotions and memory formation — among people with long COVID.
Governments Target Medical Debt With COVID Relief Funds
Millions of Americans mired in medical debt face difficult financial decisions every day — pay the debt or pay for rent, utilities and groceries. Some may even skip necessary healthcare for fear of sinking deeper into debt.
To address the problem, an increasing number of municipal, county and state governments are devising plans to spend federal coronavirus pandemic relief funds to eliminate residents’ medical debt and ease those debt burdens.
Unlike credit card or loan debt, medical debt is not a choice, advocates said. “Medical debt is something that people can’t help and it’s not their fault,” Burnley said. “No one chooses to get hurt or to get sick.”
The cities and states are teaming up with RIP Medical Debt, a New York-based nonprofit that since 2014 has used donations to buy huge bundles of debt from hospitals and other healthcare providers at pennies on the dollar and pay it off. A single donated dollar erases an average of $100 of debt.
European Medicines Agency Expects Annual COVID Vaccination Campaigns, Similar to Flu Shot
The European Medicines Agency expects COVID vaccination campaigns to be conducted once a year, similar to the approach with flu inoculation, it said on Wednesday.
In Europe, there is a marked decline in new COVID cases, hospitalisations and deaths — the lowest levels observed in the European Union in the past twelve months, he said, citing data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
The EMA is currently in discussions with the World Health Organization and other regulatory agencies about the criteria and process that will lead to the potential update of the vaccines in view of future vaccination campaigns, he added.
My Initial Impressions of a New COVID Treatment: Pegylated Interferon Lambda — a Major Study Offered Encouraging Results, but Some Barriers to Treatment Exist
Earlier this week, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who received one injection of pegylated interferon lambda did better than those who received placebo. Interferons like this one work by helping cells keep viruses from invading and taking up shop.
The new study compared outcomes in mostly vaccinated participants across several periods, including Omicron. Interferon recipients had lower rates of the study’s “primary outcome” of interest; Participants were deemed as having experienced the primary outcome if either a COVID-related hospitalization or an emergency department (ED) stay longer than 6 hours occurred.
The skeptic in me notes that a few findings were less impressive than the headline. For example, when researchers measured all-cause death or COVID-related hospitalization (factoring out longer ED stays), about half of that signal of benefit vanished (i.e., there was a 25% reduction in those outcomes as opposed to a 51% reduction in the primary outcome).
As the New York Times reported, the FDA is unlikely to authorize this drug for use in the U.S. The reasons for this are actually kind of silly. First, the study was done in Brazil and Canada — and the FDA likes U.S. data. It seems to me that in a pandemic, science is science, regardless of its locale. What matters is the quality of the endeavor, not the country code where it took place.
Antibiotics Are Being Inappropriately Prescribed for COVID, Increasing the Threat of Antimicrobial Resistance — Research
Antibiotics are drugs designed to treat infections caused by bacteria (for example, skin infections). They don’t work on infections caused by other microbes such as viruses (including COVID and flu) or fungi (for example, thrush).
Beyond treating bacterial infections, antibiotics also have other important uses, like preventing infection during major surgery.
When antibiotics are misused or overused, more opportunities arise for bacteria to develop and improve these protective tools. This contributes to a problem called antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance, where bacteria evolve over time so that antibiotics no longer work against them. This makes infections more difficult to treat as doctors have fewer antibiotics to choose from, in turn increasing the risk of serious illness and death.
But how has the COVID pandemic affected antibiotic use, and the problem of antibiotic resistance? A recent study which analyzed pharmaceutical sales data from 71 countries suggests that as COVID cases went up, so did antibiotics sales.
