Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: Congress Must Address The Drug Shortage Issue Quickly; The Pharmacists Are Not OK
The Washington Post: Drug Shortages Are An Urgent National Danger. Here's How We Fix Them.
During a winter of extraordinarily high rates of infectious diseases, U.S. pharmacies have run out of the antibiotic amoxicillin. The government has had to release emergency reserves. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, 1/16)
The Tennessean: How To Treat Burnout In America's Pharmacists
Pharmacists are in the crosshairs. It’s cold and flu season. There’s an amoxicillin shortage. Lines are long, tempers are short, and all this on top of nearly three years of COVID, vaccines, and variants. It’s no wonder the phenomenon of pharmacist burnout is on the rise. (Sarah L. Clark, 1/12)
New England Journal of Medicine: Medicare Overpayment For Outpatient Medication — A Supreme Court Ruling In Context
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling pertaining to Medicare payments for outpatient medications that will result in billions of dollars in additional payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to hospitals. (Wasan Kumar, B.S. and Kevin Schulman, M.D., 1/14)
Stat: Is Biogen Really To Blame For Putting Profit Ahead Of Patients?
wo congressional committees recently released damning results of an 18-month investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Biogen’s controversial Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm. The systems that enabled Biogen’s actions, however, went largely unscrutinized. (Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, 1/17)
New England Journal of Medicine: Bivalent Covid-19 Vaccines — A Cautionary Tale
In November 2019, a bat coronavirus made its debut in humans in Wuhan, China. Two months later, the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, called the Wuhan-1 or ancestral strain, was isolated and sequenced. It was now possible to make a vaccine. (Paul A. Offit, M.D., 1/11)
