Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Hospitals Need To Reach Out To Communities Post-Covid; Manufacturing Vaccines Can't Be Done By Just Any Pharma Company
Stat: Hospitals Need To Mend Relationships With Their Communities
In April 2020, Víctor Santamaría was in an intensive care unit at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City with a breathing tube in his throat. His lungs, kidneys, and liver were failing as a result of Covid-19. He was barely hanging on. (David Scales and Devin Worster, 2/4)
Market Watch: A Straightforward Explanation Why More COVID-19 Vaccines Can’t Be Produced With Help From ‘Dozens’ Of Companies
In the last few days, the question of why more drug companies haven’t been enlisted for vaccine production has come up. It’s mostly due to a tweet urging Pfizer and Moderna to share their design with other pharma companies. The problem is, as far as I can see, this is simply wrong. There are not “dozens of other pharma companies” who “stand ready” to produce these mRNA vaccines. To me, this betrays a lack of knowledge about what these vaccines are and how they’re produced. (Derek Lowe, 2/3)
Bloomberg: Covid-19 Mutations Make Immunity Math Incredibly Daunting
Since early in the Covid-19 pandemic, would-be prophets (most of them not infectious-disease epidemiologists) have been predicting that it would soon burn itself out as people recovered from the disease and developed immunity. So far they have been proved wrong again and again as temporary declines in new infections gave way to second and third waves. Still, even infectious-disease epidemiologists agree that there is a point at which widespread immunity to a disease can cause it to decline or even disappear. This “herd immunity” threshold is calculated in its simplest form as a function of a disease’s basic reproduction number, R0, which is how many additional people each person with the disease can be expected to infect (in a population with no previous immunity that makes no behavioral changes in response to the disease). In this equation, the share of the population that needs to be immune to achieve herd immunity is 1 - 1/R0. (Justin Fox, 2/3)
Stat: Kids Don't Need Covid-19 Vaccines To Return To School
The notion is out there that public school students should not return to in-person learning until they’ve been vaccinated. That proposition worries me. Here are five reasons why schools can and should open at 100% capacity before a vaccine for those under age 16 is available. (Vinay Prasad, 2/3)
The Hill: Science Is Back At The White House; Now It Must Be Integrated Into American Diplomacy
President Biden underscored the importance of science to his administration by promptly nominating a White House Science Advisor and elevating the role to Cabinet status. That was an excellent start to correcting the Trump administration’s hostility to the role of science in policymaking, but Biden needs to ensure his new Secretaries at key Cabinet agencies are similarly moving to integrate science into their operations. (Kenneth C. Brill, 2/3)
The Wall Street Journal: From Covid Relief To Big Government
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was precise and pointed Monday as she dismissed efforts by 10 Republican senators to forge a compromise with President Biden on his $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. Following the senators’ meeting with Mr. Biden, she defended the president’s stimulus plan as “carefully designed” and focused on “pressing needs.” The president “will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment,” she concluded. The administration’s package was neither “carefully designed” nor focused only on “pressing needs.” It’s a mishmash of the good, the bad and the in-between, tilted toward delivering cash to blue states and putting in place permanent big-government programs under the guise of temporary emergency measures. (Karl Rove, 2/3)
New England Journal of Medicine: Covid-19 And The States – A Conversation With Ralph Northam
The continuing spread of SARS-CoV-2 remains a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. What physicians need to know about transmission, diagnosis, and treatment of Covid-19 is the subject of ongoing updates from infectious disease experts at the Journal. In this audio interview conducted on February 3, 2021, the editors are joined by Dr. Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, to discuss the logistics of Covid-19 vaccination. (Eric J. Rubin, Lindsey R. Baden, Ralph S. Northam, and Stephen Morrissey, 2/3)
The Washington Post: How Is Alaska Leading The Nation In Vaccinating Residents? With Boats, Ferries, Planes And Snowmobiles.
Alaska, the state with the largest land mass in the nation, is leading the country in a critical coronavirus measure: per capita vaccinations. About 13 percent of the people who live in Alaska have already gotten a shot. That’s higher than states such as West Virginia, which has received a lot of attention for a successful vaccine rollout and has inoculated 11 percent of its people. But the challenge for Alaska has been how to get vaccines to people across difficult, frigid terrain — often in remote slivers of the state? “Boats, ferries, planes, snowmobiles — Alaskans will find a way to get it there,” said the state’s chief medical officer, Anne Zink, 43. (Cathy Free, 2/4)
The Wall Street Journal: Californians Disapprove Of Gov. Lockdown
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has proven unwilling to live by the Covid distancing rules he imposes on voters. Now voters may be unwilling to allow the first-term Democrat to continue as California’s governor. A new survey in the Golden State suggests that his November party in defiance of pandemic protocols at the acclaimed French Laundry restaurant was even more expensive than it seemed. The elections of 2020 clarified that no one should expect political polls to express mathematical precision. But the recent trend is striking. The University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies reports: Californians are reevaluating their views of the job Gavin Newsom is doing as governor. (James Freeman, 2/3)
San Francisco Chronicle: California Keeps Abandoning Its Most Effective Pandemic Precautions
The gathering evidence that California’s holiday season stay-at-home orders turned back its worst surge of coronavirus infections yet raises more questions about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to rescind the restrictions last week. While the governor was responding to encouraging trends in new cases and hospitalizations, which continued to fall in recent days, he may have undone the very policy that stemmed the deadliest wave of the pandemic. (2/3)
