Viewpoints: Is Importing Canadian Drugs Risky?; Accepting Vaccine Hesitancy Is A Slippery Slope
Editorial writers tackle counterfeit drugs, parental vaccine hesitancy, HIV, and more.
Dallas Morning News:
Is The FDA Opening A Door For Counterfeit Drug Trade?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead last month for Florida to import prescription drugs in bulk from Canada. If all goes according to plan, the state government will be able to dispense certain Canadian-sourced drugs to people who receive care through the state Department of Corrections, the state Department of Children and Families, and the state Agency for Persons with Disabilities. (Sally C. Pipes, 2/8)
New England Journal of Medicine:
The Risks Of Normalizing Parental Vaccine Hesitancy
The algorithms that shape our media diets have been promoting the idea that parental hesitancy about routine childhood vaccines has become commonplace in the United States since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. (David M. Higgins, M.D., M.P.H., and Sean T. O’Leary, M.D., M.P.H., 2/8)
New England Journal of Medicine:
Advanced HIV As A Neglected Disease
In the early decades of the global response to HIV/AIDS, the focus was on saving lives. And rightly so: without antiretroviral treatment (ART), people lived less than a year, on average, from the time they developed AIDS. But over the past 15 years, the focus has shifted to virologic control. (Nathan Ford, D.Sc., Peter Ehrenkranz, M.D., and Joseph Jarvis, M.B., B.S., 2/8)
Stat:
How To Address Police Violence And Mental Health At Once
Despite widespread promises of reform after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, in 2023, police killed at least 1,246 people — the most in more than a decade. This police violence is intertwined with a parallel public policy disaster: America’s abysmal mental health systems that force police officers to function as de facto mental health workers. People with unmet mental health needs are 16 times more likely to be killed by police, and a quarter of all those killed by police since 2015 were perceived to be suffering from a mental health crisis. (Eric Reinhart, 2/8)
