About Covid-19
European countries resume use of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, hoping pause has not dented confidence: “A dozen European countries [yesterday] said they will resume vaccinations with the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said its initial investigation of possible side effects has concluded the vaccine is ‘safe and effective.’ Their decisions came as a relief to many public health experts, who worried about long delays in the COVID-19 vaccination programs at a time when cases are increasing in much of Europe.”
U.S. plans to use real world and trial data to determine when vaccines need to be updated: “U.S. officials plan to use data gathered from people who have already been vaccinated against COVID-19 as well as data from ongoing clinical trials to determine when and whether current vaccines need to be updated to address viral variants.
Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a hearing on Wednesday that his agency has already started getting data on vaccine safety from surveillance systems.
Those systems have been set up to gather reports of vaccine side effects from individuals and physicians and are managed in partnership with the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
About the public’s health
Assessment of the Appropriateness of Antimicrobial Use in US Hospitals: “In this cross-sectional study of 1566 patients at 192 hospitals, antimicrobial use deviated from recommended practices for 55.9% of patients who received antimicrobials for community-acquired pneumonia or urinary tract infection present at admission or who received fluoroquinolone or intravenous vancomycin treatment…
The findings suggest that standardized assessments of hospital antimicrobial prescribing quality can be used to estimate the appropriateness of antimicrobial use in large groups of hospitals.”
What can we do to assure better compliance? Seems to need some “hard wiring,” like automatic pharmacist/infectious disease review.
HHS Tells Supreme Court It Will End Abortion 'Gag Rule': “The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled its timeline Thursday for officially rolling back the Trump administration's ‘gag rule’ prohibiting physicians from referring patients to abortion providers, telling the U. S. Supreme Court that it plans to propose new rules by mid-April.”