About Covid-19
CVS, Walgreens begin rolling out over-the-counter COVID tests from Abbott, Ellume and more: The tests are available without a prescription.
Worldwide COVID-19 death toll tops a staggering 3 million: “The global death toll from the coronavirus topped a staggering 3 million people Saturday amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide vaccination campaign and a deepening crisis in places such as Brazil, India and France.
The number of lives lost, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Kyiv, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; or metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is bigger than Chicago (2.7 million) and equivalent to Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
And the true number is believed to be significantly higher because of possible government concealment and the many cases overlooked in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019.”
Study of More Than 3,000 Members of the US Marine Corps. Reveals Past COVID-19 Infection Does Not Fully Protect Young People Against Reinfection: “Although antibodies induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection are largely protective, they do not completely protect against reinfection in young people, as evidenced through a longitudinal, prospective study of more than 3,000 young, healthy members of the US Marines Corps…”
Pfizer, Moderna turned down J&J request to probe COVID-19 vaccine clotting risks: report: Interesting marketing ploy by J&J to involve its competitors in looking for clotting complications. Pfizer and Moderna are required to look for complications, so there is no public health advantage to this joint effort.
About pharma
Facebook unveils AI model to mix up cancer-curing cocktails with existing drugs: “The social media giant’s AI research department and the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a research center in Germany focused on environmental health, unveiled an open-source AI model designed to determine the viability of repurposing existing drugs into new pharmaceutical cocktails.
Researchers and biologists now have free access to the Compositional Perturbation Autoencoder, or CPA, which evaluates the effects of drug combinations in varying dosages—a complicated task, as the number of possibilities can accelerate exponentially into the billions as more medicines are thrown into the mix.
The model predicts not only how the drugs interact with one another, but also how they might work together to attack specific cell types and interrupt diseases.”
Surprise: AstraZeneca's $39B Alexion buy clears a newly vigilant FTC without a hitch: “In an anticlimactic announcement Friday, AZ said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has cleared the $39 billion deal first unveiled in December.
None of the extra antitrust hurdles that analysts had feared for the marriage actually happened. The FTC didn’t attach any extra conditions to the deal. In fact, the go-ahead simply followed the 30-day waiting period triggered when the companies refiled their transaction for review on March 16.”
Merck Halts Development of MK-7110 for COVID-1: “Merck announced that it will end research and development on MK-7110, an experimental oral drug for treatment of hospitalized coronavirus patients that had shown promise in a late-stage trial.
The pharma titan said last week that it would drop its efforts on the drug — which it obtained through a $425 million acquisition of OncoImmune in November 2020 — after the FDA said it would need to see additional data beyond OncoImmune’s study to potentially grant Emergency Use Authorization.”
The top 10 ad spenders in Big Pharma for 2020: “Total pharma advertising spending topped $6.58 billion in 2020, according to Kantar measured media. That’s just a notch above the 2019 total of $6.56 billion, but still noteworthy in a year that saw U.S. advertising spend drop by 13% overall…
Pharma spending on digital video—desktop and mobile—increased 43%, while print and out-of-home channels dropped by 16% and 81%, respectively, according to Kantar.
Pharma TV advertising remained the cornerstone of spending with $4.58 billion, a whopping 75% of the total spend. That’s up just slightly from 2019 when national TV was 73% of pharma’s investment.”
#1 on the list of top spenders is Humira.
About health insurance
Trump tried to shrink Medicaid. Here's how Biden will try to expand it.: A really good overview of the Biden Administration’s Medicaid expansion initiatives. And in a related article: Biden officials rescind Trump’s okay for Texas’s $100 billion-plus Medicaid plan: “‘[W]e are rescinding the approval issued on January 15, 2021,’ because it did not go through the full federal rulemaking process, Liz Richter, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote in a letter to Texas officials obtained by The Washington Post.”
Nonprofit Health Plans Launch Telehealth-First Options to Increase Access and Affordability: ”When Covid-19 drove an increased need for telehealth in care delivery and coverage, nonprofit health plans Harvard Pilgrim, Kaiser Permanente, and Priority Health adapted their reimbursement models for members across the United States and accelerated their time lines for bringing cost-effective virtual care insurance products to market.”
Voya research shows employees are biased toward HDHPs [High Deductible Health Plans]: The headline should say “against” HDHPs. “New research from Voya shows employees have a bias against HDHPs and the reason for that is as simple as marketing…’When we replaced the high deductible health plan name and called it something more generic, the share of people choosing high deductible health plans doubled. So just the name itself can have a really significant impact on how people think about what plan they should choose.’
Sixty-three percent of the people surveyed by Voya said they would choose the plan with the lowest deductible. As part of the study Voya designed an experiment asking participants to choose between a PPO and an HDHP. The experiment was set up in a way that the HDHP was always the optimal financial choice, despite this, 65% of those surveyed still chose the PPO plan.”