About Covid-19
F.D.A. Authorizes Updated Covid Booster Shots, Targeting Omicron Subvariants “The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the first redesign of coronavirus vaccines since they were rolled out in late 2020, setting up millions of Americans to receive new booster doses targeting Omicron subvariants as soon as next week.
The agency cleared two options aimed at the BA.5 variant of Omicron that is now dominant: one made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for use in people as young as 12, and the other by Moderna, for those 18 and older. The doses can be given at least two months since people last received a booster dose or completed their initial series of vaccinations.”
FDA takes N95 respirators off medical device shortage list “The Food and Drug Administration has taken N95 respirators off of the medical device shortage list as increased manufacturing has helped build a sufficient supply of the devices.”
About health insurance/insurers
CMS: ACOs saved Medicare $1.6B overall in 2021 as big changes on the horizon “Accountable care organizations saved Medicare $1.66 billion last year as value-based care providers brace for potential major changes to the program like new health equity measures…
CMS reported that 99% of all ACOs in the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) met quality standards, and approximately 58% earned shared savings for abiding by spending targets. An ACO agrees to take on a certain degree of financial risk and to meet spending and quality benchmarks.”
About pharma
Novartis' Entresto infringes on university patents, lawsuit claims “Novartis was served with a federal lawsuit earlier this week in the Northern District of California, alleging that its heart failure treatment Entresto infringes a patent jointly held by the University of Michigan and the University of South Florida related to ‘engineering crystals for the design of new drug compounds.’
According to the 10-page complaint, the universities allege that the US patent and trademark office issued a patent on April 28, 2020 to three inventors: Michael Zaworotko, Brian Moulton and Nair Rodríguez-Hornedo. Zaworotko and Moulton assigned their rights as inventors to the University of South Florida Board of Trustees, as did Rodríguez-Hornedo to the Regents of the University of Michigan.”
About the public’s health
Marijuana use is outpacing cigarette use for the first time on record “More people in the U.S. are now smoking marijuana than cigarettes, according to a Gallup poll.
Cigarette use has been trending downward during the past decades, with only 11% of Americans saying they smoke them in a poll conducted July 5 to 26, compared to 45% in the mid-1950s.
Sixteen percent of Americans say they smoke marijuana, with 48% saying they have tried it at some point in their lives. In 1969, only 4% of Americans said they smoked marijuana.”
Nearly 30% of US Cancer Deaths Linked to Smoking “Nearly 123,000 cancer deaths – or almost 30% of all cancer deaths – in the United States in 2019 were linked to cigarette smoking, a new analysis suggests.
That corresponds to more than 2 million person-years of lost life and nearly $21 billion in annual lost earnings.”
Association of an Automated Blood Pressure Measurement Quality Improvement Program With Terminal Digit Preference and Recorded Mean Blood Pressure in 11 Clinics “In this quality improvement study of 1 541 227 BP measurements from 225 504 patients, when aneroid sphygmomanometers were replaced with automated monitors, terminal digit preference decreased, mean systolic BP immediately increased, and during the subsequent 3 years, the proportion of patients with the diagnosis of hypertension increased from 19.1% to 23.4%…
Conclusions and Relevance In this quality improvement study, automated BP measurement was associated with decreased terminal digit preference and significantly higher mean BP levels. The method of BP measurement was also associated with the rate at which hypertension was diagnosed. These findings may have implications for pay-for-performance programs, which may create an incentive to record BP levels that meet a particular goal and a disincentive to adopt automated measurement of BP.”