By Harris Meyer | KHN The Food and Drug Administration’s decision next week whether to approve the first treatment for Alzheimer’s disease highlights a deep division over the drug’s benefits as well as criticism about the integrity of the FDA approval process. The agency said it will decide by June 7 the fate of Biogen’s drug aducanumab, despite a near-unanimous rejection of the product by an FDA advisory committee of outside experts in November. Doubts were raised when, in 2019, Biogen halted two large clinical trials of the drug after determining it wouldn’t reach its targets for efficacy. But the drugmaker […]
Kaiser Health News
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By Victoria Knight | KHN In their last year of medical school, fourth-year students get matched to a hospital where they will serve their residency. The annual rite of passage is called the National Resident Matching Program. To the students, it’s simply the Match. Except not every medical student is successful. While tens of thousands do land a residency slot every year, thousands others don’t. Those “unmatched” students are usually left scrambling to figure out their next steps, since newly graduated doctors who don’t complete a residency program cannot receive their license to practice medicine. At first glance, two new advocacy […]
By Michael McAuliff | KHN The lungs Bill Thompson was born with told a gruesome, harrowing and unmistakable tale to Dr. Anthony Szema when he analyzed them and found the black spots, scarring, partially combusted jet fuel and metal inside. The retired Army staff sergeant had suffered catastrophic lung damage from breathing incinerated waste burned in massive open-air pits and probably other irritants during his tour of duty in Iraq. “There’s black spots that are burns, particles all over; there’s metal. It was all scarred,” said Szema, a pulmonologist and professor who studies toxic exposures and examined Thompson’s preserved lung tissue. […]
By Chaseedaw Giles, KHN Posting about their day is a regular practice for Generations Y and Z, especially when they have something novel or exclusive to share. So, in the thick of a global pandemic, and with the shaky rollout of COVID vaccines making them somewhat of a holy grail, it’s no surprise selfies featuring the coveted shot are infecting social media timelines. It might engender envy, even outrage, especially if the person posting seems to have cut the line. But what if the intention was to encourage others to also get the shot? Does that make it OK? Since the […]
By Angela Hart, California Healthline Joyce Hanson was thrilled when she heard Gov. Gavin Newsom announce Jan. 13 that Californians age 65 and older would be eligible to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Infections and hospitalizations had been surging in California, and Hanson knew a simple trip to the grocery store put her at greater risk of getting sick and dying. Plus, she hadn’t seen her daughter in more than a year, so she immediately began making plans to visit her in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I felt this huge weight lifted off my heart when the governor said me and […]
By Jim Robbins, KHN As the COVID pandemic heads for a showdown with vaccines it’s expected to lose, many experts in the field of emerging infectious diseases are already focused on preventing the next one. They fear another virus will leap from wildlife into humans, one that is far more lethal but spreads as easily as SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19. A virus like that could change the trajectory of life on the planet, experts say. “What keeps me up at night is that another coronavirus like MERS, which has a much, much higher mortality rate, becomes as […]
By Arthur Allen, KHN As I prepared to get my shot in mid-December as part of a COVID-19 vaccine trial run by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, I considered the escape routes. Bailing out of the trial was a very real consideration since two other vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, had been deemed safe and effective for emergency approval. Leaving the trial would be a perfectly sane decision for me or anyone who had volunteered for an ongoing COVID experiment. Why risk getting COVID if I was given a placebo, a shot with no vaccine in it? The way tests are designed, I […]
By Rachana Pradhan, Kaiser Health News President-elect Joe Biden made COVID-19 a linchpin of his campaign, criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership on everything from masks and packed campaign rallies to vaccines. That was the easy part. Biden now has the urgent job of filling top health-care positions in his administration to help restore public trust in science-driven institutions Trump repeatedly undermined, and oversee the rollout of several coronavirus vaccines to a skeptical public who fear they were rushed for political expediency. At the top of that list is a new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency where Biden […]
By Priscilla Blossom, Kaiser Health News Colorado voters are deciding a ballot question that seeks to limit how far into pregnancy an abortion can be legally performed. While the measure would change the law only in Colorado, it would resonate throughout the Rocky Mountain states and Midwest amid an intensifying national fight, fueled by a Supreme Court vacancy, over the future of abortion. In 1967—six years before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision protected the right to an abortion in the U.S.—Colorado became the first state to pass a law widening access to legal abortion. More than 50 years later, […]
By Lauren Weber and Katheryn Houghton | Kaiser Health News While the president and vice president forgo masks at rallies, the White House is quietly encouraging governors to implement mask mandates and, for some, enforce them with fines. In reports issued to governors on Sept. 20, the White House Coronavirus Task Force recommended statewide mask mandates in Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma. The weekly memos, some of which have been made public by the Center for Public Integrity, advocate mask usage for other states and have even encouraged doling out fines in Alaska, Idaho and, recently, Montana. Masks, a political flashpoint since […]
By Justin Franz, Kaiser Health News When Tamarack Dispensary opened in the northwestern Montana city of Kalispell in 2009, medical marijuana was legal but still operating on the fringes of the conservative community. Times have changed. Owner Erin Bolster no longer receives surprised or puzzled looks when she tells people what she does. Now, her business sponsors community events and was recently nominated as a top marijuana provider by a local newspaper. “We’ve become a normal part of the community, and it feels good that the community has finally accepted us,” Bolster said. How far that acceptance goes will be tested […]
By JoNel Aleccia, Kaiser Health News Dozens of major hospitals across the U.S. are grappling with whether to ignore a federal decision allowing broader emergency use of blood plasma from recovered COVID patients to treat the disease in favor of dedicating their resources to a gold-standard clinical trial that could help settle the science for good. As many as 45 hospitals from coast to coast have expressed interest in collaborating on a randomized, controlled clinical trial sponsored by Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said principal investigator Dr. Todd Rice. Officials at some hospitals said they are considering committing only to the clinical […]
By Rachana Pradhan, Kaiser Health News The Trump administration’s latest effort to use COVID-19 rapid tests—touted by one senior official as a “turning point” in arresting the coronavirus’s spread within nursing homes—is running into roadblocks likely to limit how widely they’ll be used. Federal officials are distributing point-of-care antigen tests—which are cheaper and faster than tests that must be run by a lab—to 14,000 nursing homes to increase routine screening of residents and staff. The initial distribution targets nursing homes in hot spots and those with at least three COVID-19 cases, senior Trump administration officials said in July, hailing it as […]
By Rachana Pradhan and Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News As the coronavirus crisis deepened in April, Georgia officials circulated documents showing that to get through the next month, the state would need millions more masks, gowns and other supplies than it had on hand. The projections, obtained by KHN and other organizations in response to public records requests, provide one of the clearest pictures of the severe PPE deficits states confronted while thousands fell ill from rising COVID-19 cases, putting health workers at risk. Georgia on April 19 had 932,620 N95 respirator masks—one of the best protections for health workers against […]
By Arthur Allen, Kaiser Health News Thousands of letters stuffed with money flooded Jonas Salk’s mailbox the week after his polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in 1955. Everybody wanted his vaccine. Desperate parents clogged doctors’ phone lines in search of the precious elixir; drug companies and doctors diverted doses to the rich and famous. Some of the first batches of the vaccine were disastrously botched, causing 200 cases of permanent paralysis. That barely dented public desire for the preventive. Marlon Brando even asked to play Salk in a movie. Eight years later, with polio a fading threat, the first […]
By Matt Volz and Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News HELENA, Montana—States frustrated by private laboratories’ increasingly long turnarounds for COVID-19 test results are scrambling to find ways to salvage their testing programs. Montana said Wednesday that it is dropping Quest Diagnostics, one of the nation’s largest diagnostic testing companies. The Secaucus, New Jersey-based company had done all the state’s surveillance COVID-19 testing—drive-thru testing that moves from community to community to help track COVID’s spread. But it told state officials last week that it was at capacity and would be unable to accommodate more tests for two or three weeks. “We don’t […]
By Markian Hawryluk, Kaiser Health News DENVER—Dr. Michelle Barron, medical director of infection prevention and control at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, received an unusual call last month from the microbiology lab: confirmation of the third case this year of trench fever, a rare condition transmitted by body lice that plagued soldiers during World War I. Barron’s epidemiological training kicked in. “Two is always an outbreak, and then when we found a third—OK, we clearly have something going on,” Barron recalled thinking. Barron, who said she’d never before seen a case in her 20 years here, contacted state public health officials, […]
By Melissa Bailey and Christina Jewett, Kaiser Health News James “Mike” Anderson was a hospital employee in suburban Philadelphia with a low-profile though critical job: changing air filters in COVID patients’ rooms. By late March, new COVID cases in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, had ramped up to as many as 90 per day. At the hospital, Anderson handled air filters and other surfaces that might have been contaminated with the deadly virus, also known to hang in the air. In early April, Anderson, 51, came down with what he thought was a cold, according to his family’s lawyer, David Stern. On April […]
By Dan Morain, KHN The old men live in cramped spaces and breathe the same ventilated air. Many are frail, laboring with heart disease, liver and prostate cancer, tuberculosis, dementia. And now, with the coronavirus advancing through their ranks, they are falling one after the next. This is not a nursing home, not in any traditional sense. It is California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco. Its 670 residents are serial killers, child murderers, men who killed for money and drugs, or shot their victims as part of their wasted gangster lives. Some have been there […]
By Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News WOODBRIDGE, Va.—As Inova Health System sought donations in March to buy personal protective equipment for its staff to treat COVID-19, Zach Mote, a police officer turned brewer, came to their aid. Even though his Water’s End Brewery taproom in this Washington, D.C., suburb had been forced to close, he enlisted the help of nearby Beltway Brewing to make a new ale, PPE beer. They’ve donated the more than $18,000 from its sales to the hospital system to help buy masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment. Inova, which serves some of Washington’s wealthiest suburbs, told […]
By Rachana Pradhan, Kaiser Health News Fearful that New Orleans would run out of ventilators by early April as the number of COVID-19 patients rose by the hundreds or even thousands per day, Louisiana officials set out to get every device they could find. At the time, that meant securing an additional 14,000. Within days of President Donald Trump’s urging states to get their own supplies because it would “be faster if they can get them directly,” Louisiana sought only a fraction of them from the federal government and turned to private companies for the rest, having little confidence one supplier […]
Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News In cities across the country, police departments have attempted to quell unrest spurred by the death of George Floyd by firing rubber bullets into crowds, even though five decades of evidence shows such weapons can disable, disfigure and even kill. In addition to rubber bullets—which often have a metal core—police have used tear gas, flash-bang grenades, pepper spray gas and projectiles to control crowds of demonstrators demanding justice for 46-year-old George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, while other officers restrained his body. Some peaceful demonstrations have turned violent, with people […]
By Susan Jaffe, Kaiser Health News Coronavirus patients and their families who believe a doctor, nurse, hospital or other provider made serious mistakes during their care may face a new hurdle if they try to file medical malpractice lawsuits. Under pressure from health provider organizations, governors in Connecticut, Maryland, Illinois and about a dozen other states have ordered that most providers be shielded from civil—and, in some cases, criminal—lawsuits over medical treatment during the COVID-19 health emergency. In New York and New Jersey, immunity is now part of state law. In California, six hospital, physician and long-term care provider groups are […]
By Rachana Pradhan and Fred Schulte | Kaiser Health News The Trump administration has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic-related bailouts to health care providers with checkered histories, including a Florida-based cancer center that agreed to pay a $100 million criminal penalty as part of a federal antitrust investigation. At least half of the top 10 recipients, part of a group that received $20 billion in emergency funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, have paid millions in recent years either in criminal penalties or to settle allegations related to improper billing and other practices, a Kaiser […]
By Kathleen McLaughlin, Kaiser Health News Even as Montana begins a gradual easing of stay-at-home restrictions intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the political schism it highlighted is creating reverberations in one community in the northwestern corner of the state. A Flathead County health board member who led a movement to disparage the protective safety orders and downplay the virus is now the subject of two competing petitions—one to expel her from office and another to keep her. When the commissioners in this county of about 104,000 people appointed Dr. Annie Bukacek to the health board in January, they […]