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 […]
Kaiser Health News
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]