Also on today’s menu:
State To Receive $57 million In Opioid Settlement
Testing Required Of Travelers From China
Health Of Former Pope Worsening
I finally got my bivalent booster this week. The delay in getting the latest coronavirus booster was not just because I had to look up the word “bivalent” — it means “a pair of homologous chromosomes”, which required looking up “homologous”, which means “pairing at meiosis and having the same structural features and pattern of genes”, which meant I had to refresh my memory on what “meiosis” means, which is “a type of cell division that results in four daughter cells each with half the number of chromosomes of the parent cell, as in the production of gametes and plant spores.” Whew!
No, the real reason I delayed getting the latest jab was that no local pharmacy or medical facility had the Moderna vaccine. Somehow, Pfizer is dominating the market in New Hampshire. I wanted the Moderna booster because all of my shots so far have been Modernas, and I’ve had no serious reactions to them, while some people with the Pfizer vaccine reported days of agony.
But, more importantly, I cannot in good conscience support Pfizer. The drug company earned $81.3 billion from its Covid-19 vaccine in 2021, which the group Global Justice Now pointed out was more than the gross domestic profit of most countries. Now the company plans to quadruple the current price of its vaccine to $130 per dose next year. Making a profit is one thing; profiteering is another.
On December 12, Senator Elizabeth Warren and senator-elect Peter Welch sent a letter to Pfizer’s chief executive officer, Albert Bourla, expressing their concerns about what amounts to a 10,000 percent markup over the cost of producing the vaccine.
“This price increase represents pure and deadly greed on the part of the company, and could result in the COVID-induced fatalities of many uninsured Americans that may be unable to afford the vaccine,” they wrote. “Even worse, Pfizer’s price hike could pave the way for other vaccine manufacturers like Moderna and Novavax to raise the prices of their vaccines, harming Americans seeking protection from COVID-19 and potentially worsening an ongoing public health crisis. We seek information about Pfizer’s pricing plans and an explanation for your company’s unseemly profiteering.
“Pfizer’s planned price hikes come after the company raked in billions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the company’s COVID-19 vaccine became its second-highest revenue-generating drug. The same year, Pfizer estimated it would collect profits of around $4 billion from the vaccine, with a reported profit margin ‘in the high 20% range.’
“Pfizer deserves credit for the development and production of this vaccine on a previously unimaginable timeline, and for the development of your new COVID-19 therapy, Paxlovid, which appears to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 by almost 90 percent. But your company also benefitted from extensive support from the federal government. The vaccine relies on basic technology developed from federally funded research. Pfizer also benefitted from a ‘significant incentive’ from the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed, which supported Pfizer in July 2020 with a $1.95 billion advance-purchase agreement for 100 million doses of the vaccine. And Pfizer has earned extraordinary profits from the vaccine. Now, Pfizer’s proposed price hikes are estimated to bring in an additional $2.5 - $3 billion in annual revenue, marking yet another massive corporate payday from the ongoing pandemic.”
With that in mind, I would go without my COVID-19 booster rather than support such an unethical company. Besides, I remember that Dolly Parton donated $1 million to coronavirus research, some of which was used in the Moderna vaccine’s development. (Her donation actually went to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, where her friend, Dr. Naji Abumrad worked, but the Moderna vaccine was the result.)
I finally located a pharmacy in Epping that offered the Moderna shot. It was farther than I wanted to travel, but it was the right thing to do.
State To Receive $57 million In Opioid Settlement
New Hampshire stands to receive nearly $57 million through a settlement with CVS and Walgreens, resolving allegations that the companies contributed to the opioid crisis by failing to properly oversee the dispensing of the drugs. CVS has agreed to pay $5 billion over 10 years and Walgreens has agreed to pay $5.7 billion over 15 years.
Attorney-General John Formella said, “CVS and Walgreens flooded our communities with pills. No settlement will restore the lives impacted by the opioid addiction epidemic, but this agreement will help get treatment and recovery resources to impacted Granite Staters. People trust their local pharmacies and these pharmacy chains failed to provide the people of New Hampshire with the pharmacy care and protection they had a right to expect. This agreement mandates significant changes to these pharmacy chains’ business practices, including court-ordered monitoring to ensure checks that should have been in place will now be aggressively enforced.”
The pharmacies must monitor, report, and share data about suspicious opioid prescriptions, similar to what Walmart agreed to earlier this month. Payments are expected to begin during the second half of 2023.
Testing Required Of Travelers From China
Responding to a surge in COVID-19 cases in China, the United States will require that travelers arriving from that county must submit to testing. The new requirements will be effective on January 5 and apply to travelers regardless of their nationality and vaccination status.
Cases of the coronavirus have spread across China after the nation lifted its strict “zero-COVID” antivirus controls amidst public protests aimed at ending the restrictions that have limited freedom and crushed economic growth.
In a statement explaining the testing, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also cited the lack of adequate information from China, including both case numbers and the genomic sequencing of the viral strains circulating in the country.
Health Of Former Pope Worsening
With the health of the aging Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI worsening on December 28, Pope Francis appealed to the faithful to pray for his “very ill” predecessor “until the end.”
Benedict, who was the first pontiff to resign in 600 years, has become increasingly frail in recent years as he dedicated his post-papacy life to prayer and meditation.
When Benedict turned 95 in April, his longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, said the retired pontiff was in good spirits, adding that “naturally he is physically relatively weak and fragile, but rather lucid.”
Café Chatter
On Career Put To Bed: Josh Brooks is my cousin Sandy’s son. It is a great accomplishment. I tell him he’s nuts ... in a good way.
— Candace Skurnik
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Thank you for the interesting vaccine research and background. Good grief!!!