The covid pandemic drove major changes to Montana health policies, including the permanent expansion of telehealth regulations, a pullback on local public health officials’ authority and the easing of vaccination requirements for workers and students.
All agree that covid vaccines are urgently needed to stop the pandemic, but simply waiving patents fails to provide technological know-how and address supply chain challenges.
The Biden administration is bucking the drug industry and backing a waiver of covid-19 vaccine patent protections to help the rest of the world vaccinate its populations. Here at home, the Food and Drug Administration wants to ban menthol flavorings for cigarettes, setting off a fight with the tobacco industry. Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Tami Luhby of CNN and Kimberly Leonard of Business Insider join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has outsourced his way through the covid-19 pandemic, tasking his private-sector allies in Silicon Valley and the health care industry with fundamental public health duties such as testing, tracing and vaccination. Among the losers: the state’s weakened public health system.
Some immigrant groups are closing the ethnic gap on COVID-19 shots. For many Kurdish Americans, their fears about vaccination are entangled with their experiences in refugee camps after fleeing Iraq.
The costs of personal protective equipment and disinfecting offices while seeing fewer patients have some doctors and dentists demanding that insurance companies step up.
With older adults vaccinated, doctors say a growing share of their covid patients are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, as more contagious variants circulate among people who remain unvaccinated.
A KHN investigation found that more than 2,000 schools have spent millions of dollars for systems, lured by air purifier companies’ claims that experts say mislead or obscure the potential for harm from toxic ozone.
With some 100 million Americans fully vaccinated, the U.S. is relying on a patchwork network of vaccine monitoring systems that lack the breadth and depth of large, population-based programs, experts said.
California officials are optimistic they can vaccinate millions more before hitting a hard wall of vaccine resistance.
