- Should vending machines be available to dispense medication for opioid overdoses?
- Why are people having less sex?
- Study: Native Americans, once among the tallest people in the world, lost their height advantage after the demise of the bison.
- How university research → startup companies → commercial innovation led to the Moderna Covid vaccine.
- How colleges and students scam the student loan program and why Biden’s new executive order will make things much worse.
- Euthanasia is the sixth leading cause of death in Canada.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Friday Links
- 100% of large health insurers cover telemedicine for mental health and other behavioral health problems. (gated)
- However, more therapists are refusing to accept private insurance. (WSJ)
- Israeli study: Paxlovid (for Covid) lowered hospitalization rates in 65-year-olds and older by about 75%, but people ages 40-64 who took the drug shortly after infection saw little to no benefit.
- Kaiser: Most Medicare beneficiaries will soon get their coverage through Medicare Advantage.
- A liberal critiques Biden: He needs advisers who think like economists. A good read if you are an Yglesias subscriber.
Thursday Links
- The chronically ill have trouble paying their bills.
- Survey: 43 percent in the 19-30 age group has used cannabis 20 or more times over the previous year.
- How to earn $139,000 a year as a nurse.
- What a black hole sounds like.
- 40% of US births are out of wedlock. But internationally we are in the middle of the pack. In Iceland it is 71%.
Virology Labs Are dangerous
The FDA used to have a laboratory located at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2014, they moved it to consolidate with other FDA facilities nearby. Because these are reasonably careful and conscientious people, they conducted a formal clean-up before they moved, and during that process they found 327 vials of unclaimed samples of viruses “inside cardboard boxes stored in the back left corner of an FDA laboratory’s cold storage room.” Six of them contained smallpox, one contained Russian spring-summer viral encephalitis (the subject of previous lab accidents), and nine had labels that couldn’t be read.