Racial bias in medicine takes many forms. It occurs when an older black guy sees his doctor, who doesn’t bother to prescribe drugs for hypertension because he assumes his patient will be noncompliant. Maybe it’s when a doctor doesn’t try to counsel her patient with high cholesterol because she assumes Hispanics suffer from with high cholesterol due to deeply entrench lifestyle behaviors. There are even debates that some treatment algorithms used in hospitals are biased due to biased programming.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Biden’s Operation Slow Speed
Operation Warp Speed produced a new vaccine for a novel virus in record time but when Operation Warp Speed was disbanded by the Biden administration vaccine research and development slowed from warp speed to impulse power. It’s ridiculous that it is taking longer to develop and deploy tweaks to the mRNA vaccines to deal with new variants than it took to develop the original vaccines from scratch. By the time we get an Omicron-specific vaccine that variant will have disappeared. This is no way to run a civilization.
Friday Links
- Scott Sumner on the FDA’s reversal – allowing pharmacists to prescribe the Pfizer Covid vaccine: Is 350 people dying every day the reason the government finally saw the light?
- A pocket-sized, smartphone-directed ultrasound could become as “ubiquitous as the stethoscope.”
- Are we in danger of losing control of Monkeypox?
- During the US Open, airplanes were diverted from the match’s airspace and flew over other neighborhoods. The result: more insomnia, more cardiovascular disease, and more substance abuse and mental health emergencies. But great tennis!
- Covid hasn’t gone away: There were many more new COVID infections in the past week in the US than in the corresponding week 1 year ago and 2 years ago.
- Telemedicine surged during the pandemic:
Weekly telemedicine visits for one insurer increased from a mean of 773 in 2020 prior to stay-at-home orders to 45,632 in subsequent weeks. Patients who were older, had existing chronic conditions, were male, or resided in predominantly non-Hispanic Black or African American Census tracts showed increased telemedicine utilization in later weeks of the pandemic.
Big Pharma Blames Hospitals and PBMs for High Drug Prices
Adam Fein at Drug Channels pointed me to a June 2022 report from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) on the price of drugs. The report is full of tidbits on drug spending. For example, the report states that prescription drug spending represents only 14% of health care expenditures. It is true that drugs are the best value in health care (especially over-the-counter drugs but that was not in the report). While it is true that drugs tend to be a better value than, say hospitals, not all drugs are of equal value. (That too was not in the report.)