Top of the morning to you, and a fine one it is. Clear blue skies and pleasant breezes are enveloping the Pharmalot campus, where the official mascots are foraging for noshes and keeping strangers at bay. As for us, we are engaged in the usual rituals, starting with firing up the coffee kettle — our choice today is Vermont maple walnut — and hunting for items of interest. On that note, please enjoy the tidbits compiled below. We hope you have a smashing day and conquer the world. And as always, please do keep in touch. …
As the Trump administration moves ahead on what could be its most wide-reaching vaccine changes yet, the makers of the shots are weighing their options — and privately warning that officials could severely limit access to key vaccines and upend the childhood vaccine schedule for years to come, STAT reports. Health authorities, under the direction of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are considering how they might discourage or even ban vaccines that rely on a common ingredient to boost their effectiveness, or break up ones that protect against multiple diseases in a single shot. If policymakers follow through on these ideas, vaccine makers could have to develop new alternatives to several key vaccines, a process that can take a decade or more and cost upwards of $1 billion, employees of vaccine makers said. The changes would impact a substantial share of the shots on the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule.
Over 74,000 people enrolled in experiments have been affected by the U.S. National Institutes of Health funding cuts, the Associated Press writes, citing a new report. Between the end of February and mid-August, funding ceased for 383 studies that were testing treatments for conditions including cancer, heart disease, and brain disease. The cuts disproportionately impacted efforts to tackle infectious diseases like the flu, pneumonia, and Covid-19, and likely disrupted patient lives in different ways. Some may have signed up for trials that never began or got delayed as institutions scrambled for alternate funding. Others could have lost access to medication or been left with an unmonitored device implant. Some could have participated in trials only for the results to never get published. More broadly, the lost research harms patients who could have benefited from a possible new treatment, researchers wrote in the report published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
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