“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
On Sept. 23, 2020, U.S. pharmaceutical and medical devices company Johnson & Johnson, Inc. announced the start of the Phase 3 human clinical trial for its experimental Ad26.COV2.S vaccine for COVID-19. The New Jersey-based company, which is partnering with its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica NV of Belgium on development of the vaccine, is planning to enroll […]
Under an amendment to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP), pharmacists and pharmacy interns in the United States are now permitted to administer vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to children over three years of age.1 Currently, there are 28 states that allow pharmacists to administer vaccinations to […]
Story Highlights Most countries that have supply contracts with AstraZeneca have granted the drug company liability protection for their COVID-19 vaccine. In the U.S., vaccine manufacturers and administrators are shielded from liability under the PREP Act of 2005 for a vaccine or drug that is developed in response to a declared public health emergency, including […]
When Moderna, Inc. announced on May 18, 2020 the results of a Phase 1 human clinical trial for its experimental mRNA-1273 vaccine for COVID-19, the biotechnology company said the vaccine had produced no “serious adverse events” (SAEs) among the 45 people who participated in the trial and that it considered the vaccine to be “generally […]
Opinion | In May 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate was 13.3%,1 which means 21 million Americans were unemployed. Not surprisingly, financial stress is a major concern, with 88% of Americans surveyed by the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating stress for their personal financial situation.2 Fifty-four percent were particularly […]
In clinical trials of the experimental messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b1), which is being developed by Pfizer, Inc. of New York and BioNTech SE of Mainz, Germany, adverse reactions have occurred in more than 50 percent of the adult participants. The Phase 1/2 human trials of BNT162b1 vaccine, which were conducted May-June 2020, […]
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told Americans on Apr. 1, 2020 that modeling reports suggested COVID-19 infections could eventually “kill 100,000 to 240,000 Americans,”1 2 3 which was considerably less than the worst case 1.7 million mortality figure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) […]
After officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) declared on Mar. 11, 2020 that outbreaks of a mutated coronavirus (COVID-19)1 2 had become a global pandemic and urged countries to take strong action to stop its spread,3 4 the governments of countries representing one-third of the world’s population5 closed borders, restricted or halted travel between […]
Julie Gerberding, MD, who served as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2002 to 2009,1 2 and joined Merck & Co. as president of Merck Vaccines division in January 2010,3 4 recently sold 102,073 shares of her Merck stock for approximately $$9.119 million. This represented just under half of […]
The New York Times on Feb. 6, 2020 was the first mainstream media outlet to report that Chinese government authorities responding to the country’s coronavirus epidemic had ordered round-the-clock house to house police searches to take the temperatures of all residents in Wuhan and detain anyone found to be sick or suspected of being sick […]