“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
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 […]
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, […]
July 4, 2020 marks the 244th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. With much of the country still shut down, large gatherings banned and “non-essential” businesses closed with required masking indoors and outdoors in some states, it is hard to imagine firework displays, neighborhood barbeques and other annual Independence Day traditions being […]
Of the 45 volunteers in biotechnology company Moderna, Inc.’s Phase 1 human clinical trial on its experimental mRNA-1273 vaccine for COVID-19, only the names of the first two participants have been widely publicized—Jennifer Haller of Seattle, Washington and Neal Browning of Bothell, Washington. The clinical trial began on Mar. 16, 2020 at Kaiser Permanente Washington […]
On May 18, 2020, Moderna, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts announced that it had obtained “positive interim clinical data” from a Phase I human clinical trial of its experimental mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccine that began on Mar. 16. The biotechnology company said that eight of the 45 healthy adult volunteer trial subjects developed antibodies that may provide […]
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 […]
Story Highlights The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) was created by Congress in 1986 as part of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Although health care providers are required by federal law to report specific vaccine reactions to VAERS, less than one percent of adverse events following vaccination are reported. Doctors, medical workers, adult patients […]