Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.
Pharmacy Chains Waste Vaccine
CVS and Walgreens alone have accounted for more than half of the thousands of wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to an analysis of public data conducted by Kaiser Health News (KHN).
KHN revealed that, of 182,874 total wasted doses documented by the CDC as of late March, about half were unused by CVS and 21% by Walgreens.
The wasted doses still account for only a small proportion of the doses the pharmacy chains have administered, according to spokespeople, and an even smaller proportion of total doses administered nationwide.
But in sum, the pharmacies wasted far more vaccine than states, U.S. territories, and federal agencies combined.
While KHN‘s data analysis did not reveal the chief waste causes, the pharmacies attributed the losses to poor planning early in the vaccine rollout and patients missing appointments; initial ultra-cold storage requirements for the Pfizer vaccine may have played a role, as Pfizer’s shot accounted for 60% of wasted doses.
Any waste of taxpayer-funded vaccines is “basically throwing money down the chute,” Bruce Y. Lee, MD, a professor of health policy and management at City University of New York, told KHN.
The CDC data do not present a complete picture of wasted doses, KHN reported, with 15 states and the District of Columbia not reporting statistics to the CDC (however, 11 of those 16 jurisdictions shared data with KHN for its analysis).
“One thing is clear: Months into the nation’s vaccination drive, the CDC has a limited view of how much vaccine is going to waste, where it’s wasted, and who is wasting it, potentially complicating efforts to direct doses to where they are needed most,” the article stated.
Dementia Gene Therapy
Six dementia patients may have gone to Mexico to test an unproven gene therapy, STAT reported, lured by promises of participating in a trial of a therapy proponents think could treat their disease.
Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of Seattle biotech company BioViva, told STAT that her firm helped the patients visit Mexico to try telomerase gene therapy last year. If her assertion is true, that would be the first known effort to try gene therapy to treat age-related dementia. The patients were said to have been given one injection and treated for 1 hour.
“Everything I’m seeing indicates the involved parties are not conducting a credible clinical trial with appropriate safeguards,” said Leigh Turner, PhD, a University of Minnesota bioethicist who studies medical tourism and reviewed documents concerning the trip.
Parrish is among a group of others, including geneticist George Church, who considers aging to be a disease and gene therapy to be a possible treatment. She is eager to test her theory, but argues current clinical trial pathways are costly and time consuming.
“The effort raises the specter of an overseas medical tourism industry targeting patients desperate to lengthen their lives and offering unproven treatments that would permanently alter the genetic code inside recipients’ cells,” the article stated.
BioViva works with Integrated Health Systems (IHS), which touts itself as a broker connecting patients to doctors outside the U.S. offering unapproved treatments. IHS lists one doctor on its website, radiologist Jason R. Williams, MD. He is also BioViva’s chief medical officer and runs Williams Cancer Institute, a cancer immunotherapy practice in Mexico City.
Maryland Pushed Problematic COVID Tests
A glut of suspected false-positive COVID tests related to kits and a lab used by the state of Maryland led to universities shutting down in-person classes and disrupted operations at nursing homes in the state, the Washington Post reported — but state officials continued to push for their use.
The dubious test results stemmed from a University of Maryland lab in Baltimore that processed tests made by the South Korean firm LabGenomics, which the state ordered after the initial batch of 500,000 tests it had secured was flawed and could not be used. The lab stopped using the LabGenomics tests once health officials raised concerns about their reliability.
But Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) administration then pushed for the test kits to be used at the state’s public health lab, despite the lab director’s concerns.
University of Maryland officials also denied the test results were false and claimed they stopped using the tests in favor of others that would also check for influenza.
Hogan, rumored to be considering a run for President in 2024, wrote a memoir last year citing the initial test purchase — but he did not reveal that those tests were never used.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
