Current Events

The death toll inside New York’s nursing homes is perhaps one of the most tragic facets of the coronavirus pandemic: More than 6,400 residents have died in the state’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities, representing more than one-tenth of the reported deaths in such facilities across the country. Read More
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A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a challenge by hospital groups to a federal rule requiring them to disclose prices they quietly negotiate with insurers, in a victory for White House efforts to make healthcare pricing more transparent to patients. Read more. 
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The drugmaker Regeneron funneled tens of millions of dollars to a charity that paid the out-of-pocket costs for patients who took the company’s expensive eye drug, then lied to internal auditors about it, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in Boston, claims that Regeneron violated federal anti-kickback laws by using the patient-assistance fund to encourage doctors to prescribe their drug, Eylea, over a less-expensive competitor.

 

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Bayer AG, after more than a year of talks, agreed to pay as much as $10.9 billion to settle close to 100,000 U.S. lawsuits claiming that its widely-used weedkiller Roundup caused cancer, resolving litigation that has pummeled the company’s share price.

 

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A Missouri appeals court on Tuesday ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay $2.1 billion in damages to women who blamed their ovarian cancers on the company’s talcum products, including its iconic baby powder.

The decision slashed by more than half a record award of $4.69 billion in compensatory and punitive damages to the women, which was made in July 2018.

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The FDA has designated Endologix’ recall of an abdominal stent graft system as a class 1 recall, the most serious kind. The recall affects 5,403 devices (Ovation iX Abdominal Stent Graft Systems) manufactured and distributed in the U.S. since 2015, according to a safety alert from the agency. Read more . . .

One afternoon in early April, Brenda Anagnos crouched in the bushes outside a nursing home in Windsor, Conn., and pressed her face to the window.

“Mommy,” she yelled. “I’m here.”

From outside the locked-down facility, Anagnos said she watched her mother, wearing a red tank top, shiver beneath a hospital sheet.

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For the second time in a week, a maker of Type 2 diabetes drug Metformin announced a recall because the drug might have too much NDMA, a substance that can cause cancer in certain amounts. The FDA said it found too much NDMA (N-Nitrosodimethylamine) in seven lots of Amneal’s Pharmaceuticals Metformin Hydrochloride Extended Release 500 mg, 750 mg tablets. According to the Amneal-written, FDA-posted recall notice, the FDA recommended recalling those seven lots and Amneal decided to yank all unexpired lots on the market.
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(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Thursday it has recommended five pharmaceutical firms to voluntarily recall their diabetes drug metformin after the agency found high levels of a possible cancer-causing impurity in some versions of the medication.

The agency said the drugs contained the probable carcinogen N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) beyond acceptable limits in their extended-release formulations alone.

NDMA contamination was responsible for the recall of heartburn drug Zantac sold by Sanofi SA and some generic versions of the treatment last year.

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As an unprecedented catastrophe unfolds in which more than 28,000 people have died of Covid-19 in care facilities, the nursing home industry is responding with an unprecedented action of its own: Using its multi-million dollar lobbying machine to secure protections from liability in lawsuits.

At least 20 states have swiftly taken action within the last two and a half months to limit the legal exposure of the politically powerful nursing home industry, which risks huge losses if families of coronavirus victims successfully sue facilities hit by the pandemic. Now, the industry is turning its energies to obtaining nationwide protections from Congress in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. nursing homes have been plagued with infection control deficiencies even before the coronavirus pandemic turned them into hotspots for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, a government report said on Wednesday.

Eighty-two percent of all nursing homes had an infection prevention and control deficiency cited in one or more years from 2013-2017, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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