Feds Ask for Covid-19 “Misinformation” — Indiana Attorney General Sends Them CDC Remarks

https://thenewamerican.com/feds-ask-for-covid-19-misinformation-indiana-attorney-general-sends-them-cdc-remarks/

When the U.S. Surgeon General’s office asked states to supply it with examples of Covid-19 misinformation, it probably did not expect what it got from Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita: a list of false statements from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials.

Rokita’s letter, dated May 2 but released to the public Monday, was compiled with the help of his co-signatories, Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya and former Harvard University medical professor Martin Kuldorff.

In their letter, the three “agree” with the Surgeon General “that misinformation has been a major problem during the pandemic,” but they contend that much of the misinformation has come “from the CDC and other health organizations.” To prove it, they cite several categories of such disinformation.

First on the list is the vast overcounting of Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations. “CDC has not distinguished deaths where COVID-19 was the primary cause of death, where COVID-19 was a contributing cause of death, or where the death was entirely unrelated to COVID-19, but they incidentally tested positive,” the authors write. Various studies, which they cite, have shown that Covid-19 prevalence has been overcounted in both the United States and other developed countries.

Officials downplayed or denied that natural immunity exists while pushing the vaccines partly on the basis that they would prevent transmission of the virus. These assertions were baseless given that the existence of natural immunity was established early in the pandemic and that the vaccine trials “were not designed to determine whether they could also limit transmission or prevent death,” the letter reads.

School closures harmed children, potentially for the long term, without providing any real benefits, assert Rokita and company. The decision to shutter schools, they note, “was based on false claims that it would protect children, teachers, and the community at large.” Yet Sweden’s example of keeping schools — and most of the rest of society — open with no negative consequences put the lie to such notions by mid-2020, even as U.S. school closures dragged on.

Officials’ suggestions that “everyone is equally at risk … from COVID-19 infection” when, in reality, “there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of hospitalization and death for the old relative to the young,” led the public to wildly overestimate the dangers of the virus and to demand lockdowns and other harmful policies, says the letter.

The authors also criticize the notion that “there was no reasonable policy alternative to lockdowns,” pointing to their recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration and again to Sweden, which has “had near-zero overall excess death” during the pandemic. “Lockdowns,” they declare, “are an aberration — a sharp deviation from traditional public health management of respiratory epidemics — and a catastrophic failure of public health policy.”

“Contrary to assertions by some public health officials, mask mandates have not been effective in protecting most populations against COVID-19 risk,” write the three men. Cloth masks are useless, and even N95s have only limited effectiveness, particularly when worn by untrained individuals.

Mass testing of asymptomatic persons combined with contact tracing and quarantining, the letter argues, have “failed to substantively slow the progress of the epidemic” but have “imposed great costs.” Asymptomatic individuals rarely pass the disease on to others, the PCR tests are flawed, and tracing the contacts of everyone who tests positive overwhelms the system. “In the U.K., an official government review determined that its 37 billion pound investment in contact tracing was a waste of resources.”

Finally, the authors scold “public health leaders” for making “the suppression of COVID-19 spread to near-zero levels the endpoint of the pandemic” because “SARS-CoV-2 has none of the characteristics of a disease that can be eradicated.” The technology to eradicate it does not exist, lockdowns are unfeasible and would have to be imposed worldwide even to have a chance of being effective, the vaccines lose efficacy over time, and many animals can host the virus and transmit it to humans.

If the CDC wants to be taken seriously again, it ought to heed the words of Rokita’s missive because, as he and his co-authors observe, the government’s falsehoods regarding Covid-19 “have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.”

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CMS Proposal to Suppress Hospital Safety Data Angers Advocates

Agency says COVID disruptions, staff shortages hamper ability to fairly score poor performers

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/98843

Large employer coalitions and consumer advocates are angrily pushing back against a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed rule to suppress public reporting of key measures of preventable hospital-caused harms, such as pressure ulcers or falls resulting in hip fractures.

If the rule is finalized, CMS would not calculate scores under the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program (HACRP). Hospitals would still report on some safety measures, but certain scores — in particular those for the 10-measure Patient Safety and Adverse Events Composite (PSI 90), a key component of the HACRP — would be hidden from public data files and would not appear on the CMS Hospital Compare website.

Furthermore, CMS would not dock hospitals in the worst-performing quartile 1% of their Medicare reimbursement, as it usually does, and would end up paying these hospitals what would normally be withheld — an estimated $350 million — an amount that would be lost to the Medicare trust fund.

The agency gave several reasons — all related to COVID-19 — why hospitals need to be let off the hook, including wide variation in performance scores; unprecedented changes in clinical guidelines, treatments, and drugs; and rapid changes in what clinicians understand about a pathogen of unknown origin. In particular, they noted huge shortages of healthcare personnel and high rates of burnout, specifically among nurses, which could affect a variety of measures, such as infection rates and avoidable falls.

CMS began suppressing some measures at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and many assumed that would be the end of it.

‘Outrageous’ and ‘Ludicrous’

The CMS proposal “is outrageous,” Bill Kramer, executive director for health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, told MedPage Today.

“Patients will be unable to know whether the provider they want to go to has more patient safety problems, more risky providers, so clinicians as well as purchasers and policymakers will be unable to identify and help patients choose those hospitals with the best patient safety record,” he said. Without that information, patients are more likely to suffer from avoidable accidents, “and some of them will die as a result.”

James Gelfand, executive vice president of public affairs for the ERISA Industry Committee, a trade association representing about 100 of the nation’s largest self-insured employers who purchase health benefits for their employees and families, called the CMS proposed rule “ludicrous.”

“Essentially what they’re saying is that patients got treated badly, so they’re going to report badly, and so the hospitals are going to score badly. And, therefore, we have to keep the data secret,” he said.

“The federal government has data that would be really useful in making decisions about plan design and decisions about whether to steer people to a particular hospital or health system, but they’re not going to give it to you because it’s bad for the hospitals? I can’t express to you how alarming that is,” he noted.

Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, which uses the CMS data to score hospitals with safety grades from A to F, told MedPage Today that she worries that not only will this proposed rule be finalized, but that CMS will extend the suppressed public reporting indefinitely, because they don’t want “to make hospitals unhappy with them.”

“The American public trusts hospitals to deliver care, and not to cause them to suffer unnecessarily,” she said. “As a hospital or as a hospital worker, you have a job that’s difficult, that requires you to keep your patients safe.”

“It scares me,” she continued. “I know enough to be frightened … if hospitals are not able to manage their operations in order to protect their patients.”

However, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association told MedPage Today, “we agree with the agency that it would be unfair to base hospital performance on data that have been distorted by the pandemic.”

“To the best of our knowledge, the current methodologies for most quality report cards that use CMS quality measurement program data are based on individual measures, and not the overall scores from the HACRP and Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program,” the spokesman wrote in an email.

PSI 90

The PSI 90 score measures in-hospital serious and potentially fatal pressure ulcers, falls resulting in hip fracture, and several preventable postoperative complications, such as sepsis, respiratory failure, and hemorrhage. CMS proposed to suppress individual metrics for each, meaning that consumers would not be able to compare, for example, an individual facility’s postoperative pulmonary embolism rates or perioperative hemorrhage rates.

Binder pointed to a February 17 Perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine, authored by CMS and CDC officials, which showed that after years of quality improvement on a variety of safety measures, infections and other complications soared during the pandemic, completely reversing the progress that had been made.

For example, central line-associated bloodstream infections decreased 31% in the 5 years before the pandemic, a trend “totally reversed by a 28% increase in the second quarter of 2020,” the authors wrote. Increases were also reported in catheter-associated urinary tract infections, ventilator-associated events, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia.

These are some of the very measures whose scores will no longer be available to the public under the agency’s proposed rule, Binder pointed out.

Kramer said that PSI 90 scores are also used by insurers and employers to identify preferred provider networks and to monitor quality of care, so they can let employees know if there’s a problem with a particular hospital or system.

Nurse Burnout

Nurse burnout and personnel shortages could negatively affect the way patients respond to CMS-required Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems surveys on how they perceived the quality of their care, which CMS proposed to suppress because of hardships during the pandemic.

Because patient volumes and personnel shortages affected facilities’ rates of adverse events, the agency noted that they are “concerned … that we will not be able to score hospitals fairly or reliably for national comparison and payment adjustment purposes.”

However, Binder said that she is adamant that hospitals with poor quality scores should not be given a pass on accountability.

“If hospitals had a problem — that they didn’t have enough staff or had a high rate of problems with patient safety, that they were killing some patients — that needs to be made public and people need to know and be able to choose to not go to a hospital that’s under this kind of stress and is not safe,” she noted.

Gelfand and Binder said they understand that hospitals had staffing problems during the pandemic, and that in some facilities, a shortage of staff physically capable of assisting patients may have meant a higher number of complications, such as preventable falls.

“But when I judge a hospital, one of the things I judge them for is, are they able to roll with the punches,” said Gelfand. “And when I hear things like, ‘well, we dropped people because we made decisions about staffing,’ what I’m hearing is that they’re not capable of making decisions and planning to provide a safe environment.”

The proposed rule is also worrisome because it assumes that this pandemic is unique, and that hospitals won’t ever have to face such extreme circumstances again, he noted.

“As much as we would like to think that this is the only pandemic that we’re ever going to experience, that’s just not very likely. If the facts of the matter are that certain systems aren’t up to it, not able to keep people safe during a pandemic, we need to know that and they don’t have the right to keep that secret,” he said.

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Butler Pharmacy Graduates Earn Highest Pass Rate on the NAPLEX® Licensure Exam

https://stories.butler.edu/butler-pharmacy-graduates-earn-highest-pass-rate-on-the-naplex-licensure-exam/

If student outcomes ultimately define the quality and rigor of a college’s curriculum, as many people assert, then Butler University’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (COPHS) has a claim to being the best of its kind in the nation.

Graduates of Butler University’s prestigious Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) program passed the North American Pharmacy Licensure Examination (NAPLEX®) in their first attempt at a higher rate than graduates of any other university in the country. Of the 91 Butler graduates who took the exam for the first time in 2021, 97 percent passed. Of the 144 PharmD programs located in the United States, none had a higher first-time pass rate than Butler University.

“In the face of the pandemic, our faculty and staff remained committed to ensuring that our students received the education they deserved, were able to complete rotations, and stayed on track toward graduation,” Dr. Robert Soltis, Dean of COPHS, said. “Despite site closures and other challenges, every single student in that class graduated on time, and they had the highest pass rate in the nation on the licensure exam. It’s an amazing achievement, and speaks volumes about our commitment and dedication as an institution. I could not be prouder of, or happier for, our faculty and our students.”

According to its website, the NAPLEX® is designed to evaluate general practice knowledge and is taken by recent college of pharmacy graduates shortly after they receive their degree. The NAPLEX® is just one component of the licensure process and is used by the boards of pharmacy to assess a candidate’s competence to practice as a pharmacist. The six-hour exam is composed of 225 questions that are delivered in a computerized, fixed form. The exam results are reported as pass or fail, and candidates are allowed five attempts to pass the exam.

Butler PharmD graduates have a history of scoring well on the NAPLEX®. In each of the past three years, at least 93 percent of Butler graduates passed the exam on their first attempt.

The results come at a critical time; in Indiana and across the nation, there is a significant shortage of pharmacists, especially among the national chains. Some pharmacies have had to reduce hours or even close for one day a week due to reduced staffing. Both CVS and Walgreens have announced they are increasing salaries in hopes of recruiting more pharmacists to their locations.

“Just five years ago, we were talking about a surplus of pharmacists in this country, but the pandemic quickly changed that situation,” Dr. Soltis said. “Now, the increased demand for vaccinations has resulted in increased demand for pharmacists. Graduates of Butler’s pharmacy program are going to find an improving job market and more opportunities to use their skills to serve patients.”

When I decided to attend Butler University and major in pharmacy,  I had been told that NO BUTLER GRAD HAD FAILED TO PASS THE ” Indiana Pharmacy board”  My class was the first year that the  North American Pharmacy Licensure Examination (NAPLEX®) was used.  There was nothing available to prepared for the exam, there was no one to ask what was on the board the previous year…  My Butler class had ONE that didn’t pass the boards, but that year was the first year for the MILITARY DRAFT LOTTERY and this poor fellow drew a very low number and his draft board had been after him to be drafted but the Indiana pharmacy board wasn’t until Sept or Oct after the graduation in May.  Perhaps the stress and distraction of trying to keep the draft from drafting him.  After all, the Vietnam was on going and soon after this time.. it started ramping up.

Yours truly’s lottery number was 360 – SIX FROM THE BOTTOM… since the lottery pool was every male between 18 and 35 y/o… the number of “bodies” in that lottery pool was VERY LARGE.

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One in Four Medicare Patients Harmed in Hospitals, Nearly Half Preventable

CMS needs to do more to penalize facilities with avoidable adverse events, report says

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/98701

Medicare patients continue to experience harm during hospital stays, even after a decade of intensive efforts to decrease provider-caused adverse events, according to a report from the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG).

Among the roughly 1 million Medicare patients who were discharged from hospitals in October 2018, a total of 258,323 experienced an adverse or temporary harm event during their stay.

And 12% experienced events that led to longer stays, lifesaving interventions, permanent harm, or death. “This projects to 121,089 Medicare patients having experienced at least one adverse event during the 1-month study period,” the report stated.

Of these adverse events, 45% were said to have been preventable. According to the report, such events were linked to substandard or inadequate care — for example, using more aggressive pain management regimens after surgery than necessary, or unnecessary delays in scheduling surgeries.

In one of many case studies and patient stories included in the report, a patient required surgery to remove dead tissue from the small intestine. “However, providers unnecessarily delayed surgery for 5 days while the patient continued to deteriorate. This delay led to a cascade of harms that included worsening of the small intestine, contamination of the abdomen with pus, septic shock with an associated kidney injury, and delirium,” the report noted.

Ten percent of adverse events contributed to patient deaths, translating to 1.4%, or 14,800 patients, during the 1-month study period.

Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, which routinely grades hospitals on various safety measures, called the report’s findings “outrageous.”

“None of us would drive a vehicle or check into a hotel if we thought we had a one in four chance of being harmed from the experience,” she said.

The report also showed that 13% of patients experienced temporary harm, which required intervention but did not prolong their hospital stay or require life-sustaining measures, and over 40% were determined to be preventable. However, such events were sometimes serious and could have caused further harm had providers not noticed and quickly intervened, the OIG said.

Common adverse and temporary harm events included those related to medication use, involving delirium or other mental status changes; pressure ulcers or injuries; complications from procedures or surgeries such as intraoperative hypotension; and hospital-acquired infections (HAIs).

Of particular concern, the OIG found that patient harm events were almost as widespread as they were found to be in 2008 among a similar sample size. Back then, 27% of the patients sampled experienced a harmful event. However, the report noted that the 2018 population had a greater prevalence of comorbidities than the 2008 sample, with more “being treated for more clinically complex conditions and diagnoses than in the past.”

Adverse events result in higher costs for beneficiaries who have to pay more in deductibles and co-payments because of additional care required. The report estimated that for some treated beneficiaries, additional expenses amounted to more than $40,000. “Combined, we estimated the cost for all events to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for October 2018,” the report stated.

The OIG noted that CMS has two policies designed to deter hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), including cuts in reimbursement to hospitals with higher rates of such conditions. However, “because the policies use narrowly scoped lists of HACs and employ specific criteria for counting harm events, they have limited effectiveness in broadly promoting patient safety,” the report said. “Of the harm events we identified, only 5% were on CMS’s HAC Reduction Program list and only 2% were on CMS’s Deficit Reduction Act HAC list.”

Furthermore, when CMS counts infections associated with a surgical procedure in its formula to penalize hospitals, it counts only those involving the colon or an abdominal hysterectomy, so many other infections go uncounted, such as those occurring after a laminectomy.

Additionally, the report found that hospitals often omit specific codes that CMS uses to monitor the occurrence of HACs, thereby limiting the agency’s awareness of some events in Medicare-certified hospitals.

According to the OIG and Binder, CMS should include more types of harm events in its formula for penalizing hospitals. The current policy shift appears to be steering the agency away from that, Binder noted.

“Though in the report CMS concurred with this recommendation, the agency is moving rapidly in the opposite direction, not growing the number of measures, but removing all the HACs and HAIs from payment consideration. CMS’s Proposed Rule calls for suppressing all HACs and HAIs from use … and replacing them with nothing,” she said.

The report noted that “only the worst 25% of performers receive the 1% reduction each year.” Furthermore, “hospitals that routinely are in the top three quarters of performance do not have a financial incentive through the HACRP [HAC Reduction Program] to improve more.”

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Contact Congress to stop FDA & Big Pharma’s attempt to control supplements and get power to ban kratom

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act reauthorization is being used to give the FDA even more power to threaten kratom and all supplements

First off, we understand this is getting into the legislative weeds, but this is incredibly important as it could change how all supplements and kratom are controlled by the FDA. 

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act or PDUFA is up for reauthorization, and proposed changes to it could give the FDA power to deny registration of all supplements; granting them power to require kratom to be registered, and therefore the power to deny registration and effectively ban all kratom products

Please contact your congressional representatives today! Go to Protectkratom.org/congress using the link below to complete the email contact for to tell Congressional officials not to support any attempts to require supplement registration.

Supplements are not prescription drugs, and shouldn’t be treated the same.  

NOTE: The House Committee on Energy & Commerce is meeting on the PDUFA regulation for the House so we’ve created an additional contact form to be used for them as well. 

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After years, pharmacy-middleman suit might finally come to trial

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/05/16/after-years-pharmacy-middleman-suit-might-finally-come-to-trial/

Since at least 2016, Ohio pharmacists have been accusing large companies acting as pharmacy middlemen of abusive practices, which they deny. And since 2019, the state has been accusing them as well, in the form of lawsuits.

Now, after years of wrangling in court, some of that litigation might be headed to trial.

The middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, operate behind the scenes, but they’re part of some of the largest corporations in the United States. And the big three, which handle prescription transactions for more than 70% of covered Americans, are part of companies that also own major insurers.

Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, negotiate rebates from drugmakers, in part by controlling which drugs are covered by insurance and at what level. They contract with networks of pharmacies and decide how much to pay them for the prescriptions they dispense.

In 2016, two of the big-three PBMs — CVS Caremark and OptumRx — were working for Ohio’s five Medicaid managed-care companies. Late that year, many Ohio pharmacists complained, the companies slashed their reimbursements and then CVS — which was also their biggest retail competitor — offered to buy them out.

CVS and OptumRx insist their reimbursements have been fair and that their actions have saved money for consumers and taxpayers. But amid a newspaper investigation and one by then-Auditor Dave Yost, the Ohio Department of Medicaid in 2018 commissioned an investigation that showed that in 2017, CVS and OptumRx charged taxpayers $244 million more for Medicaid drugs than they paid the pharmacies that dispensed them.

While that was a bombshell, big portions of the analysis were redacted. Under prodding from lawmakers and the press, then-Medicaid Director Barbara Sears moved to release an unredacted version. CVS and Optum sued on July 16, 2018 to block release.

That suit continues, even though The Columbus Dispatch was able to get behind the redactions and show that CVS in 2017 reimbursed big competitors such as Kroger and Walmart much worse than it did its own pharmacies.

The case has languished for almost four years, with Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Andy D. Miller most recently granting another delay last month.

But another, perhaps more substantive case, appears to be moving ahead.

After he became attorney general, Yost in 2019 sued OptumRx over its dealings with the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. That suit claims that Optum defrauded the agency of $16 million by not providing guaranteed discounts and through other practices.

It’s slated for trial before Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Michael Holbrook on Oct. 24, and the parties seem to be getting ready for trial.

“We are in the discovery process and planning accordingly for our trial date in October,” Yost’s spokesman, Steven Irwin, said in an email on Tuesday.

A spokesman for OptumRx again denied that the company had done anything wrong.

“We are honored to have delivered access to more affordable prescription medications for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation and Ohio taxpayers,” the spokesman, Andrew Krejci, said in an email. “We continue to believe these allegations are without merit and will vigorously defend ourselves.”

Yost also has sued another of the big-three PBMs, Express Scripts, on behalf of the Ohio Highway Patrol System. The suit seeks an unspecified dollar amount after Express Scripts “egregiously charged for services it didn’t deliver,” Yost said. 

Express Scripts also denied wrongdoing. The case now is slated for trial before Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell in June 2023.

When he announced the workers’ comp suit, Yost said it was the start of a flurry of litigation against the pharmacy middlemen, and his office is said to be pursuing other claims.

He tallied a big win last year after he sued Medicaid managed-care provider Centene over dealings using its in-house PBMs. Centene didn’t admit wrongdoing, but it agreed to pay Ohio $88.3 million and set aside an additional $1 billion to settle similar claims in states that hadn’t even sued.

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Medicare Advantage Versus Traditional Medicare

https://www.daily-remedy.com/medicare-advantage-versus-traditional-medicare/

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It appears that in FLORIDA Walgreens is being sued for “contributing” our fabricated opiate crisis and in CALF they are being sued for having their stores understaffed and putting pt’s safety at risk from mistakes Walgreens’ Priority Was Filling Drug Orders Fast, Judge Told

https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0365.pdf     Florida got 10+billion out of the Tobacco settlement at the end of the last century. I don’t know if they were hoping to extend the “annual annuity payments” from the tobacco settlement with suing the pharma industry.  It appears that this settlement comes up short.

Florida may be returning to the pharmacy environment back in the mid 2010-2020 decade… when most chain pharmacists were SELDOM COMFORTABLE filling Rxs for controlled meds… the term was coined back then as the “Pharmacy Crawl”..where pts trying to get a controlled Rx filled may have to go to a dozen or so different pharmacies in trying to get a controlled Rx filled.  Can you imagine a chronic pain pts … having to drive around most of a day to find a pharmacy to fill their pain med Rx ?  Back then controlled Rxs were still “paper”, so the pt had a Rx in their hand. Today, most all controls are now sent to a pharmacy electronically. When a pharmacy/pharmacist can’t/won’t fill a C-II,  the Rx basically goes dead, because the pharmacy can’t do nothing but CANCEL the electronic Rx… and the pt is having to have to reach out to their prescriber to send it to another pharmacy. Of course, pharmacies will not tell a pt over the phone if they actually have a particular C-II in stock. When one of the early statements in the early part of the war on drugs was “JUST SAY NO”… may take on a new meaning for chronic pain pts trying to get their pain meds filled .

Walgreens reaches opioid settlement with State of Florida

DEERFIELD, Ill. — Walgreens announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement with the State of Florida to resolve all claims related to the distribution and dispensing of prescription opioid medications across the company’s pharmacies in the state.

The settlement amount of $683 million includes $620 million to be paid out to the State of Florida over 18 years, as well as a one-time payment of $63 million for attorneys’ fees.

The settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing or liability by Walgreens.

“As the largest pharmacy chain in the state, we remain focused on and committed to being part of the solution, and believe this resolution is in the best interest of all parties involved and the communities we serve across Florida,” said Danielle Gray, executive vice president and global chief legal officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Our pharmacists are dedicated health care professionals who live and work in the communities they serve, and play a critical role in providing education and resources to help combat opioid misuse and abuse.”

As one of Florida’s leading health care providers, Walgreens has taken a number of actions to prevent and respond to the opioid crisis, while continuing to serve patients, including:

• Providing patient education on safe opioid use
• Making life-saving Naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal medication, available in all Walgreens pharmacies nationwide
• Providing safe and convenient medication disposal kiosks available at 1,400 Walgreens stores, along with other safe disposal options at all other Walgreens locations
• Deploying technology to help pharmacists ensure they are dispensing prescriptions written for a legitimate medical purpose
• Stopping self-distribution of opioids and all pharmaceuticals to Walgreens stores in 2014

The settlement funds will be used by the State of Florida to support its efforts to combat and treat opioid addiction. The settlement is a result of unique facts and circumstances concerning the state of Florida. It should not be used to forecast or predict the value of any other litigation claims or future settlements, and is unrelated to any other opioid-related litigation in which Walgreens is involved and which the company will continue to defend vigorously.

Click to access 0365.pdf

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Walgreens’ Priority Was Filling Drug Orders Fast, Judge Told

A former Walgreens pharmacist felt pressured to “fill, fill, fill” prescriptions while working at a pace that made her fear making fatal errors, a California federal judge heard in recorded testimony Thursday in a multibillion-dollar bellwether trial over claims Walgreens and others illegally fueled San Francisco’s opioid epidemic.

The city of San Francisco has accused Walgreens, along with drugmakers Teva and Allergan and drug distributor Anda, of creating a public nuisance by marketing opioids with misleading messages about their safety and failing to prevent the ensuing flood of painkillers from being diverted for improper uses.

Thursday marked the second day of the bench trial in which the testimony focused on San Francisco’s case against the pharmacy chain. It included the recorded deposition of Rebecca Gayle, who worked at a San Francisco Walgreens as a staff pharmacist from 2012 to 2016, also holding the role of assistant store manager from 2014 to 2016.

“The most challenging part of working at Walgreens was I constantly felt there was the pressure to fill, fill, fill, and that was what the company cared about most,” Gayle said. “That’s the message I got.”

The demand to fill prescriptions quickly made it difficult for her to investigate suspicious prescriptions or talk to patients about their medications.

“I constantly got feedback to go faster, shave down on the things that were most important to me as a pharmacist like counseling patients,” Gayle said, later adding, “I ran into situations where I was afraid I made a lot of mistakes that could result in severe patient … harm or even death, depending on medication and the type of error.”

During Gayle’s cross-examination, a lawyer for Walgreens asked her if she believed she and her colleagues were doing their best on behalf of their patients and to make sure they prevented diversion.

“I feel like we, as pharmacists, could have had many more tools, and support from a staffing and time perspective, to do more due diligence to prevent diversion,” Gayle said. “We were doing our best, but it was limited given the volume of prescriptions we were filling and the pace at which we were expected to fill.”

Gayle said she would sometimes search doctors’ names on the internet if she felt something was fishy about them, as well as leave notes for her colleagues to warn them about doctors who appeared to be issuing excessive opioid orders.

If there was a strong red flag, Gayle said she and her colleagues would sometimes refuse to fill a prescription.

Brian Swanson of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, an attorney for Walgreen’s, asked Gayle if she was ever punished for refusing an order, and she said no.

Among doctors who had “fishy” prescribing practices was Collin Leong, Gayle said. He ultimately lost his license in 2013 and pled guilty to selling opioid prescriptions to homeless people with no medical justification, but not before Walgreens filled thousands of his prescriptions, according to a document the city filed with the court. 

An attorney for San Francisco showed Gayle a news article that said the homeless people would be given cash for the pills from a third party. Leong charged $80 to $150 for a prescription, taking in about $400,000, according to the news report.

“Did your district managers ever ask you to identify suspicious prescribers so they could warn others?” the attorney asked. Gayle said no.

Another former San Francisco Walgreens employee, Victor Lo, also testified that the store he worked at was inadequately staffed, making it difficult to do his job carefully.

“We always felt like we were behind, we always felt, at least I felt, I could potentially dispense something incorrectly,” Lo said.

Lo, however, testified that when he told his supervisor that he felt the pharmacy was dispensing a lot of narcotics from doctors who appeared to be “too free” in writing prescriptions, he was told the pharmacists couldn’t say no.

“We couldn’t categorically say flat out we’re not filling these prescriptions from a licensed prescriber. Those prescribers could sue Walgreens,” Lo said he was told.

In addition to Lo, live testimony was given Thursday from Carmen Catizone, who said Walgreens did not meet the standard of care legally required of pharmacies. Among concerns, from 2003 to 2012, Walgreens had a policy passed on to pharmacists to merely call the doctor who issued a questionable prescription as opposed to doing any other due diligence.

“This is especially true when the prescriber may be assisting the patient to inappropriately use controlled substances,” Catizone said.

In 2013, Walgreens introduced a checklist for pharmacists to use when dispensing some drugs, but it didn’t cover some commonly diverted opioids. Until 2020 the checklists were maintained only in hard copy at each pharmacy, and not electronically, so they could be shared with other stores, Catizone said.

During cross-examination, Swanson took aim at the list of “red flags” or warning signs that suggest opioid abuse or diversion that Catizone said pharmacists are required to be on the lookout for.

“You don’t cite any federal or state statute that discloses each of these specific red flags you identify, do you?” Swanson asked, later noting that they also don’t appear in the Controlled Substances Act.

Swanson also posed several hypothetical situations to Catizone that would result in a legitimate prescription being flagged. For example, if a patient obtained multiple opioid prescriptions from different prescribers.

“That would flag a patient who broke a leg and then gets an opioid script from the ER and then gets a second prescription from the orthopedist who treats them,” Swanson noted.

Walgreens’ lawyer also said pill volume wasn’t necessarily a red flag, for example, if a doctor was prescribing for an oncology patient or for pain management.

Catizone’s time on the stand was about 30 minutes, in keeping with Judge Breyer’s orders and a tight trial timetable, limiting direct witness examinations to written declarations with only a short live introductory summary.

Catizone, who served as the executive director and CEO of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy from 1988 to 2020, also submitted a 35-page declaration to the court.

The Bay Area litigation is the first to rope together defendants across the pharmaceutical supply chain, from manufacturing to distribution and pharmacy dispensing.

San Francisco is represented by its city attorney’s office, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, Andrus Anderson LLP, Weitz & Luxenberg PC, Simmons Hanly Conroy LLC and Levin Papantonio Rafferty.

Allergan and its affiliates are represented by Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

Teva and its affiliates are represented by Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP.

Anda is represented by Foley & Lardner LLP.

Walgreens is represented by Bartlit Beck LLP and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

The case is City and County of San Francisco et al. v. Purdue Pharma LP et al., case number 3:18-cv-07591, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The MDL is In re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation, case number 1:17-md-02804, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

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https://www.newsweek.com/record-numbers-americans-are-dying-overdoses-instead-justice-we-get-theater-opinion-1706231

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City announced this week that it would be removing the Sackler’s nameplate off of their arts center in response to pressure from activists. “The Guggenheim and the Mortimer D. Sackler family have agreed to rename the arts education center,” a museum spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. The Guggenheim was not alone; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also removed the Sackler name from a gallery, as did the National Gallery in London this week.

The Guggenheim’s effort is timely, coming on the heels of another devastating statistic: Nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2021. And yet, the sad truth is, embarrassing members of the Sackler family will not bring justice to the victims of the opioid crisis and their families, who are once again being offered busy work as though it were meaningful reform. Scrubbing the Sacklers’ name from museums, like suing them in court, amounts to little more than kabuki theater—and everyone but the victims knows it.

Real justice could not be more urgent. America remains mired in a protracted drug-overdose crisis, with over half a million people dead in just a decade. The crisis is being fed by the ubiquity of dangerous fentanyl in the black market. Despite illegal drugs being the culprit in almost every case, the focus of the media and politicians has been on punishing pharmaceutical companies, in particular, members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, for which a major case of civil litigation is ongoing.

But the calls for justice for the victims of opioid addiction rarely rise above the symbolic, things like the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art removing the Sackler name from their nameplates. And this is a far cry from meaningful consequences that would help the victims of the opioid crisis.

But the lawsuit is a far cry from what real justice would look like. “The whole thing is kabuki theater,” says Richard Ausness, a legal scholar and renowned opioid litigation expert from the University of Kentucky Law. He told me that while there is a high emotional charge to these proceedings, the actual bearing on the case is minimal. “It ought to be about money,” Dr. Ausness explained. “About who pays what. And instead, they want to make the Sacklers listen to people complain about them.”

It may surprise you to learn that instead of trying to bring the Sacklers to justice, the Department of Justice has done anything but. On multiple occasions, the family agreed to multi-billion-dollar settlements, like a widely-criticized bankruptcy agreement from September of 2021 which mandated that the Sacklers would forfeit Purdue ownership and shell out $4.3 billion to litigants. But it granted the Sacklers sweeping immunity from opioid lawsuits brought against their company Purdue Pharma and its drug OxyContin. The plan was killed last December by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, after the DOJ publicly announced they didn’t like how the Sacklers would be immune to further shakedowns lawsuits.

So this March, the Sacklers made a new deal, with compensation coming to $6 billion—and immunity from further litigation. Once again, the DOJ pushed to have it overturned, though U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain stood firm and overruled. (DOJ is still pushing for an appeal in the federal appeals court.)

Professor Ausness and others I spoke to believe the case will end up at the Supreme Court, and it’s anyone’s guess what happens then. But as it currently stands, the victims will never see a single cent from civil litigation. Unless specified otherwise by state law, litigation settlement funds are at the discretion of state attorneys general, who have historically allocated the vast majority of opioid litigation money to feed state budgets. What little funds go toward “anti-addiction” projects have been spent on ridiculous efforts that have very little do with addiction, like Michigan’s focus on helping new mothers or West Virginia’s emphasis on public education.

The media and prosecutors should have been honest with victims from the start and admitted that putting the Sacklers in jail was never an option. Remember, in the 1990s and 2000s, the hard push for prescribing opioids was at the behest of the federal government. These companies’ advertising strategies weren’t drastically different from those for any other drug. While Big Pharma’s behavior was unethical, that is not the same as it being illegal.

Meanwhile, Americans are still overdosing on illegal drugs in the hundreds of thousands.

Where are the calls for justice for them?

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