“The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped.” – Hubert Humphrey
passionate pachyderms
Pharmacist Steve steve@steveariens.com 502.938.2414
When I applied to Butler U for pharmacy school in 1996, after one year at a local extension of Indiana University – studying for a major in Chemistry
But what they did not tell you back then was around 1 out of 5 or 6 Freshman Pharmacy declared majors would make graduation. Getting in was EASY… getting to graduation was a BITCH… Back then, there was 82-84 pharmacy schools… today there is abt 142 schools and they are graduating some 14K-15K and those pharmacy grads from 1980 – abt 8,000 are now retiring… Doesn’t take a Math major to figure out that Pharmacy has a very serious – and growing – Pharmacist SURPLUS. Today, new grads are getting pay offer of abt $20/hr less than I was making when I retired in 2013 and unless the new grad agrees to be Pharmacy manager – may not even get FULL TIME. Today’s grads, many are coming out of school with a SIX FIGURE STUDENT LOANS. When I graduated from Butler U… I owed about what was 2-3 week’s pay, once I got licensed, which I was able to do in Kentucky by mid- July after graduation. Followed up getting my Indiana license in Sept or Oct.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a work environment that has become both unsafe for the pts and the Rx dept staff. And many Pharmacists are starting to fight back… A local Walgreens a couple of months ago all three pharmacist WALKED OUT… similar things happened to local CVS’. Our small county of abt 80K population has THREE INDEPENDENTS and as far as I know … non of them missed a day being open their scheduled hours and Rx dept staffed.. Here is a hyperlink to help you find a independent pharmacy by zip code https://ncpa.org/pharmacy-locator
Back in the pre 90’s when independents dominated the market place, Pharmacists showed up FIRST PLACE on most respected profession surveys… the last survey I have seen Pharmacists are now down to FOURTH and now that the chains dominate the market place … probably headed for the end of the list along with used car salesmen and members of Congress. But those current surveys rank pharmacies by ownership… independents are always at the top ranking of the list by customers/pts.
Congressman Weber’s assistant has requested to hear from the residents of the great state of Texas. This is a golden opportunity for pain patients to bring the plight of untreated/under-treated pain patients in front of the Congressman. Specifically your pain story as well as any stories related to illicit fentanyl (i.e. whether you or someone you know has suffered from an illicit overdose) and suicide related to pain. In addition, the Congressman is interested in examining Texas state policy and its current is impact on pain patients (has Texas policy served as a detriment or interfered in your care).
The reason for this request is that I will be meeting with Congressman Weber’s office in the near future. I have been asked to gather the above requested information in preparation for this meeting. I am requesting that anyone who lives in Texas, who would like to participate, to please email their stories to me at: lrlonebear@ciaag.net by January 20, 2022.
I would like to reassure everyone that your information and any stories that are shared will be kept confidential and only used for the purposes of this meeting.
I am requesting that submissions are kept short and concise. While I recognize that each person has a unique story to tell, I am requesting that submissions are one page in length to include the following:
Your diagnosis
Are you currently receiving pain treatment?
Have you been force tapered/completely withdrawn from medications or tapered down to an ineffective dose?
Were you forced into using ineffective alternative/complimentary modalities?
Were you forced into taking medications or having procedures to justify receiving pain management?
Had any practitioner imply that the pain is “all in your head”?
Do you feel you have been harmed by Texas pain laws as they currently stand?
Thank you in advance for sharing your stories. Feel free to email me with any questions or comments.
In Turkey the metro stations allow dogs to sleep during the colder months. What an amazing gesture
“The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped.” – Hubert Humphrey
Announced Thursday, the lawsuit surrounds data from the “V-Safe” system used by the CDC to track patients’ health after receiving the coronavirus vaccination. The group says the CDC has already provided Oracle, a government contractor, with the data in a deidentified form – or lacking personal information.
The CDC also tracks safety through its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and continues to say that the approved and authorized COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
“V-safe data will be collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” according to a CDC document.
Attorney Aaron Siri, who represents the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), said that the CDC initially refused to provide app data because it purportedly wasn’t “deidentified” or stripped of personal information. When ICAN followed with a request for “all data submitted to v-safe and subsequently deidentified,” the CDC rejected the request as duplicative of the original.
Lurie Children’s hospital registered nurse Carolyn Ruyle prepares a dose of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Lurie Children’s hospital Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
“If this sounds ridiculous, it is because it is,” said Siri. “The public should be outraged by the CDC’s games.”
ICAN’s lawsuit notes that the CDC said V-Safe was part of “the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.”
Department Of Health and Human Services, Hubert H. Humphrey Building on April 11, 2015, in Washington. (Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)
Siri, on behalf of another group, previously sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for more than 400,000 pages of information on the approval process for Pfizer-BioNTech‘s COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA had offered to release 12,000 documents by January and a minimum of 500 pages a month, which could mean it would be decades before all the documents would become public.
The CDC and Oracle did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
“The federal government is thereby not only failing to provide the transparency necessary to earn the American people’s trust regarding these vaccines but is also failing to comply with FOIA,” the lawsuit reads.
As the omicron surge pummels a pandemic-weary nation, the first antiviral pills for Covid-19 promise desperately needed protection for people at risk of severe disease. However, many people prescribed Pfizer’s or Merck’s new medications will require careful monitoring by doctors and pharmacists, and the antivirals may not be safe for everyone, experts caution.
Paxlovid, Pfizer’s Covid-19 pill, is manufactured in Ascoli, Italy.Pfizer via Reuters
The Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer’s Paxlovid for mild to moderate Covid in people as young as 12 who have underlying conditions that raise the risk of hospitalization and death from the coronavirus, such as heart disease or diabetes. However, one of the two drugs in the antiviral cocktail could cause severe or life-threatening interactions with widely used medications, including statins, blood thinners and some antidepressants. And the FDA does not recommend Paxlovid for people with severe kidney or liver disease.
Because of experts’ concerns about the potential side effects of Merck’s molnupiravir, the FDA has restricted its use to adults and only in scenarios in which other authorized treatments, including monoclonal antibodies, are inaccessible or are not “clinically appropriate.”
The Paxlovid cocktail consists of two tablets of the antiviral nirmatrelvir and one tablet of ritonavir, a drug that has long been used as what is known as a boosting agent in HIV regimens. Ritonavir suppresses a key liver enzyme called CYP3A, which metabolizes many medications, including nirmatrelvir. In the case of Paxlovid treatment, ritonavir slows the body’s breakdown of the active antiviral and helps it remain at a therapeutic level for longer.
When Paxlovid is paired with other medications that are also metabolized by the CYP3A enzyme, the chief worry is that the ritonavir component may boost the co-administered drugs to toxic levels.
Complicating matters, the drugs that pose interaction risks are widely prescribed to people at the greatest risk from Covid because of other health conditions.
The medications include, but are not limited to: blood thinners; anti-seizure medications; drugs for irregular heart rhythms, high blood pressure and high cholesterol; antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications; immunosuppressants; steroids (including inhalers); HIV treatments; and erectile dysfunction medications.
“Some of these potential interactions are not trivial, and some pairings have to be avoided altogether,” said Peter Anderson, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “Some are probably easily managed. But some we’re going to have to be very careful about.”
In its fact sheet about Paxlovid, the FDA has published a detailed list of medications that may interact harmfully with ritonavir, including those that should not be paired with the Covid antivirals.
However, pharmacists stress that many of the drug interactions are manageable and that they should not preclude most people from taking Paxlovid.
“Pharmacists are highly trained experts in medication safety and monitoring and are an excellent source of information and advice about interactions between medications and also supplements and herbal products,” said Emily Zadvorny, a clinical pharmacist who is the executive director of the Colorado Pharmacists Society. “They will help determine if a significant interaction exists and devise solutions to mitigate the interaction if possible.”
‘A breakthrough drug’
The good news is that health care providers have experience navigating ritonavir’s use among people with HIV — a group that often takes medications for other health conditions, in addition to antiretroviral therapy.
Dr. William Werbel, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in transplant infectious diseases, advised people at high risk of Covid-19 complications to talk to their health care providers, as well as a savvy pharmacist, about changes they could make to their drug regimens should they need Paxlovid — even before they become infected with the virus.
Anyone seeking Paxlovid, which must be prescribed within five days of the first symptoms, should be sure to let their prescribers and pharmacists know the complete lists of other medications and over-the-counter supplements they are taking, Anderson said.
Some medications, such as particular statins, are most likely safe to stop taking during treatment with the Covid pills, Anderson said. For example, it might be better to stay on certain blood thinners but to lower the doses. Some heart rhythm drugs cannot be taken with Paxlovid.
Conversely, some anti-seizure medications can boost liver enzymes’ metabolic action and thus lower the body’s Paxlovid levels, as can the herbal supplement St. John’s Wort. The FDA warned that they should not be combined with Paxlovid.
Because the Paxlovid treatment is brief — 30 pills, taken as three pills twice a day for five days — experts are hopeful that the risk of adverse interactions with other medications is low.
“Five days of interactions is not a big deal for the majority of drugs,” said Jason Gallagher, a clinical pharmacy specialist in infectious diseases at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia.
If a drug’s potential interaction with Paxlovid poses too much of a risk, Anderson said, a safe and effective alternative Covid-19 therapy would be GlaxoSmithKline’s sotrovimab — the sole authorized monoclonal antibody treatment that research indicates reliably neutralizes the omicron variant of the virus. Otherwise, the antiviral molnupiravir is an option, albeit one with a much lower efficacy than either Paxlovid or sotrovimab.
Even with the concerns about taking Paxlovid with other prescription medications, experts are excited about the drug’s potential.
“Paxlovid is a breakthrough drug,” Anderson said. “This could make a real difference in the pandemic by making an effective Covid treatment available to many people.”
Social Security recipients are set to see the highest cost-of-living increase in 40 years in 2022, a welcome boost for those depending on the fixed payments and feeling the squeeze after months of surging inflation during 2021.
The 5.9% increase is higher than has been seen in several years, as cost-of-living adjustments are made in line with the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index. This is the largest COLA rise since 1982, when recipients received a 7.4% cost-of-living adjustment.
A sign is seen outside a US Social Security Administration building, November 5, 2020, in Burbank, California. (Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
In announcing the COLA in October, the Social Security Administration said the average retiree will see a monthly increase in their payment of $92, bringing the average check amount to $1,657. The typical couple would see their benefits jump $154 to $2,754.
The SSA has since released a calendar showing when the roughly 70 million beneficiaries can expect to receive their payments starting in January.
For those with a birth date between the first and tenth of the month, they can expect their payments on the second Wednesday of the month.
A Social Security card sits alongside checks from the U.S. Treasury on October 14, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo illustration by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Beneficiaries with birthdays on the 11th through 20th will receive payments on the third Wednesday of the month, and those with birth dates on the 21st through the 31st will get their checks or deposits on the fourth Wednesday of the month.
While the social security payment amount increase will no doubt provide relief to many recipients, it could also accelerate the depletion of the fund sooner than expected – and might not cover the rising costs seniors truly face as inflation continues to rise for everything from consumer goods to gasoline to housing.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the Social Security payment increase for 2022 means the fund will be unable to pay full benefits by 2032, a full year earlier than projected.
A visitor sits near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2021. (Photographer: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the national debt sits at around $29,000,000,000,000 ($29 trillion), and the federal deficit is at roughly $3 trillion for fiscal year 2021 according to the Congressional Budget Office.
