That’s just lazy writing

As this season’s Delta-variant plot line continues to unfold*, the writers are already dropping some cliché teasers for next season. In this case, researchers at an Ohio State University dug up 15,000-year-old viruses from a Chinese glacier.

Money quote: “Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date.”

* We’re a bit worried about the upcoming episode, “Olympics of Doom”

Sure, why not?

“Coffee and veggies may protect against Covid-19” according to Northwestern medical researchers. Also protective: being breastfed (as a child, we presume) as well as eating fewer processed meats. The more you know.

Prison of debt

The latest figures (per a study published in JAMA) show that a whopping one in six Americans have medical debt in collections, and medical debt “now outweighs all other personal debt in U.S.,” especially in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid.

And when they say it outweighs other debt, they mean unpaid medical bills are more than all other sources of personal debt combined.

By the tail end of June 2020, individual Americans had a mean medical debt of $429 — $39 more than the combined average of all other non-medical debts such as credit cards, utilities and phone bills, the researchers wrote.

It gets worse: The data don’t take into account any medical debts incurred in 2020.

Guess who’s next

Drug distributors are close to a settlement for their role in the opioid crisis, which means those same states and localities will soon turn to their next targets: drug makers and pharmacies. Specifically (but not exclusively) we’re talking AbbVie, Endo, and Teva, and CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Walmart.

The pharmacies and drugmakers have denied the claims, saying rising opioid prescriptions were driven by doctors, that they followed federal law and that the known risks were included in U.S.-approved labels for the drugs.

And to keep things straight, those drugmakers are also currently defending themselves in New York and Orange County, California, while the pharmacies are looking at an October trial in Ohio.

PrEP is free

Health insurers will have to cover PrEP — the HIV prevention drugs (e.g., Descovy or Truvada) — at zero cost for patients. So say the feds:

The guidance that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, along with the Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury, sent to health insurers Monday indicated that insurers have 60 days to comply with the mandate. The rule says insurers must not charge copays, coinsurance or deductible payments for the quarterly clinic visits and lab tests required to maintain a PrEP prescription.

The downside: People without health insurance will get the short end of the stick, because — while they might be able to get the drugs free (via drugmakers’ programs) — they won’t be able to afford the necessary lab tests or provider visits.

Jumping on the Covid bandwagon

There’s no cure for long Covid, but that won’t stop resorts and spas from offering treatment centers for it. Still feeling sick after the virus is gone? Why not…

…channel your inner Gwyneth Paltrow and pay $3,500 to have a therapist cake a paste of turmeric, galangal, and kaffir lime on your chest, cover it with an alcohol-doused towel, and set it all on fire.

Or inhale concentrated oxygen, practice chest muscle-strengthening exercises, have lasers shot at your head (“brain photobiomodulation”), or enjoy energy therapy (?), lymphatic drainage, and perhaps some electrolysis foot baths? And yes, every one of those is something actually being offered.

Don’t make any long-term plans

Thanks to a combination of Covid-19 and a surge in drug overdoses, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped 1.5 years in 2020, the largest drop since World War II.

Perspective: Previous drops of just 0.1 years in U.S. life expectancy were big news (in 2015, 2016, and 2017)

About three-quarters of 2020’s decline in life expectancy can be attributed to deaths from Covid-19, the CDC said, while 11% of the decline is due to increases in accidental deaths, including drug overdoses. Last week, the agency reported that a record 93,000 drug-overdose deaths occurred in 2020, which is a 30% increase compared with 2019.

J&J booster?

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine may not be as effective against Delta, according to a study out of NYU; boosters could eventually be necessary. This contradicts J&J’s own study that says the shot works against the variant for at least eight months.

[T]he conclusions add to evidence that the 13 million people inoculated with the J.&J. vaccine may need to receive a second dose — ideally of one of the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, the authors said.

The Long Read: A simple number

In a rare positive article* in the Atlantic, we learn that scientists are getting close to finding a single, easy-to-measure number — a correlate of protection — that will tell whether a Covid-19 vaccine is effective in general … and whether a single individual is protected.

If confirmed, these correlates could revolutionize the way we tackle SARS-CoV-2 immunization: Vaccine makers testing a new inoculation may no longer need to follow tens of thousands of people for many months to test their product’s protection.

*Fear not, as the magazine continues its negativity with “Vaccination in America Might Have Only One Tragic Path Forward“