The bad Covid-19 news

“The proportion of Americans dying from coronavirus infections is the highest in the developed world.” While we started off with a lower mortality rate, “as spring turned to summer, the U.S. largely failed to embrace public-health and policy measures that have helped other countries reduce death rates.” (We also lead the world in total number of deaths.)

And “U.S. Covid-19 Hospitalizations Hit Highest Level in Nearly Six Weeks” — and hospitals are reporting surges.

The good Covid-19 news

The Long Read — A Dose of Optimism: “The months ahead will be difficult. But the medical cavalry is coming, and the rest of us know what we need to do.”

Remembering Jim Bartling

As we launch this campaign, we remember Jim Bartling, our foundation chair who recently and unexpectedly passed away. He was a person with a big heart and a giant legacy of helping others, and he leaves a sizeable void here at the foundation.

Thanks to Jim’s vision, the Georgia Pharmacy Foundation’s PharmWell initiative promotes mental wellness in our profession, including challenges such as burnout, drug abuse, depression, and suicide. Some pharmacists have described PharmWell’s programs as “life changing.”

If you’d like to take a moment to honor Jim, please share your memories and appreciation of Jim online.

Wasps may be good for something

UPenn researchers sent their grad students out to play with highly toxic Korean yellow-jacket wasps, and the result: a protein that can be tweaked so it kills bacteria (usually) without harming human cells (usually). So far they’ve only experimented on mice, though, but their new protein shows promise in protecting those mice from lethal bacterial infections.

Even with this potentially useful protein, the official position of GPhA Buzz (although not necessarily GPhA itself) is that all wasps should be destroyed on sight.

Guess you can cross Mallinckrodt out of the phone book

It declared bankruptcy, “saddled with lawsuits alleging it fueled the U.S. opioid epidemic and after it lost a court battle to avoid paying higher rebates to state Medicaid programs for its top-selling drug.”

Lilly pauses its Covid-treatment trial

The trial of a monoclonal antibody treatment that works with remdesivir was paused by U.S. health regulators — the data safety monitoring board — for undisclosed safety concerns. It’s a pause, not a cancellation, but it does come on the heels of a pause of the J&J vaccine trial.

Metformin recall widens

Two more companies — Marksans Pharma and Sun Pharmaceutical Industries — bring the total number to at least 10 who have recalled the extended-release version of metformin because of high levels of a carcinogen.