More vaccines a-comin’

Pfizer has reached a deal with the U.S. government to supply an additional 100 million doses (i.e., enough for 50 million people).

BUT check it out: Here’s GPhA member Ben Ross, owner of Forest Heights Pharmacy in Statesboro, getting vaccinated by his business partner, pharmacist Pete Nagel. (And yes, you can and should admire their coordinated masks and shirts.)

And here’s Ben holding a box that can potentially save a lot of lives:

U.S. sues Walmart for understaffing pharmacies

What, you thought the opioid crisis lawsuits were all over? Nope. The feds’ suit against Walmart is a little different, than the other ones, though:

The Justice Department’s lawsuit claims that Walmart sought to boost profits by understaffing its pharmacies and pressuring employees to fill prescriptions quickly. That made it difficult for pharmacists to reject invalid prescriptions, enabling widespread drug abuse nationwide, the suit alleges.

Deadliest year in history

Yeah, U.S. life expectancy had gone up in 2019, but that’s behind us now. No hyperbole; 2020 is the deadliest year in American history. (And with one American dying from Covid every 30 seconds, the few days left in the year are just awful icing on the cake.)

You can’t always trust pulse oximeters

If you have Black or dark-skinned patients, here’s an important piece of info: Fingertip blood oximeters are less reliable when used with dark skin. We’re talking three times more errors.

With blood oxygenation being used to determine how severe a case of Covid-19 someone has, this is a scary bit of news.

“I think most of the medical community has been operating on the assumption that pulse oximetry is quite accurate,” said Dr. Michael W. Sjoding […] “I’m a trained pulmonologist and critical care physician, and I had no understanding that the pulse ox was potentially inaccurate — and that I was missing hypoxemia in a certain minority of patients.”

Green means go

A pair of researchers have found a way to alter the genes of gut bacteria so they respond to light. Why would you want to do this? Because if you alter the right genes, you can use light to make the bacteria to behave the way you want it to.

For example, you could engineer a bacteria to produce more colanic acid, which seems to improve lifespan (at least in nematode worms). But you only want the acid in the small intestine, and you don’t want to overdo it.

Make that bacteria respond to green light, though, and you can control when and where it happens. Presto: Immortality! (Well, possibly better health at least.)

British invasion in five sentences

The new Covid-19 strain from Britain is probably already here.

It’s more virulent, but not (it seems) more deadly … although a different variant (in South Africa) does seem more dangerous.

The vaccines we have should work against it.

Most of Europe has closed their borders with the U.K.

The U.S. is still taking travellers from there, but the CDC is at least a little worried.

Ferrets get protection

Black-footed ferrets are cute, endangered, capable of getting Covid-19 … and potentially spreading it to humans (possibly after helping it mutate). So scientists in Colorado aren’t waiting for a commercial vaccine — they’re acting now.

As one put it:

“If the virus returns to the animal host and mutates, or changes, in such a way that it could be reintroduced to humans, then the humans would no longer have that immunity. That makes me very concerned.”