Covid quickies

Blood type: Despite earlier suggestions, it seems that blood type does not make someone more susceptible to Covid-19. (It’s based on a study of 107,796 individuals, so it would seem to have some weight.)

Good and bad: The UK variant — B.1.1.7 to its friends — is apparently more virulent than the basic strain of SARS-CoV-19, but not more severe. So that’s a bit of good news.

Winter is coming: The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) says to expect a good summer … but a bad winter. The forecast calls for a ‘considerable surge’ of Covid-19 cases “because the new variants are more transmissible, and people will likely relax social distancing and mask wearing.”

* …which we’re not supposed to call “the UK variant,” because we’re trying to get away from ‘place’ names like “Spanish fly” and “Russian roulette”

And the slightly bigger Covid news

There’s another new variant, this one in Oregon. It’s kind of like B.1.1.7 Plus, with the “plus” being an additional six mutations…

…one in the spike protein, three on the replication complex (ORF1ab), one in the structural protein N, and one in the accessory protein ORF8.

There’s not enough information yet, but William Haseltine knows his stuff, and he thinks it’s probably not a friendly variant — it’s one likely “associated with an increased transmission and vaccine resistance.”

Christmas is 255 days away

That’s too long to wait. NOW is the time to register for the 2021 Georgia Pharmacy Convention. If you read this and thought, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to do that” — don’t wait any longer. Click here to go to GPhAConvention.com and sign up now.

The room block’s been open since March 1, and the longer you wait, the greater your risk of ending up in that one wing with the lizard infestation. (Kidding!)(Probably!)

Go! Register for the biggest event of the year on the amazing Amelia Island!

GPhAConvention.com!

Wellstar’s a great place to work

Do you work for Wellstar? You might want to casually slip that into conversation — after all, Fortune named it one of the 100 best companies to work for. (It’s #90, if you must know.)

Wellstar took a major financial hit […] But the health system took aggressive steps to protect the interests of its workers, including by deploying $2.9 million in childcare support for its workforce and pay continuation programs for staffers who were unable to work, as well as more than $2.2 million dedicated to a free meals program. Its CEO Candice Saunders also took a 60% pay cut in an effort to lead by example.

Who else is on the list? Publix, Target, and Wegman’s — and, of course, the Cheesecake Factory.

Groundbreaking research

“New research,” says Kings College London, “reveals why some of us are hungry all the time.” The shocking reason? Some people’s blood sugar regularly dips low. (Bonus: The college refers to these people as “Big dippers.”)

The traffic is tired of bearing

Pharmaceutical companies are freaking out as the Democrats pick up where the Trump administration left off: They also want to either tie when Medicare pays for drugs to what the rest of the world pays, or at least allow Medicare to negotiate prices — you know, basic capitalism.

Drug companies, of course, want to keep the status quo, where there is no negotiation: They set the price, and Medicare forks it over. And they’re planning to use the same, tired arguments: ‘It will hurt innovation,’ ‘it will hurt jobs,’ yada yada yada.

The biosimilars roadblock

Since 2015, the FDA has approved 29 biosimilar products, but they’re still not in wide use — unlike generic drugs. What’s up with that?

Insurance companies, in large part. They have formularies, and while they rarely care which generic drug a patient takes, when it comes to physician-administered biosimilars, they get picky. And since 2019, larger insurers’ formularies specify which ones they will cover.

Think of the poor hospital pharmacist, who has to track multiple virtually identical drugs and which patients get which version. Oh, and insurers change their formularies month to month.

Hospital providers can now face a dizzying set of rules that must be carefully tracked when treating patients with different insurers. […] Rather than stocking one or two versions of a drug with no clinically meaningful differences and administering them to all patients, hospital pharmacies must inventory several versions depending on insurers’ preferences that month.

Bad baby bump

Yet more groundbreaking research, this from the University of British Columbia. Mechanical engineers there did the study, and they’re cautioning pregnant women to drive slowly* over speed bumps.

And there’s not a bit of hyperbole in this language:

If driven over quickly, they caution this can lead to minor injuries to the fetal brain, cause an abnormal fetal heart rate, abdominal pain, uterine contraction, increasing uterine activity and further complications.

* Preferably no more than 15.5 mph.

ICYMI: J&J vaccine

The FDA wants to “pause” the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine while it investigates reports of fears of blood clots. (Yes, that’s correct — just like with the AstraZeneca vaccine, there have been scattered reports of blood clots with the J&J shot.)

The Georgia DPH is doing just that.

To be clear: There have been six reports out of the 7,000,000 J&J shots in the U.S. That’s literally more than one in a million. (One in 1.167 million in fact.)