Doors wide open

All the state’s mass-vaccination sites will be open to everyone starting Monday, no appointment necessary.

Two parties, eight bills, and plans to rein in drug prices

A group of eight bills — each supported by Democrats and Republicans — have been introduced in Congress, all aimed at lowering the prices of medication.

From rules to prevent drug makers from making a minor change to get a new patent (“product hopping”), to banning pay-for-delay deals with generics makers, to stopping drug companies from making fake “citizen petitions” to hurt a rival, and more, the bills’ broad support looks good … at least until the lobbying begins.

Why the wrong people are unvaccinated

The places with the most people at high risk for Covid-19 are often the places with the lowest vaccination rates? It’s not just vaccine refusal. The folks at ProPublica (who turn piles of data into interesting stories) looked at what’s going wrong.

In short, the issue was (and is) a focus on older people and not the most vulnerable.

Why did that happen? Because, despite the Trump administration telling them to prioritize the vulnerable, without federal funding, it made more sense for cash-strapped states to say “Anyone over 65” rather than mount the expensive effort to identify and reach the poor and sick, many of whom are in harder-to-reach rural areas.

So now we have those poorer, less-healthy, and less mobile people who are still unvaccinated.

“We’re not out of the woods yet in this country. What happened in Michigan could still happen in a number of other states out there. Even with the level of vaccination they’ve had and the previous infections, look what still happened.”

Kidney transplant? There’s an app for that

Pharmacists at the Medical University of South Carolina created an app for kidney-transplant recipients to help them deal with the medication side of things: errors, side effects, and of course “failure to take medications as prescribed.”

All of those can compromise their health, but the pharmacists’ solution is fairly simple: The app not only reminds them to take their meds and has them report side effects, it’s also used during televisits and connects to the patients’ home-based blood pressure and blood sugar monitoring.

Compared with participants in the control group, participants receiving the intervention were 61% less likely to experience a medication error, 45% less likely to experience serious side effects, and 54% less likely to be hospitalized over the 12 months of the study.

Choose your own vaccination adventure

The biggest roadblock to ending the pandemic in the U.S. is now vaccine hesitancy, fueled by anti-vaxxers, deniers, and people who are just getting bad information.

Researchers at Britain’s Imperial College London modeled what might happen in different vaccination scenarios, based on the level of hesitancy. It ain’t pretty.

In the best case scenario, restrictions can safely be lifted before the end of the year. But with even moderate hesitancy … well, we may need to go back to “non-pharmaceutical interventions” — think lockdowns — to keep the pandemic from restarting.

ICYMI

The FDA is planning to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, with a formal proposal coming within a year.

…but the ban is likely to take years to implement and will surely face immense opposition from the tobacco industry and its advocates in Congress.

The Long Read: GoodRx

It’s popular (mostly), it’s profitable, and it gets people their meds. So how does GoodRx work? And is it helping, “profiting off a broken system,” or maybe a bit of both? Fortune looks deep.

[Patients] don’t have to dig out an insurance card, or think about co-pays, deductibles, PBMs, or health plans—all the things that make American health care so miserable. Of course, that stuff and all the dysfunction are still there in the background. GoodRx is just the middleman that lets you forget it.

Today’s medical shocker

…comes from epidemiologists in Wuhan-yes-that-Wuhan, China. They found that people who are poorer and who have unhealthy lifestyles are more likely to die.