ICYMI: Rite Aid hacked

Rite Aid reported that 2.2 million of its customers’ personal information was stolen in June in a data breach … sorry, a “data security incident.” The theft occurred this year, but the data is a few years old:

“This data included purchaser name, address, date of birth, and driver’s license number or other form of government-issued ID presented at the time of a purchase between June 6, 2017, and July 30, 2018.”

The company halted ransom negotiations, and the hackers — a group called RansomHub — said they’ll leak the information by the end of the month if they aren’t paid.

Telemed works for opioid treatment

If you want patients to stick with their treatment for opioid addiction, it’s better for them to use telehealth visits than go to the ER.

That’s what University of Buffalo researchers found when they looked at the records of people referred to a local opioid treatment network. Those who came from the ER didn’t stick with the program nearly as well as telemedicine referrals.

65.1% of those referred via a telemedicine call showed up at their first clinic appointment versus 32.3% of those referred via an in-person emergency department visit.
And 53.2% of telemedicine patients were still in treatment at the 30-day mark versus 22.2% of those referred from an emergency department visit.

High-five to Buddy

Buddy Carter, the Georgia pharmacist — who also happens to be a US congressman — takes it to PBMs in an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “It’s time to bust it up the PBM cartel.” (Bonus: GPhA member Nikki Bryant is featured in the photo.)

Short takes: Long Covid

The 7 percent

A new report from the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality concludes that about 7% of the US population (18 million people) has had long Covid. That’s based on a survey of 17,000 adults across the county.

Vaccines cut risk

A different study out of the VA Saint Louis Health Care System found even more detail. Long-Covid rates have been declining to the point that only 3.5% of people vaccinated “during the Omicron era” — i.e., later in the pandemic — have long Covid, compared to 7.8% for unvaccinated patients. (That’s based on data from more than 5 million veterans.)

The conclusion: “Vaccines Significantly Reduce the Risk of Long Covid”.

… and so does repeat infection

Looking at longer-term trends, German researchers found that later variants of the virus were less likely to result in long Covid; “An Omicron infection was substantially less frequently associated with post-Covid-19 condition than earlier virus variants.”

Interesting: The more times someone was infected, and the more boosters they had, the lower their risk of long Covid.

Conclusion: Expect rates of long Covid to decrease over time.

Elsewhere: PBMs under fire

Vermont’s attorney general is suing CVS Caremark and Express Scripts, alleging they “pushed patients toward more expensive drugs even when cheaper ones were available, and pocketed the extra cost through an opaque system of fees^*,” which violates Vermont law.

Pennsylvania’s governor signed a bill that requires PBMs to reimburse all pharmacies equally and gives the Pennsylvania Insurance Department more oversight over those PBMs. Critically it reads:

A PBM registered with the department and conducting business on behalf of a health insurer client in this commonwealth may not:
(1) reimburse a retail pharmacy an amount less than the amount that the PBM reimburses a PBM-affiliated retail pharmacy located in this commonwealth for providing the same pharmacist services. (Emphasis ours.)

^* We’re shocked. Just shocked.

Another HIV cure

A seventh person has been cleared entirely of HIV. (We say “cleared” because we’re talking about the virus being removed from his system, even though the news says “cured.”)

In this case, a German man who developed acute myeloid leukemia after an HIV diagnosis needed a stem cell transplant. His treatment team found a donor with a rare mutation (“homozygous delta-32 CCR5”) that provides natural resistance to HIV. The transplant not only treated his cancer but also cleared the HIV from his body — it’s been almost six years now.

The detailed science is interesting: The donor was heterozygous with that mutation, meaning they had one copy of the gene … but the treatment still worked. People with heterozygosity for that delta-32 mutation are a lot more common than those with two copies of the gene, meaning there is more hope for a broad treatment.