Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It’s not great. From Nelson et al. (2009): Among those who received a first dose of varicella (n = 16 075), hepatitis A (n = 594 917), and hepatitis B (n = 590 445) vaccine, relatively few completed the series (55%–65% for hepatitis B vaccine and 40%–50% for hepatitis A and varicella vaccines in most…
Health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities is the answer according to the CDC. STAT News reports: Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 13 to 1 to put health care providers and long-term care residents — two groups that represent about 24 million Americans — at the top of the vaccine priority…
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have come true. Stat News reports: The Moderna vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received placebo in the company’s…
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
Given the incredible speed in which vaccine development for COVID-19 is occurring, it merits thinking back on the typical development and approval time of previous vaccines. Puthumana et al. (2020) reviews 21 vaccines approvals since 2010. They find that: …most novel vaccines approved by the FDA required about 8 years of clinical development and were…
Great news on progress for a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. From their press release: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants Study enrolled 43,538 participants,…
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
That is according to a Health Affairspaper by So Yoon Sim et al. (2020). We estimated economic benefits using cost-of-illness and value-of-a-statistical-life approaches and combined this estimation with immunization program costs to derive the return on investment from immunization programs against ten pathogens for ninety-four low- and middle-income countries for the period 2011–30. Using the…
That are the results from a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey. It is pretty dispiriting that only 71% of people will probably or definitely get a vaccine. Is this because people are not scared of COVID? No. In general, most people are concerned. 63% of people say they are very or somewhat worried that they…
Tuberculosis (TB) kills the most people in the world of any other pathogen. While treatments are available to fight TB, there are a number of challenges. First, many individuals may have latent TB where the disease may be contagious before symptoms are apparent. Second, the spread of HIV has also been problematic for controlling TB,…