ANTIOCH, Calif. — A mobile “strike team” is bringing vaccines to some of Northern California’s most vulnerable residents along with a message: This is how you avoid dying from covid-19. So far, that message has been met with both nervous acceptance and outbursts of joy from a population that has been ravaged by the disease. […]
In eastern Tennessee, doctors have seen firsthand how a hard-line immigration policy can affect the health and well-being of a community. In 2018, federal agents raided a meatpacking plant in Morristown, a manufacturing hub in the Tennessee Valley, and detained nearly 100 workers they suspected of being in the country illegally. In the weeks that […]
Robin Davidson entered the lobby of Houston Methodist Hospital, where her 89-year-old father, Joe, was being treated for a flare-up of congestive heart failure. Before her stretched a line of people waiting to get covid-19 vaccines. “It was agonizing to know that I couldn’t get in that line,” said Davidson, 50, who is devoted to […]
“Pfizer and Moderna could share their design with dozens of other pharma companies who stand ready to produce their vaccines and end the pandemic.” — Feb. 3 in a Facebook post Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna earned praise for creating highly effective covid-19 vaccines in record time. But are they inadvertently hurting the public by […]
Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen. Jared Walker, who runs a nonprofit that helps people pay medical bills, posted a TikTok video explaining the recipe to “crush” hospital bills via charity care policies. “What that means is that if you make under a certain amount of money, the hospital legally has to forgive […]
A key U.S. senator is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate N95 mask fraud and federal agents announced the seizure of 1.7 million more counterfeit 3M masks in the New York borough of Queens as the breadth of a major scam concerning front-line health workers continues to grow. Early Thursday, Sen. Maria Cantwell […]
Peter Prater’s family wasn’t thinking about covid-19 when the call came that he had been taken to the hospital with a fever. It was April, and the Tallahassee Developmental Center, where Prater lives, hadn’t yet had any covid diagnoses. Prater, 55, who has Down syndrome and diabetes, became the Florida center’s first known case, his […]
Fed up with a lack of federal action to lower prescription drug costs, state legislators around the country are pushing bills to penalize drugmakers for unjustified price hikes and to cap payment at much-lower Canadian levels. These bills, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats in a half-dozen states, are a response to consumers’ intensified demand […]
Thousands of counterfeit 3M respirators have slipped past U.S. investigators in recent months, making it to the cheeks and chins of health care workers and perplexing experts who say their quality is not vastly inferior to the real thing. N95 masks are prized for their ability to filter out 95% of the minuscule particles that […]
Mary Barnett is one of about a dozen seniors who got a covid-19 vaccine on a recent morning at Neighborhood Health, a clinic tucked in a sprawling public housing development on the south side of downtown Nashville, Tennessee. “Is my time up, baby?” Barnett, 74, asked a nurse, after she’d waited 15 minutes to make […]
