Public Health

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on PRX. President Joe Biden has said he still wants a bipartisan bill to provide the next round of covid relief. But in case that doesn’t happen, House committees this week got down to work on a budget reconciliation bill that could pass the Senate with a […]

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 […]

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 […]

Contact tracing, a critical part of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, has fallen behind in recent months as covid-19 cases have soared. President Joe Biden had pledged to change that. Biden proposes hiring 100,000 people nationwide as part of a new public health jobs corps. They would help with contact tracing and […]

As the pandemic sends thousands of recovering alcoholics into relapse, hospitals across the country have reported dramatic increases in alcohol-related admissions for critical diseases like alcoholic hepatitis and liver failure. Alcoholism-related liver disease was a growing problem even before the pandemic, with 15 million people diagnosed with the condition around the country, and with hospitalizations […]

“Now he [Biden] is saying that people who came here illegally can jump ahead of other Americans who have been waiting to get the vaccine.” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) During a Feb. 2 interview on Fox News, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) claimed President Joe Biden was allowing unauthorized immigrants to move ahead of American citizens […]