| | | |   | Happy Thursday, D.C. Diagnosis readers! It was nice to see some of you all at our event on Friday. I hope you all had a great long weekend if you had one — mine was a little ~newsier~ than expected over here, with the recent upheaval at BIO. If you’re interested in chatting, drop any tips to rachel.cohrs@statnews.com. | | | The latest Covid funding mystery (Stephanie Nano/AP) The Biden administration has long complained about Congress’ apathy toward providing additional Covid-19 response funding. But Republicans are frustrated, in turn, that the administration seems to keep finding billions of dollars between the couch cushions when it needs to make purchases.
The latest installment — last month, the federal government finally paid for the rest of its contract with Pfizer for Paxlovid, the Covid treatment. The purchase cost $4.9 billion. It’s not entirely clear where it came from, but my colleague Sarah Owermohle and I did some digging to get more details.
A senior Biden administration official told us the funds to pay Pfizer the final tranche came from "things like vaccine and therapeutic countermeasures, the [strategic national] stockpile, testing and other mitigation activities.”
HHS didn’t offer any more details, but records that were newly made public show that the administration wasn’t actually completely out of money, like they’ve claimed to Congress. I dug through the HHS spreadsheets to figure out which accounts have some funds leftover, and how much is left. One important qualifier – these numbers were time stamped near the end of August, so it’s possible that there have been changes since then. -
BARDA: $620 million -
Strategic National Stockpile: $2.9 billion -
Defense Production Act: $1.7 billion -
Healthcare Provider Reimbursements: $10.7 billion -
Testing, contact tracing, and mitigation: $10.6 billion - Antivirals: $396.8 million
- Vaccines and therapeutics: $130 million
| The surprising group that will be hit hard by drug pricing reform Obviously, pharmaceutical companies are upset that they’re going to lose money from Medicare under Democrats’ new drug pricing law. But there’s another, less obvious group that’s concerned as well — long-term care pharmacies that serve almost entirely Medicare patients, and dispense the drugs that will likely enter the price negotiation program first.
While long-term care pharmacies support lowering drug costs, they’re also worried about whether their bottom lines will take a hit as a result, said Alan Rosenbloom, president and CEO of the Senior Care Pharmacy Coalition. They aren’t paid a percentage of the costs for the drugs they dispense, but lower prices will mean smaller pools of discounts for groups like insurers, wholesalers and pharmacies.
“Pharmacies shouldn’t be collateral damage. We didn’t cause high prices,” Rosenbloom said in an interview with STAT.
The two biggest long-term care pharmacy companies are Omnicare, which is owned by CVS Health, and PharMerica, which is owned by private equity firm KKR. | Find patterns in clinical trials data for clear decision-making that will get you ahead. STAT Trials Pulse combines machine learning and STAT’s award-winning newsroom to help you reduce information overload and identify the signals that matter in the clinical trials landscape. Build watch lists to monitor the companies and therapeutic areas you care about, receive personalized email briefings about your followed trials, and decode patterns you wouldn’t otherwise see. Learn more at statnews.com/trials-pulse, or start your 30-day free trial. | A patent reform Genius 
(John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation) The latest round of MacArthur Fellows were announced yesterday afternoon, and one grantee in particular is a familiar face to those following the patent reform debate: Priti Krishtel, the co-founder and co-executive director of I-MAK.
She’s described as a “health justice lawyer exposing the inequities in the patnet system to increase access to affordable, life-saving medications on a global scale.” It’s an endorsement of the team’s work ahead of a looming debate over the issue — sources tell your author that patent reform could be up next, now that Congress has passed changes to how Medicare pays for drugs.
The fellowship is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award over five years to help individuals pursue their interests. | | | | | Thanks for reading! More next week,  | |
No comments