
From Washington, DC
- While the House of Representatives is on a district workweek, the Senate continues with Committee business and floor voting.
- The President’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will attend a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on Wednesday and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday.
- The Wall Street Journal reports,
- “The Central Intelligence Agency has now concluded that the deadly Covid-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, lending credibility to a view that has been the focus of sharp debate among scientists and politicians for years.
- “In doing so, the CIA has now joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department in identifying a laboratory mishap in Wuhan, China, as the probable source of the Covid virus. It has killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million people worldwide.
- “CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said in a statement released Saturday.
- “The spokesman added that the judgment was “low confidence” and that the CIA would continue to evaluate “any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”
- “The agency had previously taken the stance that it didn’t have enough information to assess whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or arose from a laboratory mishap.
From the public health and medical research front,
- The Washington Post notes
- “Ever since the novel coronavirus reached the United States five years ago, it has unleashed punishing winter waves of illness.
- “But the usual covid uptick is much more muted this winter and appears to have peaked. The virus is less rampant in wastewater compared with winters past. Hospitalization rates have gone down.
- “Instead, an unusual medley of ailments emerged this season — walking pneumonia, RSV, norovirus and bird flu — along with the more familiar foe: influenza, which is garnering more attention than covid this time around because the hospitalization rate is three times as high.”
- The University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP points out,
- “The estimated effectiveness of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) among older US veterans in the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season against infection, emergency department/urgent care (ED/UC) visits, and hospitalization was 78%, 79%, and 80%, respectively.
- “The findings, published this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, come from a target trial emulation study led by researchers at the Veterans Affairs Portland Health Care System in Oregon. The observational study was designed to fill in knowledge gaps remaining after clinical trials (e.g., vaccine effectiveness (VE) in people with weakened immune systems, effects on healthcare use for infection).”
- and
- “In the largest trial of its kind, patients receiving oral versus intravenous (IV) antibiotics for fracture-related infections (FRIs) had similar reoperation and reinfection rates, US researchers reported this week in JAMA Surgery.
- “But the primary and secondary analyses of trial results came to different conclusions regarding noninferiority, leaving some uncertainty about the findings.”
- Per Fierce Pharma,
- “Old drugs from Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer have delivered what the companies and researchers believe could establish them as new standard treatments for certain colorectal cancer patients.
- “In Bristol Myers’ case, the company’s dual immunotherapy of Opdivo and Yervoy showed it could work better than Opdivo alone in patients with certain metastatic colorectal cancer. The combo lowered the risk of disease progression or death by 38% in patients with microsatellite instability-high or mismatch repair-deficient (MSI-H/dMMR) tumors, according to data from the phase 3 CheckMate-8HW trial to be presented at the ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.
- “The study randomized 707 patients across various lines of treatment, with 55% of participants in the Opdivo-Yervoy arm and 52% of the Opdivo monotherapy arm entering in the first-line setting.”
- The Wall Street Journal discusses new approaches to treating minor injuries like sprains. “Updated methods for treating sprains, strains and bruises now focus on boosting your body’s natural healing process.”
From the U.S. healthcare business front,
- Beckers Hospital Review shares 109 statistics on hospital margins, revenues, which are bumpy by region.”
- Kauffman Hall offers an infographic on hospital and health system M&A trends in 2024.
- Per HR Dive,
- CFOs expect their companies to see a 7.3% rise in salaries and wages paid in the next 12 months, according to a Q4 Deloitte survey, which polled 200 finance chiefs at companies with a minimum of $1 billion in revenue shortly after the U.S. election in November. The pay projection was nearly double the 3.65% rise anticipated in Q3, according to the findings of the Big Four firm’s previous quarter’s report.