Tag Archives: pharmacies

Fears of coronavirus second wave prompt flu push at U.S. pharmacies, drugmakers

By Caroline Humer and Julie Steenhuysen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. pharmacy chains are preparing a big push for flu vaccinations when the season kicks off in October, hoping to curb tens of thousands of serious cases that could coincide with a second wave of coronavirus infections.

CVS Health Corp, one of the largest U.S. pharmacies, said it is working to ensure it has vaccine doses available for an anticipated surge in customers seeking shots to protect against seasonal influenza.

Rival chain Rite Aid Corp has ordered 40 percent more vaccine doses to meet the expected demand. Walmart Inc and Walgreens Boots Alliance said they also are expecting more Americans to seek these shots.

Drugmakers are ramping up to meet the demand. Australian vaccine maker CSL Ltd’s Seqirus said demand from customers has increased by 10 percent. British-based GlaxoSmithKline said it is ready to increase manufacturing as needed.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,428 adults conducted May 13-19 found that about 60 percent of U.S. adults plan to get the flu vaccine in the fall. Typically fewer than half of Americans get vaccinated. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends the vaccine for everyone over age 6 months.

Getting a flu shot does not protect against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus for which there are no approved vaccines. Public health officials have said vaccination against the flu will be critical to help prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with flu and COVID-19 patients.

“We’re in for a double-barreled assault this fall and winter with flu and COVID. Flu is the one you can do something about,“ Vanderbilt University Medical Center infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner said.

Drugmakers last year produced nearly 170 million doses of influenza vaccine, according to the CDC. There were up to 740,000 hospitalizations and 62,000 deaths in the 2019-2020 flu season that ended last month, the CDC said.

While health insurance typically covers the flu shot at a doctor’s office and other groups offer free flu vaccine clinics, the adult vaccine retails for about $40, putting the U.S. market at up to $6.8 billion. The CDC secures some doses at a discount price in its child vaccination program.

Global revenue for influenza vaccines is about $5 billion, according to Wall Street firm Bernstein, and in the United States each additional 1 percentage point of Americans getting the vaccine is worth $75 million in revenues to drugmakers.

HEAVIER TOLL

CDC Director Robert Redfield has said that flu and COVID-19 combined could exact a heavier toll on Americans than the initial coronavirus outbreak that began this winter.

Some experts said creative ways must be developed to ensure that people are vaccinated against flu because patients may be less likely to see their doctors in person out of fear of getting infected with the coronavirus in medical offices.

Pharmacies, public health clinics and other flu shot providers may need to develop drive-up clinics – popular with COVID-19 diagnostic tests – for flu vaccines, said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease.

“My goal is that every single vaccine dose that gets made gets into somebody’s arm to protect them. I don’t want any vaccines left on the shelves or in doctors’ offices,” Messonnier said in an interview.

One reason for reluctance among Americans to get the flu shot is that it does not always prevent disease, in part because the flu strains selected as targets of the vaccine months ahead of time are not always a perfect match for the dominant flu strains that actually circulate in any given season. But the shots reliably reduce hospitalizations every year, according to experts.

“Even if it protects 35 to 40 percent of the population, it’s a lot better than zero,” University of Minnesota influenza expert Dr. Michael Osterholm said.

In a survey commissioned by CVS Health between January and May, consumers who said they will definitely or are likely to get a flu shot rose from 34 percent to 65 percent. They also said they would increasingly go to pharmacies and less often to a doctor’s office or healthcare centers.

Rite Aid Chief Pharmacy Officer Jocelyn Konrad said the pharmacy chain, which provided about 2.6 million flu shots last year, upped its order by 40 percent this year.

Rite Aid said social distancing policies may cut into workplace flu clinics but that it may offer voucher programs to employers and is considering setting up drive-through clinics. In Australia, where the winter flu season is underway, such sites are already in use.

Some U.S. doctors are also considering clinics in parks and community centers and even home visits for vulnerable patients, said David Ross, vice president of commercial operations for North America at Seqirus.

“As we look at immunization this coming fall, it will play an enormous role in this battle against COVID-19,” Ross said.

(Reporting by Caroline Humer in New York and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Additional reporting by Grant Smith in New York; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Will Dunham)

U.S. health secretary says agency has power to eliminate drug rebates

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar listens to U.S. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders introduce him during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 11, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis

By Yasmeen Abutaleb

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said it was within his agency’s power to eliminate rebates on prescription drug purchases, a key element of the Trump administration’s plan to lower prescription medicine costs.

Such rebates are negotiated in the United States by pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) to lower the cost of medicines for their clients, including large employers and health plans that cover tens of millions of Americans.

Drugmakers say they are under pressure to provide rebates to the few PBMs that dominate the market and that those payers do not pass on enough of those savings to patients – a contention the PBMs dispute. The drugmakers say the rebates force them to raise the price of their therapies over time to preserve their business.

The Trump administration has been receptive to that argument. Azar, in an interview with Reuters on Friday, said rebates created a perverse incentive to continuously raise drug prices.

Azar, a former top executive at drugmaker Eli Lilly Co, is trying to deliver on President Donald Trump’s promises to lower the cost of prescription drugs for Americans, which Trump made a major priority during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The Department of Health and Human Services last month proposed regulations that would scale back protections for rebates that might otherwise be illegal under a federal anti-kickback law.

The PBM industry has challenged that move, saying HHS cannot eliminate rebates on its own and would need Congress to change the federal statute. The ultimate responsibility for high drug prices, those companies say, lies with the manufacturers who set those prices.

Azar contends that the current rebates are a product of previous HHS regulation. “What one has created by regulation, one could address by regulation,” he added.

He did not say when such new regulations, which are being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, might take effect. “The question of rebates may very well be fundamental to the issue of how you reverse these constant incentives to higher list prices (for medicines).”

CAMPAIGN ISSUE

The cost of healthcare, and prescription drugs specifically, is expected to be a major campaign issue ahead of November elections, in which Democrats are seeking to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate from Trump’s Republicans.

In May, Trump unveiled a “blueprint” comprising dozens of proposed policies to give the government greater leverage over drug prices but did not support changes to give the federal government’s Medicare health plan for seniors direct negotiating power with drugmakers. Critics say that has spared the pharmaceutical industry any real challenge to its pricing practices.

Azar defended the administration’s actions, noting that more than a dozen leading drugmakers, including Pfizer Inc, Merck Co and Celgene Corp, had pledged to hold off on further price increases this year.

“They are seeing where this is going, they are seeing that we are ticking off the blueprint items one by one,” Azar said. “We are not dependent on the voluntary action of pharmaceutical companies. We are not counting on their goodwill or their altruism. … They’re just changing because they see that’s the future.”

Critics say the drug price pledges by major drugmakers are largely window dressing.

Since May, HHS has given Medicare Advantage health plans, which are administered by private-sector health insurers, new tools to lower prescription drug costs.

The agency’s Food and Drug Administration has unveiled a plan to boost the use of biosimilars, which are cheaper versions of expensive biotech medicines. Azar has directed the FDA to establish a working group to study how to import drugs safely from other countries if a drugmaker dramatically raises prices.

The actions have already sparked concerns. Last week, a leading group of rheumatologists met with Azar to discuss changes to Medicare Advantage that could force some patients to try a less effective, cheaper medication for a period of time before their health plan would cover a more expensive therapy.

HHS said Azar emphasized the agency’s interest in lowering drug prices but expressed openness to alleviating burdens that could be placed on physicians as a result of the new rule.

Azar said he spoke with Trump every few days, either in person or over the phone and that in every conversation, the president wanted to hear about progress on lowering prescription medicine costs.

“I have never once had a meeting or phone call with the president where we have not talked about drug pricing,” Azar said.

(Reporting by Yasmeen Abutaleb; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Peter Cooney)

‘Jackpotting’ hackers steal over $1 million from ATM machines across U.S.: Secret Service

A hooded man holds a laptop computer as blue screen with an exclamation mark is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017.

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A coordinated group of hackers likely tied to international criminal syndicates has pilfered more than $1 million by hijacking ATM machines across the United States and forcing them to spit out bills like slot machines dispensing a jackpot, a senior U.S. Secret Service official said on Monday.

Within the past few days there have been about a half-dozen successful “jackpotting” attacks, the official said.

The heists, which involve hacking ATMs to rapidly shoot out torrents of cash, have been observed across the United States spanning from the Gulf Coast in the southern part of the country to the New England region in the northeast, Matthew O’Neill, a special agent in the criminal investigations division, told Reuters in an interview.

The spate of attacks represented the first widespread jackpotting activity in the United States, O’Neill said. Previous campaigns have been spotted in parts of Europe and Latin America in recent years.

“It was just a matter of time until it hit our shores,” O’Neill said.

Diebold Nixdorf Inc and NCR Corp, two of the world’s largest ATM makers, warned last week that cyber criminals are targeting ATMs with tools needed to carry out jackpotting schemes.

The Diebold Nixdorf alert described steps that criminals had used to compromise ATMs. They include gaining physical access, replacing the hard drive and using an industrial endoscope to depress an internal button required to reset the device.

A confidential U.S. Secret Service alert seen by Reuters and sent to banks on Friday said machines running XP were more vulnerable and encouraged ATM operators to update to Windows 7 to protect against the attack, which appeared to be targeting ATMs typically located in pharmacies, big box retailers and drive-thrus.

While initial intelligence suggested only ATMs running on outdated Windows XP software were being targeted, the Secret Service has seen successful attacks within the past 48 hours on machines running updated Windows 7, O’Neil said.

“There isn’t one magic solution to solve the problem,” he said.

A local electronic crimes task force in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area first reported an unsuccessful jackpotting attempt last week, O’Neill said.

A few days later another local partner witnessed similar activity and “developed intelligence” that indicated a sustained, coordinated attack was likely to occur over the next two weeks, O’Neill said. He declined to say where that partner was located.

Jackpotting has been rising worldwide in recent years, though it is unclear how much cash has been stolen because victims and police often do not disclose details.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz in Washington, D.C.; Editing by David Gregorio)