Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Who Should Get The Bivalent Booster?; It's Possible To Eradicate Human Rabies Deaths
The new US Covid booster campaign needs a dose of clarity about its goals and limitations. The latest 鈥渂ivalent鈥 vaccine 鈥斅爎etooled to protect against the currently circulating BA.5 variant 鈥斅爓ill benefit some more than others. (Faye Flam, 9/28)
The Covid-19 pandemic set back many of the global health goals for 2030. One of the most feasible to recover is the target of eliminating human deaths from rabies, thanks to an effective, inexpensive vaccine for dogs. (Terence Scott, 9/29)
September, which is National Suicide Awareness Month, is coming to an end, but it has been a time to highlight a national emergency with local ramifications: the growing suicide rate in children. (Stacy Wilson, 9/29)
Despite rising overdose deaths, there鈥檚 some important good news regarding opioid misuse. Rates of nonmedical use by high school seniors have fallen by nearly 83 percent since 2002, when 14 percent reported having ever tried using prescription pain pills to get high. By 2021, that proportion was down to just 2 percent. Heroin use also shows a precipitous drop, with only 0.4 percent of 12th graders reporting trying it as of 2021. (Maia Szalavitz, 9/29)
What fueled the epidemic is well known: pharmaceutical companies鈥 greed, abetted by the politicians and lobbyists they paid to whittle away regulatory guardrails. That, plus the persistence of a decades-old 鈥渨ar on drugs鈥 mind-set that handles addicted people like criminals instead of human beings with a treatable medical condition. (Beth Macy, 9/28)
Institutional declarations of support for Black lives were ubiquitous in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The radical, transformative change demanded by hundreds of thousands of protestors across the country, however, has not been realized. Health systems can and must help move the country in that direction. (George Dalembert, Atheendar Venkataramani and Eugenia C. South, 9/29)
We bless the advent of airbags. But few people realize that these safety devices, while ultimately saving lives, may cause complex injuries themselves. (Patricia A. Richard, MD, DMD, 9/29)
