Weekend Update

David Ermer–Congress, COVID-19, U.S. Healthcare–

The House of Representatives and the Senate are holding Committee business and floor voting this week. The President will give the State of the Union address tomorrow at 9 pm.

Following up on the May 11 end of the Covid public health emergency decision, CNBC informs us that the federal government’s free vaccine supply with be exhausted in “early fall,” likely October.

Vaccine pricing in the early fall 

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel told CNBC last month that the company is preparing to sell the vaccines on the private market as early as this fall. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors during the company’s earnings call this week that he is preparing for the vaccines to go commercial in the second half of the year.

Pfizer and Moderna have said they are considering hiking the price of the vaccines to somewhere around $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S. government pulls out of the vaccine program.

Paxlovid pricing and available supply

Pfizer has not announced how much the antiviral will cost once it goes commercial. The federal government is paying about $530 for a five-day treatment course. It’s unclear how much patients will have to pay out of pocket and how much of the price insurance will cover.

Dawn O’Connell, who heads the federal office responsible for the U.S. stockpile, said last August that the Health and Human Services Department expected to run out of Paxlovid by mid-2023.

[Dr. Ashish] Jha [the Omicron czar] said on Tuesday that there are still millions of doses of Paxlovid and omicron boosters in the U.S. stockpile. “They will continue to be available for free to all Americans who need them,” Jha said of the remaining federal supply.

From the public health front —

  • NPR Shots reflects on the end of the 2021-2022 tripledemic. The FEHBlog was pleasantly surprised that the Omicron X.BB surge was manageable even after the flu and RSV surges faded. In the FEHBlog’s layman’s view as a grandfather, the RSV surge was an unavoidable one-time event. The silver lining in that particular cloud is that a single-shot vaccine against RSV for infants appears on the horizon. The flu, like Omicron, will be with us for the foreseeable future.
  • The New York Times Magazine featured a thought-provoking article on menopause.
  • Fortune Well discusses available and future cancer vaccines.