Tag: Gupta

Categories
Health

Biden to Nominate Rahul Gupta to Run Nationwide Workplace of Drug Management Coverage

Biden to Nominate Rahul Gupta to Run National Office of Drug Control Policy

Charleston’s program was nationally recognized, but it was criticized by the city’s mayor when Dr. Gupta was the health commissioner. Dr. Gupta’s department issued an audit that found fault with the program, including shoddy record keeping, which led to the program’s decertification after the city had already shut it down.

Public health experts said its closure had a chilling effect on other programs, and kept some from getting off the ground.

As a state health official, Dr. Gupta had no authority to stop the closure. In a 2018 interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting shortly before he left the health commissioner’s job, Dr. Gupta said that the closure was “not in the best interest of the community” and that needle exchange programs like Charleston’s should not be shut down “reactively.”

But critics faulted him for not using his platform forcefully enough to defend the program.

Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University and a longtime AIDS activist, on Tuesday called Dr. Gupta a “terrible choice” who “represents a return to the old ways of thinking about drug use in America, and is not the forward-thinking leader we need right now.”

Other experts said that Dr. Gupta was caught in a difficult situation with the battle over the syringe exchange. Mr. Raymond, while describing the closure of the Charleston program as “a tragedy,” called Dr. Gupta an “excellent choice.” That assessment was echoed by Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who worked with Dr. Gupta to address the opioid crisis in West Virginia.

“He knows the value of syringe service programs, he understands the evidence on harm reduction and he is very supportive,” Dr. Sharfstein said. “West Virginia is a very difficult environment for discussion of these topics, and he had to navigate under those constraints.”

The White House announced the selection of Dr. Gupta in a statement on Tuesday, along with 10 other nominations, including that of Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona, to be the ambassador to Turkey and that of the writer Atul Gawande to a post at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Categories
Health

Dr. Vin Gupta slams Covid reopening insurance policies of Arizona, Florida and Texas

Say goodbye to $30 plane tickets. The era of dirt-cheap flights is ending

The intensive care unit and the pulmonologist Dr. Vin Gupta have beaten up Republican governors of Arizona, Florida, and Texas for reopening prematurely, particularly as new variants are taking hold across the country.

“What the governors of Arizona, Florida, and Texas are doing is not good public policy,” Gupta said. “From a scientific point of view, it just doesn’t make sense … Especially in these populous states with generally older populations living in these states, there is a deep concern here that variants are already gaining a foothold.”

The US reports an average of 58,618 new Covid cases per day, an increase of 6.7% over the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University. This is the highest increase from the week since mid-January. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, issued a stern warning on Friday.

“I am still deeply concerned about this development,” said Walensky. “We have seen cases and hospital admissions go from historical declines to stagnation to increases. And we know from previous waves that if we don’t control things now, the epidemic curve has real potential to rise again.”

Gupta, an NBC medical worker, warned the early reopening could even spawn new, vaccine-resistant variants of Covid.

“Are we going to create a variant that evades any type of immunity the vaccine confers … that’s the big problem here,” Gupta said on CNBC’s The News with Shepard Smith.

“So we really need governors who will stay vigilant, preach vigilance and have a uniform public policy in all 50 states for the next few months until everyone gets a vaccine,” he said. “That will be the key piece here, otherwise we may not have normality on July 4th.”

Gupta said the US is in a “race against time” to vaccinate as many people as possible.

The White House announced on Friday a record 3.4 million vaccines administered nationwide. That number could rise as Johnson & Johnson prepares to dispense 11 million doses of its single-shot vaccine next week.

Representatives from the governors of Arizona, Texas, and Florida were not immediately available to comment.

Categories
Health

‘Model would not matter. Get the primary vaccine out there,’ Dr. Vin Gupta says

‘Brand doesn't matter. Get the first vaccine available,' Dr. Vin Gupta says

The intensive care unit and the pulmonologist Dr. Vin Gupta told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that patients should stop weighing the pros and cons of the Covid vaccine and still get the first shot in the arms as soon as possible, a new Israeli study that shows that the Pfizer vaccine will actually stop the spread of Covid.

“People say maybe I want the Pfizer vaccine instead of Johnson & Johnson or another,” said Gupta, a professor at the Department of Health Metrics and Assessment at the University of Washington, during an interview Monday evening. “That’s the wrong way to think about it. The brand here doesn’t matter. Get the first vaccine available.”

Gupta tweeted a photo of the lungs of a Covid patient who died of life support. The lungs developed holes that were once lung tissue, and Gupta said the vaccines can prevent this type of severe progression of the virus.

“This right-sided image is severe pneumonia that requires life support,” Gupta said. “All vaccines in the pipeline or approved prevent this, regardless of the variant.”

According to the Johns Hopkins University, the United States has exceeded 500,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, and that’s twice as many as any other nation. In fact, the US has recorded an average of one death per minute over the past year.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris honored the lives lost on Monday with a moment of silence and a candle-lighting ceremony in the White House. White House press secretary Jen Psaki also ordered Biden to lower the state flags to half the staff for the next five days. The bells at Washington National Cathedral rang 500 times in memory of the Americans killed by Covid.

The grim milestone of the pandemic comes when virus numbers improve. According to Johns Hopkins, the average daily cases are 69,986, a 52% decrease in this month alone. The average daily deaths are 1,872, the lowest since December 2. Hospital admissions are down 41% this month alone, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

However, Gupta told host Shepard Smith that people shouldn’t give up their vigilance when it comes to the virus.

“I think right now we have to be very careful how we feel about this good news,” said Gupta. “We still have to be vigilant, but yeah, that’s really good news, bright at the end of the tunnel, hopefully by midsummer.”

The highly transmittable new Covid variants have surfaced in several places in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The British variant was found in 44 states, the South African variant in 10 states and the Brazilian variant in 4 states.

Gupta noted that the US doesn’t have the sequencing technology to understand the “true spread” of the variants and is another reason for Americans to remain vigilant against the virus.