Tag: HHS

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Former HHS official applauds ‘data-driven’ easing of CDC masks steering

Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Fauci, Paul exchange on face masks

Former health and social worker Dr. Mario Ramirez on Tuesday welcomed President Joe Biden’s support for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s masking updates.

“I think the president made the right point today, namely that today’s guidance is not about politics, but rather a data-driven recommendation based on how these vaccines behave in the wild,” said Ramirez.

According to the CDC, fully vaccinated people can exercise outdoors and attend small gatherings without wearing a face mask. Biden said the new recommendations underscore the strides the US has made in fighting Covid.

Ramirez, a former HHS Pandemic and Emerging Threat Coordinator for the Office of Global Affairs, told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that while the US is headed in the right direction on vaccinations, officials have an “ongoing messaging campaign “to convince skeptical Americans to vaccinate.

In the US, 232 million shots of vaccine have been put into guns, according to CDC data, with 43% of the total population receiving at least one dose and nearly 20% of the country being fully vaccinated.

Dr. Peter Hotez told The News with Shepard Smith on Friday that daylight saving time in the US could return to a pre-Covid-19 normal if 75% to 80% of the US population are vaccinated.

Ramirez said improving vaccine convenience will be another helpful step in getting more Americans vaccinated.

“One of the things we’re looking forward to this fall is whether vaccine makers can actually pool a flu and a coronavirus vaccine together. If we can, it will go a long way toward improving vaccine uptake,” he said Ramirez.

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Senate to verify Xavier Becerra as HHS secretary

Senate to confirm Xavier Becerra as HHS secretary

Xavier Becerra, candidate for Secretary of State for Health and Human Services, answers questions during his Senate Finance Committee nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on February 24, 2021.

Greg Nash | Pool | Reuters

The Senate plans to confirm Xavier Becerra as secretary for health and human services on Thursday as the US looks to contain Covid-19 and achieve a semblance of normal life by the summer.

Becerra, California’s attorney general, will get approval by a narrow margin in a Senate split between 50 and 50 parties. Almost all Republicans have opposed the former US representative’s nomination, questioning his past healthcare experience and support for Medicare for All.

Becerra would be the first Latino to lead HHS.

The support of Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, should remove the need for Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a casting vote.

If this is confirmed, Becerra will play a vital role in one of the federal government’s most daunting corporations of all time. HHS will help ease Covid-19 vaccinations and testing efforts as health officials hope widespread vaccination will fight back a mutating virus and allow businesses and schools to reopen.

While the spread of the virus has slowed in the United States, the country has about 54,800 Covid-19 cases and at least 1,200 deaths every day, according to a 7-day average calculated by CNBC. About 15.5% of adults and 37.6% of those over 65 are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Becerra will also play a prominent role as the Biden government continues health care reform. President Joe Biden has supported the creation of a Medicare-style public insurance option and changes to control the cost of medication and care.

Becerra becomes the 20th member of the President’s Senate-approved cabinet. The chamber has turned its attention to filling the executive branch since it passed the $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus alleviation law earlier this month.

At a Senate confirmation hearing last month, Becerra said he understood “the enormous challenges that lie ahead”. He said he will work not only to contain the virus, but also to improve access to affordable health care.

Becerra touted his work as California’s attorney general to make Covid treatments more widely available and to crack down on opioid manufacturers.

After her election to the Senate last year, he succeeded Harris as the state’s largest law enforcement officer in 2017. Becerra won a four-year term in 2018.

He represented California in the US House from 1993 to 2017.

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HHS secretary recommends states open pictures to older People, weak teams

HHS secretary recommends states open shots to older Americans, vulnerable groups

Minister of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on Wednesday urged states not to micromanage their assigned coronavirus vaccine doses, saying it was better to get the shots off as soon as possible, even if they don’t all have theirs Vaccinate healthcare workers.

“There is no reason states need to complete vaccination of all health care providers before opening vaccinations to older Americans or other high-risk populations,” Azar told reporters during a news conference.

“When they use all of the vaccine that’s allocated, ordered, distributed, shipped, and got it in the arms of the healthcare providers, that’s all great,” he added. “But if for some reason their distribution is difficult and you have vaccines in freezers, then you should definitely open them to people 70 and over.”

US officials are trying to speed up the pace of vaccinations after a slower-than-expected initial rollout. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States continues to grow. The nation has at least 219,200 new Covid-19 cases and at least 2,670 virus-related deaths each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided states with an overview recommending that priority be given to health workers and nursing homes first. However, states may distribute the vaccine at their own discretion.

Azar said Wednesday that states that offer some “flexibility” about who gets the first doses are “the best way to get more shots in the arms, faster”. “Faster administration could save lives now, which means we cannot allow perfect to be the enemy of good,” he said. “Hope is here in the form of vaccines.”

More than 4.8 million people in the United States received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine at 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday, according to the CDC. The number is a far cry from the federal government’s goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020 and 50 million Americans by the end of this month.

US officials admitted vaccine distribution was slower than hoped. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told STAT News Tuesday that she expects the vaccine rollout to accelerate “fairly massively” in the coming weeks.

“It is the beginning of a really complicated task, but one that we are ready for,” she told STAT.

Global health experts had said distributing the vaccines to around 331 million Americans within a few months could prove to be much more complicated and chaotic than originally thought. In addition to making adequate doses, states and territories also need enough needles, syringes, and bottles to complete vaccinations.

The logistics involved in obtaining and administering the vaccine are complex and require special training. For example, Pfizer’s vaccine requires a storage temperature of minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines cannot be re-frozen and must be given at room temperature and within hours, otherwise there is a risk of going bad.

Read More: The Long Road Of The Covid Vaccine: How Doses Get From The Manufacturing Plant To Your Arm

Azar also said the holidays likely played a factor in the slow adoption of vaccines. Healthcare providers knew it would be difficult to hire millions of people for vaccinations by December.

Nearly 20 million doses of vaccine have been dispensed to more than 13,000 locations across the country, General Gustave Perna, who oversees logistics for President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed ​​vaccination program, said during the same meeting.

The vaccine distribution is going “very well,” he said, adding that officials are still working to improve the process. “Our goal is to keep the drum beat constant so that states have a cadence of allocation planning and then the appropriate allocation to the right places as indicated.”

“We are constantly re-evaluating the numbers and making sure that they are distributed in the right places [and] Make sure execution is happening so other decisions can be made about assignments, “he added.

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HHS releases sweeping new report on U.S. Covid outbreak in transfer towards transparency

HHS releases sweeping new report on U.S. Covid outbreak in move toward transparency

The Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive new report on the state of the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak on Friday, releasing data previously only available to government employees.

The new “Community Profile Report” uses data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the HHS Protection System to show the severity of the outbreak in different states and even counties. The first report shows that 35 states are “red,” indicating a major outbreak.

The report also names “selected high-exposure areas” where the number of new cases is increasing rapidly along with the percentage of positive tests. For example, Nashville, Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Somerset, Pennsylvania are high-pollution areas in the first report.

The report also identifies “Rapid Riser Counties” and displays several heatmaps that contain various statistics that are used to determine how bad the local outbreak is in counties across the country. It records, among other things, the death rates, the percentage of positive tests and hospital admissions in Covid.

It is the most comprehensive picture of the US outbreak released by the federal government about nine months after the virus spread across the country. It is a reminder that such data was withheld from the public for months while it was distributed among federal and some state officials.

Jose Arrieta, who served as the chief information officer for HHS when the government launched HHS Protect, the agency’s Covid-19 hospital data warehouse, said the new report was “certainly a step in the right direction” toward transparency. Arrieta resigned in August.

“A number of agency staff, including myself when I was there, pushed for transparency,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I appreciate the fact that the data is being shared.”

Dr. Janis Orlowski, Chief Health Care Officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, is a member of the working group for White House Health Advisor Dr. Deborah Birx, on improving HHS protection. She said she and other members had been pushing for more data to be released over the past few weeks.

“We pushed for transparency, transparency, transparency … and they are doing a good job,” she said. “I like that it’s transparent and that epidemiologists and other people can look at it and say that’s fine, but it would really be better if we knew X, Y or Z.”

HHS spokeswoman Katie McKeogh said in a statement to CNBC that at least some of the data is in one form or another in scattered reports, but this new report brings it all together.

“As you know, there are different reporting processes at the local, state and state levels, and it has taken time and effort to build consistency between these systems to present the data as you see it today,” she said in a statement opposite CNBC. “This report has been extremely valuable to the federal response and we hope it will be helpful to state and local health departments, hospitals, businesses and the public as well.”

Much of the data in the report has been distributed to governors and state officials by the White House coronavirus task force to guide local Covid-19 strategy. Many of the reports, which in public statements often paint a worse picture of the outbreak than federal officials, were received from reporters.

The new public reports are a major step towards transparency in a federal response that is largely characterized by its opaque data collection.

“We hope that making this data public will help Americans make personal choices to slow the spread,” a group of federal officials who campaigned for the report said in a statement titled “Our data is yours Data”. The group includes Heather Strosnider, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance at CDC, Kelly Bennett, Co-Head of Integrated Surveillance in the Assistant Secretary’s Office for Preparedness and Response, Amy Gleason of US Digital Service and Kevin Duvall, Assistant Head of Data Officer at HHS .

“HHS believes in the power of open data and transparency,” they wrote. “Publicly publishing the reports that our own response teams use and using the information by others outside of the federal response will only make the data better.”

A federal conflict over data transparency began this summer when the CDC’s data infrastructure proved inadequate to meet the requirements of the Covid pandemic. For example, federal officials needed daily data on the number of Covid patients in each hospital in order to be able to make potentially life-saving decisions about the allocation of scarce resources.

Instead of working on a quick overhaul of the CDC system, HHS rolled out a new data collection system called HHS Protect this summer with the help of federal companies, including Palantir. While many in the public health sector recognized the limitations of the CDC’s data collection system, some saw it as a move by the Trump administration to phase out the CDC amid a crisis.

Orlowski said the detail of the new public report is a demonstration of what HHS Protect is capable of and a testament to the progress the U.S. has made in collecting public health data during the pandemic.

“Never waste a crisis,” said Orlowski. “As long as we don’t increase the burden on the hospital, I believe we must continue to do so.”

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HHS Secretary Azar says Pfizer retains U.S. at ‘arm’s size’ on manufacturing

HHS Secretary Azar says Pfizer keeps U.S. at 'arm's length' on manufacturing

Minister of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Thursday he wanted “more insight” into how the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine is made. The US drug manufacturer kept the federal government on a “customary market basis” throughout the process.

Unlike other drug companies, Pfizer did not accept federal funding to develop or manufacture its vaccine. Pfizer has signed a contract with the United States to supply 100 million doses of its vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed. This is enough to vaccinate 50 million Americans, as the vaccine takes two doses three weeks apart. Pfizer is also negotiating an additional 100 million doses with the US.

“You’re part of Operation Warp Speed, but … it’s a different relationship” than the government deals with Moderna and other federal drug companies that have received federal funding, Azar told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” during an interview Thursday. “We pull together, give [Pfizer] A guaranteed purchase that allows them to make capital investments has a predictable buyer, but we don’t have full visibility into their making because they kept this a bit more on-market. “

But Azar said he would like to see the federal government’s relationship with Pfizer change.

“We are working with Pfizer. We are very optimistic that we will be securing additional volumes in the second quarter, but they will need our help making them,” he said. Azar also noted that Pfizer originally said it would produce 100 million cans by the end of the year but “had to cut that in half to 50 million”.

Later on Thursday, Pfizer issued a statement saying the company “has no production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine and no shipments containing the vaccine will be put on hold or delayed”.

The company also “continuously” exchanged information on “all aspects of our production and sales capacities” in weekly meetings with HHS and Operation Warp Speed.

“They have visited our facilities, walked the production lines and were informed of our production planning as soon as information became available,” said Pfizer.

His emergency vaccine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday. The first doses of Pfizer’s vaccine were shipped to the United States over the weekend and the Americans received gunfire on Monday.

The initial doses of the Pfizer vaccine are limited as production begins. Officials predict it will be months before everyone in the US who wants to be vaccinated is vaccinated. The US shipped 2.9 million doses of the vaccine this week with an additional 2 million expected next week, General Gustave Perna, who oversees logistics for Operation Warp Speed, told reporters on Wednesday. The US hopes to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of the year.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pfizer’s target for vaccine launch of 50 million doses worldwide by the end of the year was only half of what it originally planned. In a statement, Pfizer said there were several factors influencing the number of estimated doses, including increasing the size of a vaccine at an “unprecedented” pace.

When asked Thursday why Pfizer is unable to produce more cans, Azar said the US would offer “to help them get a higher yield if they are willing to enlist our help” .

He said the problem was not a cost issue, adding, “We’re working with them.”

“The discussions are very productive,” he said. “We will use the full power of the US government to support and maximize production, as we have always wanted. I am very optimistic that we will find a good place there.”

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Former Obama HHS official criticizes Trump administration’s international Covid strategy

Former Obama HHS official criticizes Trump administration’s global Covid approach

Former Health and Social Services Officer Dr. Mario Ramirez told CNBC that he was “concerned” about equitable access to Covid-19 resources around the world and criticized the Trump administration for not participating in the multilateral COVAX facility.

“One of the things that was regrettable about the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic was that they chose not to attend the COVAX facility,” said Ramirez, a former coordinator for the HHS Pandemic and Emerging Threats Office of Global Affairs. “The COVAX facility was an opportunity for emerging economies to jointly invest in vaccines and gain access to all of these resources.”

According to a report by NBC News, poorer countries around the world may have to wait years to get vaccines while vaccines are currently being rolled out in rich countries like the US and the UK.

In a comprehensive interview on Wednesday evening during The News with Shepard Smith, Ramirez also discussed his experience with Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. One of tens of thousands of Americans who have now received it, he said he felt “great” after having “a little pain in his arm”.

All 50 states have now started giving Pfizer’s vaccinations. An FDA advisory committee will meet Thursday to discuss whether or not to give Moderna’s vaccine the go-ahead just two days after announcing the shot is highly potent. If the panel approves the Moderna vaccine, nearly 6 million doses will be deployed across the country next week. The federal government has already signed deals with Pfizer and Moderna to deliver a total of 200 million vaccine doses by the first quarter of the new year.

Ramirez told Shepard Smith that there are several systems in place to ensure people get their critical second dose of the Covid vaccine. He was given a physical paper dosage card and said it was part of the process to remind people to get their second dose. The ambulance added that he also receives regular feedback from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through his V-Safe app. Ramirez said another critical aspect of helping people remember they received the second dose was to sign up for the first dose.

“For example, we know from previous studies with the HPV vaccine that complying with this second visit is a big contributor to compliance,” Ramirez said.