Eli Lilly to sell Zepbound directly to consumers without insurance coverage
(NEW YORK) — People who are in need of weight loss medications but do not have insurance coverage will soon have a new way to access one of the popular medications, Zepbound.
Eli Lilly, the maker of Zepbound, announced Tuesday it will begin selling the weight loss drug directly to consumers through the company’s direct pharmacy, LillyDirect.
With a doctors’ prescription, consumers will be able to purchase Zepbound in vial forms that are about half the price of the auto-injector pre-filled pens sold in pharmacies, according to Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks.
A one-month supply of Zepbound at a 2.5-milligram dose will cost $349, while a one-month supply at a 5-milligram dose will cost $549, according to Ricks.
Medical professionals can start filling prescriptions for the Zepbound vials on Tuesday via LillyDirect and the vials will start shipping in the days ahead.
Ricks noted that the new option will be self-pay only and will not participate in insurance.
With insurance coverage, Zepbound can cost as low as $25 per month, but without coverage, the medication can cost more than $1,000 per month.
Consumers who purchase Zepbound through LillyDirect will have access to educational resources on how to administer the medication, according to Ricks.
Zepbound is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a weight loss management treatment for people with obesity or those who are overweight with at least one related underlying condition such as high blood pressure.
However, many private insurers and Medicare do not cover weight loss drugs used for obesity.
Zepbound contains the same active ingredient, tirzepatide, as another medication, Mounjaro, which is also made by Lilly and is FDA-approved to treat Type 2 diabetes.
Tirzepatide works by helping the pancreas increase the production of insulin to move sugar from the blood into body tissues.
It also slows down the movement of food through the stomach and curbs appetite, thereby causing weight loss.
Past clinical studies have shown users of medications used for weight loss like Zepbound and Mounjaro can lose between 5% and 20% of their body weight on the medications over time.
Medical specialists point out that using medication to lose weight also requires cardio and strength training and changing your diet to one that includes proteins and less processed foods with added sugars.
The most commonly reported side effects of medications used for weight loss are nausea and constipation, but gallbladder and pancreatic disease are also reported.
Makers of these drugs recommend having a conversation about the side effect profile and personalized risks with a health care professional before starting.
(TEL-AVIV, Israel) — The last day of the polio vaccination campaign is wrapping up in Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday.
The campaign was launched after the first case of polio in Gaza in more than 25 years was recently detected. Health officials from the WHO, the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health and partner organizations said they would be vaccinating children in three-day phases starting in central Gaza, then in southern Gaza, and ending in the north.
As of Thursday morning, more than 552,000 children under age 10 out of 640,000 have been vaccinated in Gaza, according to the WHO. The organization said at least 90% coverage is needed to stop a potential outbreak in Gaza, and the campaign may be extended if that 90% figure isn’t achieved on Thursday.
Poliovirus was first detected in sewage samples from the cities of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis – in central and southern Gaza, respectively – in mid-July, in tests conducted by the Gaza Ministry of Health in coordination with the UN.
In mid-August, the Ministry of Health reported the first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years, in a 10-month-old child who had not been vaccinated. Doctors suspected polio after symptoms resembled the virus, which was confirmed in test conducted in Amman, the capital of Jordan, according to the WHO.
Children are receiving two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2), which has been used for outbreak response under the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing approval since March 2021. A second dose is typically given four weeks after the first.
“We want to protect our children from diseases and give them the necessary vaccines because prevention is better than cure,” Islam Saleh, a mother in northern Gaza, said in a video issued by the United Nations (UN) on Wednesday.
“I fear for my son because there is no cure for polio. This dose he received will protect him, and it is safe,” Saleh added.
Officials have said that the vaccination operation is complicated by access restrictions, evacuation orders and fuel shortages. Israel has agreed to “temporary” pauses in fighting each day in order for the vaccinations to be administered.
Earlier this week, a convoy of UN vehicles in northern Gaza was stopped and questioned by Israeli Security Forces before being released, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement.
Polio largely affects children under age 5 and can lead to paralysis or death. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there are about 341,000 children under the age of five in Gaza.
Children in the U.S. are recommended to get the inactivated polio vaccine as part of routine childhood immunization, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It consists of four doses in total administered first at 2 months of age, then at 4 months, 6-18 months, and 4-6 years.
“It has been heartening to see the response to the campaign,” the WHO said in comments released after a press briefing on Thursday. “Everywhere the team has gone, parents are doing all they can to ensure their child does not miss vaccination. Many vaccination sites received more than expected crowds. Special coordinated missions were also conducted to reach children in insecure and heard to reach areas.”
ABC News’ Jordana Miller and Dana Savir contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The World Health Organization (WHO) declared mpox to be a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on Wednesday
“Today, the Emergency Committee met and advised me that in its view, the situation constitutes a public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a media briefing on Wednesday.
In the U.S, there have been 1,634 cases of mpox reported so far this year, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That’s more than double the number of national cases seen at the same time last year but significantly lower than those seen during a U.S. mpox outbreak in 2022, CDC data shows.
PHEICs were most recently declared for the COVID-19 pandemic and the previous mpox outbreak of 2022.
Although mpox is endemic to parts of Central and Western Africa, cases have been rising dramatically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
This year, there have already been more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths reported in the DRC, according to the WHO.
There are two types of mpox: clade I and clade II, with clade roughly meaning they are descended from a common ancestor organism. While clade I has caused small, localized outbreaks in the DRC for years, researchers identified a clade I variant, known as clade Ib, that seems to spread mainly through sexual contact and appears to be behind the outbreak in the DRC.
Tedros said the detection of clade Ib in neighboring African countries that have never reported mpox cases before – including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda – led him to convene a meeting of the WHO’s emergency committee.
“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern DRC, its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying,” Tedros said during the briefing.
On Monday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) – the continent’s top health agency – declared mpox a public health emergency of continental security (PHECS) – the first such declaration since the Africa CDC’s inception in 2017, according to the agency.
On the same day, the WHO published a report that found there were a total of 934 new laboratory confirmed cases of mpox and four deaths from 26 countries in the month of June, “illustrating continuing transmission of mpox across the world.”
There have been no cases of clade I mpox reported outside Central and Eastern Africa at this time, including in the U.S., according to the CDC. The risk of the type of mpox circulating in the DRC is low to the American public, according to the CDC.
Currently, the JYNNEOS vaccine, a two-dose vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent smallpox and mpox, is the only vaccine being used in the U.S. to prevent mpox. Data from Africa has shown two doses of JYNNEOS are at least 85% effective in preventing mpox infection.
(NEW YORK) — As the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris came to an end this weekend, most of the conversation surrounded the number of medals won, and the number of records broken.
However, there was also another topic at hand: the presence of COVID-19 at the Olympics.
At least 40 athletes tested positive for COVID, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), including several Australian swimmers, a British swimmer and a German decathlon competitor.
Additionally, American track and field star Noah Lyles won bronze in the 200-meter race after testing positive for COVID-19 two days prior.
Despite the number of cases, public health experts told ABC News that the Paris Games were actually a success and a testament to how far the world has come since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“COVID-19 was so less disruptive in Paris than it was in Tokyo or Beijing because of what science and medicine have done over the past four years,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told ABC News.
“That should be the story, that we went from something that was disrupting the entire world to something that is now kind of a rank-and-file respiratory virus. I think that’s the real story. Here is the success of humanity with tackling this scientific problem, and the minds that went to work on this problem and made it something that is no longer a major concern for a lot of the population,” Adalja said.
How the Paris Olympics were different
The Paris Olympics were billed as the first games with some sense of normalcy after the strict restrictions seen during the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
Athletes were under strict testing and quarantine protocols and had to follow stringent mitigation measures to participate in the 2021 or 2022 Games. No spectators were allowed at the Tokyo Games while a limited number were allowed at the Beijing Games.
Comparatively, there were no formal requirements for regular COVID-19 testing or reporting for the Paris Games, either in general or for specific events.
An athlete testing positive did not require them to sit out from an event either. Participating following a positive test was left up to the discretion of the athlete, team and medical staff. Additionally, there were no restrictions regarding spectators.
“The Paris Olympics were something that really resembled pre-COVID Olympics, nothing like what we saw in Beijing, nothing like what we saw in Tokyo,” Adalja said. “And I think that reflects the fact that the context regarding the virus that causes COVID-19 has changed a lot over the past four years.”
COVID at the Paris Games
Only about 40 COVID-19 cases were confirmed among athletes at the 2024 Summer Games. Experts say it’s not out of the ordinary that cases would occur and that, likely, the total is an undercount of cases.
“I am sure that that is a gross under-representation of the actual number of cases,” Dr. Pedro Piedra, a professor in the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology and Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, told ABC News.
“[COVID] testing is not required, and testing for other respiratory viruses has really not been required either, and whenever you have such an event, it is an excellent ground for viruses to transmit. And that’s not just unique to the Olympics. That’s anytime you have a lot of individuals cluster over time together,” he continued.
The Australian Olympic Committee said last week that 16 athletes tested positive for COVID, at least seven of whom were swimmers.
The British Olympic Committee said swimmer Adam Peaty tested positive for COVID-19 less than 24 hours after winning silver in the men’s 100-meter breaststroke final.
Perhaps, most famous, Lyles — the American sprinter — revealed after winning bronze in the 200-meter men’s final that he had tested positive two days beforehand. Lyles drew a great deal of criticism for running the race unmasked and not publicly revealing his diagnosis before the competition.
However, experts said that COVID-19 is beginning to be considered an endemic virus, meaning it is typically present, and should be treated like other endemic viruses, like the flu.
“A lot has changed, and this virus is now what we would call an endemic virus; it’s basically part of the new respiratory viruses that circulate within our community,” Piedra said. “We don’t try to test every virus for every illness that we have. If we did, I think it would cost significantly, and on many occasions, we don’t have any form of treatment or prevention methods.”
Adalja said because COVID-19 is being considered an endemic respiratory virus, each individual case is less significantly important.
“We have so many tools that science and medicine have given us that make COVID-19 so much more manageable in 2024 than it was in 2020, 2021, 2022,” he said. “So, in that sense, the fact that you’re not hearing about every case as it occurs is just like you don’t hear about every case of influenza that occurs.”
He continued, “I think that the fact that people are back to their lives, that people are winning medals when they have COVID-19 really shows that despite all of the obstacles the governments put in place to deal with COVID appropriately, scientists, physicians delivered and developed so many tools that were able to now live our lives in the midst of COVID-19 and not have It be as disruptive as it once was.”