Polio vaccinations wrap up in Gaza as officials try to inoculate 90% of children under age 10
(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.
(WASHINGTON) When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, there was a key provision that the Biden administration fought hard for. For years, private insurance companies negotiated with drug makers over prescription prices.
However, Medicare, representing 50 million seniors, did not have the same right to negotiate prices for its Part D coverage. This meant that Medicare basically had to accept the prices offered to them.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra joined “Start Here,” ABC News’ flagship daily news podcast, earlier this year to announce that negotiations were starting. They had selected 10 medications to prioritize and attempt to bargain down prices.
On Thursday, during the first public event held by President Biden and Vice President Harris since the Biden dropped out of the presidential race, they revealed that they had agreed on all issues. This is being described as a significant development for anyone on Medicare, and for anyone who pays taxes to fund the expenses of Medicare.
Secretary Becerra joined “Start Here” on Friday to discuss this further.
START HERE: Mr. Secretary, last time we spoke you had just identified the drugs…they included some diabetes drugs, some arthritis medications, treatments for blood clots and blood cancer. Where are we now?
BECERRA: We are done with the negotiation, Brad. We have completed 10 drugs. Every company joined in the negotiations. We had offers, counter offers, and we hit a sweet spot with all ten. And that sweet spot will save Americans on Medicare who need these drugs lots of money. And it will save taxpayers who help fund the Medicare program lots of money, in the billions.
START HERE: Yeah. How much of a discount are we talking about here?
BECERRA: So in some cases, the discount from the list price is up to 79%. I think the lowest discount is about 38%. And I do want to caveat that a bit. Very rarely does anybody pay list price for anything. And if you do, take it back and bargain a bit. Whether it’s that car at the dealership where you look at list price, you don’t pay that. When you go to the department store, you try to find everything you can on sale or, you know at some point it’s going to go on sale.
And so everybody makes the effort to try to get the best price for whatever the product is. In this case, it’s a very important product, it’s your prescription medication. But you should still be able to get a good price, and that’s what we did. We negotiated and got a much better price than what Medicare was getting.
START HERE: But just so we can we can be clear about that caveat. You’re saying it’s 68%, say it’s like 79% less than the list price. But you guys weren’t paying the list price earlier. Can you tell us how much you were paying on these drugs beforehand, and how much the new discount you’ve gotten is?
BECERRA: Yeah. And that’s where it gets a little dicey because there are lots of nooks and crannies in the health care system. Some of them include what are, what is considered proprietary information of the companies, the drug companies, that they don’t want disclosed. And so the net price that Medicare pays is lower than the list price, but still high.
START HERE: So there’s some contract somewhere being like “You guys, no one can disclose what you guys had originally been paying.”
BECERRA: Yeah. We can’t, we can’t take you behind the curtain unless the drug companies tell us it’s okay to do so.
START HERE: Were you able to actually push back against these drug companies, or was it kind of like “We’ll ask once and then we’ll have to take what we get. We’re not going to risk not giving Americans these, these drugs.”
BECERRA: Well, let’s just say that when they came in with their offer or counteroffer, the final price was neither our initial offer nor their official offer. But here’s what I will tell you. The Congressional Budget Office, which is Congress’ budget estimator, they’re the ones that keep tabs of what legislation will cost — will it save money or will it cost taxpayers money? And they are very stingy when it comes to saying “Oh, taxpayers will save money.” Right?
Well, the Congressional Budget Office said with regard to the Inflation Reduction Act and prescription drug negotiation, they said, we believe in the first year of negotiation — which we just finished — in that first year, and they’re projecting because they didn’t know which drugs it would be, etc.. They said, we believe the Department of Health Human Services will save $3.7 billion. Well, we’ve saved $6 billion.
And on top of that, we’re saving people out of pocket another billion and a half. But here’s the kicker. They said over 10 years, they assume that this new law, over 10 years of negotiating, will save $100 billion. So if we’re already almost double their first estimate for their first year, I guarantee you we’re going to do better than the 100 billion, over 10 years.
START HERE: Okay. When do the new prices go into effect, then I guess?
BECERRA: Jan. 1, 2026.
START HERE: Okay, so when that kicks in, how much of a discount will average Medicare patients actually see? Because, like, if you guys scored a 68% discount on Farxiga, like the diabetes kidney medication, does that mean that the person using that drug is going to pay, it doesn’t mean they’re going to pay 68% less. I mean, how much less would it be?
BECERRA: Yeah. So remember, and that’s also a difficult question because seniors don’t typically pay very much for their prescription medication. Medicare the program, that’s the beauty of Medicare, it covers the lion’s share of the cost of those drugs. Some Americans still have to pay some out-of-pocket costs for their drugs, especially the higher cost drugs. So we’re going to save folks quite a bit of money.
Let’s put it this way: I can talk to you in total aggregate terms. We can now look at the price that we negotiated and say “Okay, if we had this price back in 2023, what would our cost have been?” And the result is we would have saved $6 billion to the health care program, and Americans will be able to save about a billion and a half dollars collectively in their out-of-pocket costs.
START HERE: The trade group that represents companies like Pfizer, Lilly, Merck, they’ve said we might not see as much innovation because we’re not getting as much money. That’s, that’s constantly been sort of a critique of this. They also say that your math makes assumptions about how many people truly save money on this. They say a very small amount of people actually get this Part D plan in the way that would actually save the money here. What is your response to to to these pharmaceutical groups?
BECERRA: Well, remember, they’re more than 50 million Americans who have prescription coverage under Medicare, the Part D program. There are about 9 million people in the Medicare program who use one of these 10 drugs. It’s not a small universe of people. And these are very expensive drugs. When you can bring the price down of a drug that’s listed for, say, $10,000, $12,000 to $3,000. That’s a pretty good deal. It’s still $3,000, but it sure saved you a ton of money. If you were paid $12,000 or 13,000 before that.
And so this will save not just the Medicare program money, but it will save Medicare beneficiaries money. And it certainly will pay taxpayers who today, when they work, have some of their money from their paycheck taken out so they could cover their Medicare investment into the future so that when they get turned 65, they can qualify. They will get to benefit from a strengthened Medicare program that will have those new resources available, because we didn’t have to spend it at, for overcharging us for the prescription medication.
START HERE: Well, so now, I mean, the idea is that you’ll negotiate more drug prices, right? So you got these 10 out of the way. What are the next 10 or the next 20, or do you guys have a sense of what types of drugs you’re looking to target?
BECERRA: Yeah. And here I have to be careful, because everything we say about a drug can move the price on the market. Right? And I don’t want to be accused of trying to influence the price up or down. And so what I can tell you is the statute, the new law, the Inflation Reduction Act, gave a pretty clear prescription of how to select these, set of drugs that will be negotiated. That’s a, it’s a good thing in the way, in a sense that it doesn’t let politics enter into this. It was pretty clear which drugs count. In this case, the first 10, they had to be the most expensive drugs in the Medicare system.
START HERE: All right. So then we’ll see what happens next. All right. Secretary Xavier Becerra, thank you so much.
(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) — The percentage of teenagers who were up to date on their human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines has fallen dramatically since 2020, according to new federal data released Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends children from ages 11 to 12 receive two doses of the HPV vaccine, given six to 12 months apart, although children can get the vaccine starting at age 9.
Anybody under age 26 can get the HPV vaccine if they have not been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. People ages 15 to 26 years old who have not received the HPV vaccine typically need three doses to be fully vaccinated.
The CDC’s report looked at data from the 2023 National Immunization Survey -Teen, a group of phone surveys used to monitor vaccination coverage among teenagers. Similar ones are conducted for children and adults.
The survey looked at trends in coverage by birth year, and trends in coverage by eligibility for the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, a federally funded program that provides vaccines to children whose parents or guardians may not be able to afford them.
The program found that vaccination coverage for vaccines including tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis vaccine (Tdap), as well as for the meningococcal ACWY vaccine, was generally stable during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, there was a notable decrease in the percentage of adolescents who were up to date with HPV vaccination by age 13 among those born in 2010 — who would have turned 13 in 2023 — compared with those born in 2007, who would have turned 13 in 2020.
For teens who were born in 2007, 52.8% of those who were not eligible for VFC were up to date on their HPV vaccines by age 13. By comparison, only 48.7% of non-eligible teens born in 2010 were up to date by age 13.
Among teens born in 2007 who were VFC eligible, 53% were up to date by age 13. However, only 42.7% of eligible teens born in 2010 were up to date by age 13.
“The decline in the percentage of VFC- eligible adolescents who are HPV [up to date] could signal a change in accessibility to vaccination through the VFC program, a change that needs further exploration,” the report read. “This possibility under-scores the importance of ongoing efforts to ensure equitable access to vaccination services for all children and adolescents.”
Overall, 2023 coverage was similar to 2022, with 76.8% of all teens between ages 13 and 17 receiving at least one dose of the HPV vaccine compared to 76.0% in 2022, the report found.
However, only 61.4% of all teenagers in this age group were updated on their HPV vaccines, down from 64.6% in 2022.
HPV is a very common STI that infects about 13 million Americans each year, according to the CDC. Nearly everyone will contract HPV at some point in their lives, the CDC says.
There are more than 100 types of HPV, and most HPV infections clear up on their own within two years.
About 10% of infections last longer and can put individuals at risk for some cancers including cervix, vaginal and vulvar cancer; penile cancer; anal cancer; and oropharyngeal cancer, which is a cancer of the back of the throat, according to the CDC.
Every year, HPV causes about 37,000 cases of cancer in both men and women in the U.S., according to the federal health agency. However, HPV vaccination can prevent more than 90% of HPV cancers when given at the recommended ages, according to the American Cancer Society.
“Health care providers should make strong recommendations for all routine vaccines and verify if adolescents, particularly those eligible for the VFC program, are up to date with all recommended vaccines,” the report stated.