Bloomberg: Birth Control Provider The Pill Club Goes Bankrupt After False Billing Claims 
The Pill Club, a birth control and telehealth provider backed by an affiliate of venture financing firm TriplePoint Capital LLC, went bankrupt after California authorities accused the startup of fraudulently billing the state’s Medicaid program for contraceptives customers didn’t order and counseling sessions it never provided. (Randles, 4/21)

Reuters: Abortion Providers Relieved, Wary As High Court Preserves Pill Access
Abortion rights supporters expressed relief on Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court preserved access to a widely used abortion pill but warned of a long fight ahead as a legal challenge to the medication continues. The move by the court to halt new restrictions on the drug set by lower courts was welcome news less than a year after its conservative majority upended U.S. abortion access by overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion nationwide. (Bernstein, 4/24)

AP: What Supreme Court Action On Abortion Means For Patients
For patients, there’s been confusion “about whether or not they can access their appointments,” said Dr. Becca Simon, a family medicine doctor in Pennsylvania who provides abortions. “We’re trying to just calm people.” ... Doctors and clinic operators worry that the decision earlier this month by a federal judge in Texas blocking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication — and media coverage about it — have led some people to question the drug’s safety. “The language in the opinion that was used is very, very disturbing,” said Texas OB-GYN Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi. (Ungar, 4/21)

CNN: Details About Multimillion Dollar Stock Holdings Concealed In Abortion Pill Judge's Financial Disclosures 
The federal judge who issued a nationwide ruling blocking the approval of a common abortion medication redacted key information on his legally mandated financial disclosures, in what legal experts described as an unusual move that conceals the bulk of his personal fortune. In his 2020 and 2021 annual disclosures, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk wrote that he held between $5 million and $25 million in “common stock” of a company – a significant majority of the judge’s personal wealth. The name of the company he held stock in is redacted, despite the fact that federal law only allows redactions of information that could “endanger” a judge or their family member. (Tolan and Chapman, 4/21)

Politico: Trump Defends His Efforts To Combat Abortion 
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday defended his efforts to limit abortion in a video address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. In his remarks, Trump cited his appointment of three justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) to the U.S. Supreme Court. All three voted in the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationally. “Those justices delivered a landmark victory for protecting innocent life. Nobody thought it was going to happen,” the former president said. (Cohen, 4/23)

The New York Times: Sacklers Gave Millions To Institution That Advises On Opioid Policy 
For the past decade, the White House and Congress have relied on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a renowned advisory group, to help shape the federal response to the opioid crisis, whether by convening expert panels or delivering policy recommendations and reports. Yet officials with the National Academies have kept quiet about one thing: their decision to accept roughly $19 million in donations from members of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin that is notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic. (Jewett, 4/23)

NPR: To Halt Fentanyl, U.S. Says It 'Infiltrated' Sinaloa Cartel 
U.S. officials say they've identified and infiltrated the Mexican drug organization that's largely responsible for the fentanyl crisis killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.In a sweeping series of indictments targeting two dozen leaders and kingpins, the Justice Department blamed much of the carnage on the Chapitos network, a faction of the Sinaloa drug cartel. (Mann, 4/21)

AP: Dying Patients Protest Looming Telehealth Crackdown
A proposed Drug Enforcement Administration rule aimed at cracking down on prescriptions for dangerous drugs has spurred a backlash from dying patients and those who care for them. The new rules would reinstate most of the online prescribing rules for controlled drugs that were relaxed three years ago to ensure critical medications remained available during the COVID-19 pandemic. But exceptions should be made for people enrolled in hospice care or those who qualify for medically assisted suicide, critics say, because they are often too sick to leave their homes for medical appointments. If approved, the rule would take effect in November. (Aleccia, 4/24)

Sacramento Bee: Families Of Golden State Killer’s Victims Relive His Arrest 
Five years ago, Kris Pedretti was on a business trip in Los Angeles. She got a call from former Sacramento Undersheriff Carol Daly with a message: the man who had raped her as a 15-year-old inside her parents’ Carmichael home in 1976 had been arrested. “I went into shock,” Pedretti said. “That trap door flew open and I was by myself and I’m in shock...“And that was the day the healing began, but it was a really rough start, for sure.” The suspect Sacramento sheriff’s deputies arrested that afternoon – April 23, 2018 – was Joseph James DeAngelo, a retired mechanic and former police officer. (Stanton, 4/23)

San Diego Union-Tribune: '72 Hours' Project Draws Reactions From Parents, Clinicians, Politicians 
The San Diego Union-Tribune’s publication last week of “72 Hours: Inside San Diego County’s Mental Health Crisis” drew responses from throughout the community — parents, politicians, clinicians and others who reached out to the newspaper or posted thoughts on social media. (Figueroa, 4/23)

Military Times: Study IDs Healthcare Factors That Lead To Amputation Among Veterans
Several factors impacting former service members’ quality of healthcare were identified as contributors to eventual amputation surgeries among the veteran population, authors from Emory Healthcare and the Veterans Health Administration wrote in a JAMA Surgery article published Wednesday. From 2010 to 2020, lead author Olamide Alabi, a vascular surgeon for both Emory and the VA Healthcare System in Atlanta, and a team of researchers analyzed the year period prior to 19,000 amputation cases to determine how health care contributed to a major loss of limb. (Perez, 4/21)

San Francisco Chronicle: Marin Focuses Homeless Aid Effort On 2-Mile-Long Vehicle Encampment
On a frontage road along Highway 101 in northern Marin County, a line of RVs, trucks and trailers stretches for nearly 2 miles — a critical mass of unhoused residents that ballooned during the pandemic. A few RVs have always dotted Binford Road on the outskirts of Novato, but the number soared to at least 135 in recent years, fueled by acute housing insecurity and loss of income, officials say. (Vainshtein, 4/23)

Bay Area News Group: This California Town Hasn’t Had Clean Drinking Water In 11 Years
Three or four times a week, Melva Garza and her 40-year-old disabled son throw shampoo, soap, towels and fresh clothes in a bag, pack up their car and make their way to a truck stop eight miles away to take a shower. She keeps the shower tokens — 50 cents each — stacked next to the truck stop faucet, each one worth three more minutes of water. The Garzas haven’t showered in their own home in over a decade. (Toledo, 4/24)

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Five Years After Woman’s Debilitating Stroke In Jail, County Settles Lawsuit For $9.5 Million
The county of San Diego has agreed to pay $9.5 million to a woman who suffered a debilitating stroke in the Las Colinas jail in Santee five years ago. The lawsuit that led to the settlement argues that when Colleen Garot was arrested, deputies and later jail medical staff should have recognized signs of head trauma that needed immediate medical attention. (Davis, 4/23)

The Washington Post: Pinkeye Cases Rise In Allergy Season. It Might Be A Covid Symptom, Too
Pinkeye — an inflamed, itchy and painful eye — is common during allergy season. But now some doctors are concerned the ailment may also be associated with a new coronavirus subvariant. Health experts say they have not conclusively linked the condition, formally called conjunctivitis, to the subvariant Arcturus. But anecdotal reports suggest the subvariant may produce fever and conjunctivitis, mainly among children. “It’s occurring in the setting where they’ve documented community spread of this virus,” said William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. (Bever, 4/21)

CIDRAP: WHO Elevates XBB.1.16 To Variant Of Interest As Levels Rise In US And Other Countries 
The World Health Organization (WHO) this week boosted the XBB.1.16 Omicron subvariant to a variant of interest (VOI) from a variant under monitoring (VUM), based on the latest assessments from its technical advisory group on virus evolution. (Schnirring, 4/21)

CIDRAP: New Data Show Safety Of Pfizer COVID Vaccine For Teens Ages 12 To 17
Today in Pediatrics researchers published the safety data of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT-162b2) COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents ages 12 to 17 years. After 1 year, very few serious adverse events were reported, and instances of myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) were lower than initially reported. (Soucheray, 4/21)

The Washington Post: They Endured Covid. But Some Health-Care Workers Mistrust The Future.
More than any other single group, health-care workers bore the brunt of the covid-19 pandemic. In the early days and weeks of the crisis, doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians were hailed as superheroes — immortalized in graffiti and balcony ovations from New York City to Paris and Madrid. But as the months and years passed, the astonishing casualties from covid-19 — more than 1 million lives lost in the United States and nearly 7 million globally — led to exhaustion, burnout and trauma, as well as infection and deaths among front-line workers. Workforce shortages and unrelenting stress added to their hardships, even as the public applause for their contributions faded. (Brooks and Stevenson, 4/22)

USA Today: Long COVID Crisis Exposes Disability Claims System In Disarray
Marie, who left a corporate job in Missouri after contracting COVID-19 in the first wave and then developing what came to be known as long COVID, received five months of short-term disability through her employer. It was “a life-saver,” she said. But in 2022, she caught COVID again, and this time it’s taken much longer to recover from the long COVID that followed. (Buhl, 4/21)

The Hill: How Will COVID Shots Be Paid For After Emergency Ends? 
while Americans with insurance are still expected to be able to get vaccinated free of charge, questions remain over how those without coverage can obtain them and the ease of the overall process. Moderna and Pfizer, the companies behind the two most commonly administered coronavirus vaccines in the U.S., are expecting the prices of their shots to increase by as much as four-fold but have stated that consumers should not expect to feel the impact themselves, regardless of insurance status. (Choi, 4/23)

Reveal: The COVID Tracking Project Part 2
This is the second episode in our three-part series taking listeners inside the failed federal response to COVID-19. In episode two, series host Jessica Malaty Rivera, along with reporters Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler, asks a profound question: Why was there no good U.S. data about COVID-19? In March 2020, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx had a daunting task for technologist Amy Gleason, a new member of her data team. Her job was to figure out where people were testing positive for COVID-19 across the country, how many were in hospitals and how many had died from the disease. Accounting for national numbers about the disease was extremely difficult. (Curiskis and Oehler, 4/22)

Stat: Chronicling The Failures Of The U.S. Response To Covid
A new book on the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic paints a picture of a country ill-prepared to cope with a dangerous biological foe, riven by partisan politics, and led by people who saw little political gain in taking ownership of managing the crisis. (Branswell, 4/24)

The New York Times: Chinese Censorship Is Quietly Rewriting The Covid-19 Story
Under government pressure, Chinese scientists have retracted studies and withheld or deleted data. The censorship has stymied efforts to understand the virus. (Hvistendahl and Mueller, 4/23)

The Wall Street Journal: Weight-Loss Drugmakers Lobby For Medicare Coverage 
Weight-loss drugmakers are lobbying Congress to grant them access to a monster payday for their blockbuster treatments: Medicare coverage. New drugs to treat diabetes and obesity are helping people shed pounds and generating huge sales for Novo Nordisk AS and Eli Lilly & Co. But they cost hundreds of dollars a month or more and Medicare doesn’t cover them to treat obesity. The law governing Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit excludes weight drugs. If that changed, demand from the 65 million older and disabled people insured through Medicare could push sales even higher. (Whyte, 4/24)

NBC News: Are Weight Loss Drugs Causing Hair Loss? Doctors Weigh In
As drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic soar in popularity for weight loss, pounds aren’t the only thing people report losing: Social media groups for people taking the medications include posts about losing hair, too. “What is really striking for folks is that there are no scalp symptoms. It doesn’t hurt, there’s no itching, but you can run your hands through your hair and you have a handful of hair. It can be really disconcerting to see that,” said Dr. Susan Massick, a dermatologist at Ohio State University, who has seen patients who have lost hair following weight loss surgery. (Sullivan, 4/22)

The New York Times: An Extreme Risk Of Taking Ozempic: Malnutrition 
Almost immediately after starting Ozempic, a diabetes medication known for inducing weight loss, Renata Lavach-Savy, 37, a medical writer in North Bergen, N.J., was left without any semblance of appetite. She started setting alarms to remind herself to eat. She was so exhausted that even after 10 hours of sleep, she would collapse onto her couch after work, unable to move. She left purses and clothes strewn across her bedroom floor, because she was so queasy all the time and worried that bending down to pick them up would make her vomit. Four months later, Ms. Lavach-Savy’s dietitian told her that she might be malnourished. (Blum, 4/21)