Opioid Overdose Deaths | ‘Stealth’ Omicron | Wireless Charging For Medtech

Plus: U.S. lost 301,000 private jobs during January Omicron surge

Happy Groundhog Day! Unfortunately the Pennsylvania prognosticator Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so, if you believe in a groundhog’s ability to predict the weather, we are looking at six more weeks of winter. 

Just released this evening: More than 1.2 million people will die from opioid overdoses in the U.S. and Canada by 2029 if no action is taken to tackle the growing epidemic, a group of leading health experts on the Stanford–Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis warn in a new report, according to Forbes reporter Robert Hart. In 2020, there were 70,168 overdose deaths in the United States, up 37 percent from the previous year. More than 538,000 people in the U.S. died of overdoses from 1999-2020.

While there is no singular force driving the epidemic, the report criticizes aggressive and misleading marketing campaigns by pharmaceutical companies combined with lax regulatory oversight. Earlier this week, Native American tribal leaders reached a tentative $590 million settlement with opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and distributors AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health. “Pharma companies are all being sued, and they deserve to be sued, but we have to remember they exploited weaknesses in our health care regulatory system that are still there,” says Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who chaired the commission.

Resonant Link is bringing wireless charging technology to medical devices with the aim of helping ensure patients don’t have to undergo invasive procedures for battery recharge and replacement. Wireless chargers are most commonly used to recharge phones batteries and work on centuries old principles of physics. The charger, also known as the transmitter, contains a metallic coil which generates a magnetic field when electricity runs through it. The receiver in the device that needs charging collects this magnetic energy and converts it into electricity and the device gets charged. Resonant claims its patented technology can charge devices, in some cases, ten times faster than currently used technology. 

Deals Of The Week

Health Tech: League, a startup offering the backend software infrastructure for companies to deploy consumer-facing healthcare applications, has raised $95 million led by TDM Growth Partners. The company, which counts  Humana, Shopify and Shoppers Drug Mart among its customers, has raised $205 million to date. 

Digital Pharmacy: Alto Pharmacy raised a $200 million Series E led by Softbank Vision Fund. The announcement comes a month after the online pharmacy startup entered into a partnership with New York City to help distribute its supply of Covid-19 antivirals in most cases with same-day delivery. 

Biogen Offloads Biosimilars: Biogen and Samsung Biologics reached a deal in which Biogen will sell its equity stake in the joint venture Samsung Bioepis for $2.3 billion. Biogen, which entered into the joint venture to manufacture biosimilars in 2012, has faced mounting pressure over the approval and slow adoption of its controversial Alzheimer’s drug.

Noteworthy

Humana will invest $1 billion in its Medicare Advantage business after its 2022 enrollment numbers fell short of expectations. 

Here’s how the Cleveland-based inventors behind Nottingham Spirk (creator of the Swiffer SweeperVac) went from consumer products to medical devices. 

A record 14.5 million Americans purchased individual health insurance coverage on the marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act this year. 

Can a new cholesterol drug restore Merck’s prominence in heart drugs?

Coronavirus Updates

How dangerous is the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2? Figuring this out is a challenging process, researchers Roby Bhattacharyya and William Hanage write in a piece published in The New England Journal of Medicine today. Though described as being “milder” than other Covid variants, the United States nevertheless faces a situation where over 2,300 people per day have been dying from Covid over the past week, and hospitalizations are at record highs. One of the issues, the authors write, is that omicron has “been shown to be far better than previous variants at infecting people who have some degree of pre-existing immunity.” People who have that immunity thanks to vaccination or a previous Covid infection are better protected against hospitalization and more severe disease, but this also means it’s more difficult to tease out how the variant affects people who don’t have that immunity and aren’t vaccinated. 

When scientists correct for some of the confounding factors like pre-existing immunity, the authors write, the best studies so far estimate that omicron is “about 75% as likely as delta to cause hospitalization in an unvaccinated person with no history of SARS-CoV-2 infection.” In other words, omicron appears to cause severe disease about as often as the original strain of the coronavirus and the alpha variant that spread last winter. But because the virus both reinfects and appears to infect vaccinated people more often than previous variants, this means that the disease becomes much more widespread. That puts those who are unvaccinated at much greater risk than previous variants, which helps explain why hospitals continue to be overrun as omicron spreads throughout the world. 

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In other coronavirus news:

Researchers are working on a potential antiviral treatment for Covid that “tricks” the virus into binding to a decoy protein instead of a patient’s cells. 

The U.S. government’s deal with Pfizer for doses of its Covid antviral drug Paxlovid includes a “price match guarantee” that allows the U.S. to match a lower price per dose if Pfizer negotiates one with other wealthy countries. 

A majority of U.S. companies have already or will soon adopt a Covid vaccine mandate despite the recent U.S. Supreme Court blocking the Biden administration from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for large employers.

The U.S. Army will begin discharging soldiers who refuse to be vaccinated against coronavirus, which could affect tens of thousands of service members.

Eleven staffers linked to the 2022 Beijing Olympics have been hospitalized with Covid-19 since January 23. 

Only 30.5% of children ages five to 11 have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the CDC, while 21.8% are fully vaccinated.

Across Forbes

• Can Elon Musk Get Sued For Crashing A Rocket On The Moon?

• Why Silicon Valley Investors Are Injecting Millions Into San Francisco’s DA Recall Election

• Forget Meta's Sleek Virtual Reality. Maybe The Metaverse Is Fun, Friendly, 8-Bit -- And Already Here

What Else We Are Reading

• How a decades-old database became a hugely profitable dossier on the health of 270 million Americans (STAT)

• Colleges Struggle to Recruit Therapists for Students in Crisis (Kaiser Health News)

• Scientists deliberately gave people COVID — here’s what they learnt (Nature)