There were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024 than the year before — the largest one-year decline ever recorded. An estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses last year, according to provisional CDC data released Wednesday. That's down 27% from the 110,000 in 2023. The CDC has been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The previous largest one-year drop was 4% in 2018, according to the agency's National Center for Health Statistics.
The project plans to use an approach that would involve injecting people with a whole flu virus that has been killed with a chemical to render it harmless but is still capable of stimulating the immune system. Most vaccine experts consider the whole killed virus approach to be antiquated.
President Trump's bombshell executive order aimed at lowering U.S. drug prices is a step toward a worst-case scenario for the pharmaceutical industry. Some critics say the industry could have done more to avoid it, even though Trump's policies are causing turmoil in almost every sector of the economy. Trump's announcement could be the start of enormous global disruption for the pharmaceutical industry — or it's the least-bad version of what was on the table, depending on who you ask.
People taking Eli Lilly's obesity drug, Zepbound, lost nearly 50% more weight than those using rival Novo Nordisk's Wegovy in the first head-to-head study of the blockbuster medications. Clinical trial participants who took tirzepatide, the drug sold as Zepbound, lost an average of 50 pounds over 72 weeks, while those who took semaglutide, or Wegovy, lost about 33 pounds. That's according to the study funded by Lilly, which was published this week in NEJM.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and a few of her peers sued CVS on Wednesday, alleging the pharmacy giant for years failed to provide Medicaid members with access to the same discount as cash-paying customers. Campbell and attorneys general in Connecticut, Indiana and Oklahoma jointly filed a civil action after a whistleblower complaint in Washington, D.C., prompting the company to 'strongly dispute' the allegations.
A federal judge has sided with the FDA over a decision last year to remove two Eli Lilly drugs — the Zepbound weight loss medicine and the Mounjaro diabetes treatment — from a shortages list kept by the agency. The move means that patients will no longer have access to cheaper versions from compounding pharmacies.