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The Nevada Legislature approved immense cuts to the state’s health and education budgets on Sunday in an effort to rebalance the state budget amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and plummeting revenue projections...The revised budget passed through both the state Senate and Assembly after days and nights of deliberation in the part-time Legislature, which Gov. Steve Sisolak convened for an unscheduled special legislative session on July 8 to address a projected $1.2 billion revenue shortfall...The...plan cuts more than $500 million from the state budget, with the largest reductions hitting the Department of Health and Human Services and the K-12 education system. It cuts Medicaid reimbursement rates and specialty care programs and funding allocated to the state’s most underperforming schools...The state will use a combination of reserve funds and federal relief dollars to shore up the rest of the shortfall...Sisolak said in a statement he intends to sign the bill...READ MORE

AbbVie grew Humira into the world’s bestselling medicine in part through price hikes and an aggressive patenting strategy to defend against competition. The company is now deploying similar tactics to bolster Imbruvica, a cancer drug with numerous uses and big sales, experts concluded in a new report...AbbVie has filed for 165 patents on Imbruvica, and officials have granted 88 of them, the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge reports. The company’s add-on patents have earned AbbVie another nine years of patent protections for a total of 29 years of commercial exclusivity...READ MORE

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield says the controversial new process, which calls on hospitals to send capacity and utilization data to HHS, was made with CDC support...The Trump administration has directed hospitals to stop reporting COVID-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network...Instead, starting Wednesday, they have been told to send capacity and utilization information – including patient numbers, remdesivir inventory and bed and ventilator usage rates – to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the new HHS Protect system...HHS Protect has been aggregating data since April, with much of that information coming from the CDC...During the pandemic it became clear that we needed a central way to make data visible to first responders...READ MORE

DYNALABS, in St. Louis, Missouri, announced the new policy after Reuters published an investigation...that named some of the companies involved in a secret supply chain to make and test a drug ahead of the first federal executions in 17 years...DYNALABS, told Reuters they did not know the samples of the drug, pentobarbital, belonged to the Justice Department, nor that it was intended for executions...“It will be our policy going forward to require a statement from our client indicating their preparation will not be used for execution,” Michael Pruett and Russell Odegard, DYNALABS’ co-founders, said in a statement published on Friday on their website. “Clients that decline to make that declaration will not be allowed to submit their pentobarbital preparations to DYNALABS for testing.”...READ MORE

The Patient Protection Commission plans to explore the issue of health care pricing transparency...specifically some sort of a proposal that would enhance “patient health care experience and state outcomes by implementing transparency measures that help understand data trends.” ...the commission’s work plan ...includes three potential suggestions ...required reporting of all medical claims, drug costs and hospital prices to the state; a database that makes that information accessible and digitally searchable; and a provision requiring hospital data to display the finer points of how their charges are negotiated...READ MORE

Only days after three governments said Russian hackers were targeting groups conducting COVID-19 vaccine research, the U.S. has indicted two Chinese nationals for hacking hundreds of companies, governments and other organizations in the U.S. and beyond, including those working to combat the pandemic...A grand jury in Washington state returned an 11-count indictment against Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi for a 10-year “hacking campaign” targeting high-tech industries in the U.S. and several other countries. Recently, the hackers shifted their focus to companies researching COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and tests, according to authorities...READ MORE

Britain, the United States and Canada accused Russian hackers on Thursday of trying to steal information from researchers seeking a coronavirus vaccine, warning scientists and pharmaceutical companies to be alert for suspicious activity...Intelligence agencies in the three nations alleged that the hacking group APT29, also known as Cozy Bear and said to be part of the Russian intelligence services, is attacking academic and pharmaceutical research institutions involved in COVID-19 vaccine development...“It is completely unacceptable that the Russian Intelligence Services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic,″ British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a statement, accusing Moscow of pursuing “selfish interests with reckless behavior.”...READ MORE

Drug pricing legislation hasn’t gained any steam in Congress lately, but legislatures in dozens of states are chugging ahead...States nationwide are advancing bills focused on numerous topics, a new analysis from Deloitte found. Legislation to regulate pharmacy benefit managers is the most common... while many states have passed—or are considering—measures such as transparency requirements for price increases, importation, value-based contracting and more...Overall, Deloitte found that state legislation targeting drug price transparency and PBMs—not importation or other measures—is affecting companies the most right now...READ MORE

A divided federal appeals court...upheld the Trump administration’s expansion of cheaper short-term health insurance plans, derided by critics as “junk insurance,” as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act’s costlier comprehensive insurance...The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a 2-1 decision that the administration had the legal authority to increase the duration of the health plans from three to 12 months, with the option of renewing them for 36 months. The plans do not have to cover people with preexisting conditions or provide basic benefits like prescription drugs...READ MORE

Robert Courtney, the former Kansas City pharmacist whose dilution of cancer medications led to the premature deaths of hundreds and possibly thousands of patients, will not be released from prison early...The decision to keep Courtney in prison would mark a reversal by the Bureau of Prisons to release him to a halfway house today and then to home confinement in Trimble, Missouri, because of the COVID-19 pandemic...Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2002 to various crimes associated with his drug dilution scheme...READ MORE