Med Ad News 40th Anniversary

1982 marked much more than pop music and classic movies. That year, Karl and Styli Engel kicked off a newsletter aimed at a particular audience: advertising agencies serving healthcare marketers. A lot of changes have occurred in healthcare marketing during the past 40 years – including the rise and fall of the salesforce, adoption of digital, and the advent of omnichannel marketing – and Med Ad News continues to highlight and analyze the trends.

Jon Bigelow, Thayer Pond Solutions

Each new president enters the White House with big dreams and unique challenges. For President Joe Biden, 2021 was dominated by the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, an historically difficult transition of power, and a focus on packing an ambitious combination of economic relief, infrastructure investment, and social spending initiatives into a handful of multi-trillion dollar omnibus bills to push through a tightly-divided Congress.

The New York Stock Exchange is withdrawing its mask mandate for fully vaccinated people effective immediately, a source said on February 11, after several large U.S. banks also dropped their mask requirements at their U.S. offices.

Paxlovid

China’s medical products regulator said on February 12 it has given conditional approval for Pfizer’s COVID-19 drug Paxlovid, the first oral pill specifically developed to treat the disease to be cleared in the country.

Walmart Inc. informed staff on February 11 that fully vaccinated workers in the United States will no longer be required to wear masks in the company’s facilities, effective immediately, unless required by a state or local mandate.

The World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said on February 11 that the world was not yet at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as there would be more coronavirus variants.

The COVID-19 pandemic that became evident in the United States in early 2020 had a profound and disruptive effect upon cancer research and treatment, but the lessons learned can be used to improve healthcare delivery in multiple indications, according to the AACR Report on the Impact of COVID-19 on Cancer Research and Patient Care that was released February 9th.

U.S. President Joe Biden on February 10 said mask requirements for children would likely to start to fall away given federal plans to begin vaccinating children under the age of 5, but said it was probably premature to drop COVID mask requirements entirely.

U.S. President Joe Biden on February 10 said he expected inflation to start to ease during 2022 as supply chain logjams clear up, while saying his administration was already helping ease shortages, as new data showed the biggest jump in consumer prices in 40 years.

Over the past six months, the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index has declined more than 20%. Some of the falling prices appear to be due to some investors losing interest in many companies that soared into favor during the COVID-19 pandemic. And these companies that have seen declining investor interest are now struggling to raise finances, according to BioSpace