MORE COMING ON PBMs — The Senate Finance Committee is moving forward with its promise to rein in pharmacy benefit managers, according to lobbyists and a Senate health aide granted anonymity to talk about the plans — telling Megan that additional proposals targeting the industry are expected to drop in the coming days. Although it’s unclear what the PBM-focused bills would contain, it’s part of a broader attempt by Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) to crack down on PBMs’ business practices. The duo released a roadmap in April that laid out the types of bipartisan policies they wanted to pursue. PBMs negotiate discounts on medicines with drugmakers and decide which treatments health plans will cover and have faced bipartisan scrutiny in the House and Senate this year. Several bills have already been released as part of the Senate Finance Committee effort, including one that would take aim at what critics say are misaligned incentives that drive up prescription drug costs for Americans. The industry is fighting back, arguing that Congress should be focused on passing legislation that advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee this year that would crack down on how drugmakers use the patent system to prolong exclusivity over their products. The movement would come as questions still swirl about which measures will make it into Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s long-awaited insulin and drug pricing package. FIGHTING COVID-ORIGIN COVER-UP ACCUSATIONS — Two authors of a 2020 scientific paper discussing the origin of the coronavirus pandemic will appear before a House panel Tuesday to fight accusations that their paper was meant to cover up a potential lab origin of Covid-19 orchestrated by Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Kristian Andersen, professor at Scripps Research, and Robert Garry, professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, will tell the Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic they genuinely attempted to consider the evidence available about the pandemic’s origins, according to their written testimonies. Andersen will also testify that allegations from House Republicans that he drafted the paper after being prompted by Fauci to disprove a potential lab leak in exchange for a nearly $9 million grant are “absurd and false.” Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, organized the scientists who wrote the paper, according to Andersen. He will also say the $9 million grant was approved in November 2019, months before the start of the paper-drafting process. The panel subpoenaed Andersen’s Slack messages with Fauci, Farrar and others to understand Fauci’s involvement in the process. Fauci told POLITICO in March that he wasn’t involved in writing or editing the paper. Democrats strike back: A Democratic staff report released this morning aims to disprove Republicans’ accusations that Fauci and Francis Collins, the former NIH director, orchestrated the paper to hide NIH funding to the Wuhan virology lab, which is at the center of the lab leak hypothesis. Panel Republicans have called the paper a cover-up, convinced that Fauci and other NIH officials have tried to distract from what the GOP believes was a lab accident in Wuhan triggering the pandemic, following experiments with coronaviruses partly funded by the U.S. government. The report, which Democratic staff claims is based on more than 10,000 pages of email exchanges and transcribed interviews with Andersen and Garry, points to Farrar as having organized the paper, not Fauci nor Collins.
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