Obama, Hunter Biden ties to Ukraine biolabs get fresh scrutiny

 In August 2005, the U.S. entered into a little known agreement with Ukraine that included America aid to upgrade security at Ukrainian facilities in which microbes were kept.

Now, almost 17 years later, questions about the deal – and the United States' broader support for biodefense laboratories in Ukraine – have surfaced amid concerns about chemical or biological weapons being used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian government has been claiming for weeks that the U.S. government is funding bioweapon labs in Ukraine, justifying its invasion as an effort to stop a joint American-Ukrainian plan to wage biological warfare against Russia.

Chinese officials and state media have echoed the claims, which Andrew Weber, senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks, calls "utter nonsense." 

"It's KGB-style misinformation that's been going on for about 15 years," he said Monday.

One concern among analysts and U.S. officials is that Russia could be laying the groundwork for using chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine and giving itself plausible deniability by blaming Ukrainian labs.

Experts and U.S. officials agree with Weber that Moscow's accusations are unfounded, roundly dismissing them as propaganda.

"Russia is inventing false pretexts in an attempt to justify its own horrific actions in Ukraine," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said earlier this month.

Others have pointed out that no evidence exists to show Ukraine is working to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified earlier this month that "we do not assess that Ukraine is pursuing either biological weapons or nuclear weapons."

United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu similarly said the international group is "not aware" of any biological weapons program in Ukraine.

The U.S. and Ukraine are members of the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits such weapons. And the U.S. government has said both countries are in full compliance.

Russia, however, is not in compliance and "maintains an offensive biological weapons program," according to the State Department.

Weber told Just the News the Russian government has three top-secret military laboratories conducting work on biological weapons that have never been visited or observed by outside inspectors.

"It's very disingenuous for Russia to point its finger at the U.S. and Ukraine," he said. "Both Russia and China know there's nothing untoward going on there."

Weber was the Pentagon official in charge of the U.S.-funded program that worked with the Ukrainian government and spearheaded negotiations with Kyiv on securing biological material.

After 9/11 and subsequent anthrax attacks across the U.S., Weber explained, the president of Ukraine asked Washington to assess the security of his country's chemical and biological labs. The U.S. and Ukraine each wanted to counter the threat of bioterrorism and to prevent the proliferation of biological weapons, materials and technology, he also said.

Weber led a team that identified a number of labs run by Ukraine's Ministry of Health that would be good partners for the effort – many of them in poor shape with dangerous pathogen collections left over from the Soviet Union.

While Ukraine's labs weren't directly involved in the Soviet biological-weapons program, some of their pathogens were used for Moscow's weaponization work.

After months of negotiations, the Pentagon and the Ukrainian ministry in August 2005 struck an agreement under which the U.S. agreed to send aid to Ukraine to fund security upgrades at Ukrainian facilities in which pathogens were stored and to support Ukrainian research on fighting the spread of diseases. 

The purpose was purportedly to consolidate pathogen collections into one or two safer and more secure labs in Ukraine and to strengthen Ukraine's public health capacity to respond to disease outbreaks.

Today, with the Russia invasion roughly one-month long, there are concerns that Russia could either capture Ukraine's biolabs for their own purposes or strike them and accidentally release stored pathogens.

Such concerns have prompted the World Health Organization to urge Ukrainian authorities to destroy research samples of disease pathogens in their labs.

The 2005 agreement extended to Ukraine the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which was established in 1991 to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in the former states of the Soviet Union. The program is housed within the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

The program has spent about $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to the DTRA. Roughly $200 million of that total has been spent on supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities and diagnostic sites.

There may have been some U.S. funding to support Ukrainian biodefense labs before 2005, but it would have been small and through the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine, Weber also said.

The final deal, which was meant to defend against bioweapons rather than build them, was announced by then-Sens. Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, during a visit to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

For the last nearly two decades, the deal been the basis for U.S.-Ukraine collaboration on biological materials.

"That's been the legal framework" ever since, said Weber. "It's been a successful collaboration," despite Russian claims to the contrary.

However, one recent assertion by Russia appears to be at least partially true: that President Biden's eldest son, Hunter Biden, helped finance biolab projects in Ukraine.

Hunter Biden and his colleagues invested $500,000 in a Pentagon contractor through their firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, and raised millions more through other firms that included Goldman Sachs, according to emails from Biden's laptop. Biden abandoned his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. The FBI now has the device.

The Pentagon contractor was Metabiota, a California-based pathogen research company.

The emails were sent during the Obama administration when Biden's father was vice president. They show the younger Biden introduced Metabiota to officials at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board he served, for a project involving biolabs in Ukraine.

In 2014, the U.S. awarded $23.9 million to Metabiota, according to government records, and $307,091 of that total was allocated for "Ukrainian research projects."

The financial link between Hunter Biden and Metabiota's work in Ukraine was first reported by the National Pulse.

https://justthenews.com/government/security/biden-obama-and-ukraine-biolabs-separating-fact-fiction

Poisoning Fears: Ukraine warns peace team not to eat or drink during talks with Russians

 Following reports that Ukrainian peace negotiators and a Russian oligarch showed symptoms of having been poisoned after a meeting earlier this month with Russian officials, Kyiv has warned its negotiators to avoid meals and snacks during additional talks. 

"I advise anyone going for negotiations with Russia not to eat or drink anything, preferably avoid touching surfaces,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Tuesday while speaking to state media.

The warning is in response to suspicions that the negotiators were poisoned March 3, while meeting in Ukraine with Russian counterparts. According to reports that emerged this week, the victims experienced peeling skin on their faces and hands, along with painful tearing from their eyes.

The alleged victims included Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has been acting as a back-channel conduit between Moscow and Kyiv.

Details of the incident were described on Monday in a series of tweets from Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based group that conducts and publishes open-source research. 

"Bellingcat can confirm that three members of the delegation attending the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia on the night of 3 to 4 March 2022 experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons," the group wrote on Monday.

According to Bellingcat, the talks began March 3 in the afternoon, and lasted until about 10 p.m.

"Three members of the negotiating team retreated to an apartment in Kyiv later that night and felt initial symptoms – including eye and skin inflammation and piercing pain in the eyes – later that night," the organization wrote. "The symptoms did not abate until the morning."

The three men who felt the symptoms had consumed only chocolate and water, while a fourth person who ingested the same foodstuffs did not have symptoms.

Bellingcat tweeted that the symptoms were "most consistent with variants of porphyrin, organophosphates, or bicyclic substances."

Speculation quickly emerged that the men were poisoned by Russian hardliners who aimed to torpedo peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

The theory is "shocking," but also improbable, one U.S. intelligence analyst told Just the News.

"It would be very tough to pull off, particularly in that setting," the analyst said. The analyst is not authorized to speak to the media, and made the comments on condition of anonymity.

Moscow denounced the suggestion that Russia had given poison to the negotiators. Such reports were false, and were part of an "information war," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

The Kremlin did not immediately return a request Tuesday for comment.

Another alleged victim, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, on Monday downplayed the accounts.

"I’m fine," Rustem Umerov tweeted. "This is my response to all the yellow news spreading around. Please do not trust any unverified information."

The reports are part of a campaign to control the narrative surrounding events in Ukraine, he suggested.

"We have an informational war ongoing as well," Umerov also said in a tweet. 

More than three weeks after the alleged poisonings, the alleged victims, including Abramovich, have recovered and resumed their efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.

https://justthenews.com/government/security/ukraine-warns-peace-team-not-eat-or-drink-during-talks-russians-fear-being

Amid growing criticism, CDC denies withholding vaccination data on COVID deaths, hospitalizations

 For the first time since COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed, the CDC finds itself under sustained scrutiny from even presumed allies for the quality and timeliness of data it publishes and what it keeps hidden.

The agency recently removed tens of thousands of deaths attributed to COVID through a "coding logic error," including a quarter of pediatric deaths. 

The CDC has only published "a tiny fraction" of its collected data, from booster performance in prime-age adults to "hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status," sources told The New York Times. 

One reason is fear the data could be misrepresented, including on vaccine effectiveness, agency spokesperson Kristen Nordlund told the newspaper. Scottish public health officials gave the same rationale when the country stopped reporting COVID deaths by vaccination status last month.

Newly released public records show the agency refusing to share its "demographic vaccine data at the state level" a year ago, instead directing a Harvard public health researcher to see if the CDC's "state and jurisdictional partners" post the data on their website.

Even as the agency works to unify federal and state public health data systems through its Data Modernization Initiative, some critics have accused the CDC of actively squelching statistics that undermine its preferred narratives. 

"The CDC is no longer releasing data comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated deaths & hospitalizations," conservative writer Scott Morefield tweeted Saturday. "But don't worry. I'm sure it's just an oversight."

Nordlund told Just the News the agency is actually just working on a six-week lag with some data. Its most recent comparison of deaths used January data and wasn't released until mid-March, and the February deaths data will be released in mid-April, she said.

Its data tracker on cases and deaths, which covers 26 jurisdictions, has long emphasized that vaccinated and especially boosted individuals have better outcomes than the unvaccinated, though the data are more complicated. (Cases data run through mid-February.)

The January data show unvaccinated people ages 5 and up had a nine times greater risk of death than the fully vaccinated, and for ages 12 and up, 21 times greater than the boosted, though deaths fell sharply for all groups by the end of the month.

Cases across all groups also saw a steep plunge between early January and Feb. 19. The boosted even had a slightly higher positive rate per 100,000 than the vaccinated by the latter date. 

The fine print notes that deaths include anyone with a "positive specimen" and that a person isn't considered "fully vaccinated" or boosted until at least 14 days after receiving the primary series or booster. Those who only had one mRNA vaccine dose were excluded entirely.

The tracker's death data are "real time and subject to change" because they are often incomplete, Nordlund said regarding the CDC's recent removal of 72,000 COVID deaths. The National Vital Statistics System is the "most complete source of death data," given its death certificate review process. 

The CDC's "COVID-19-associated" hospitalization data by vaccination status are published more quickly, though they also cover just half the jurisdictions (13) as those reporting cases and deaths. The agency doesn't define "COVID-19-associated," and Nordlund didn't answer whether that includes COVID infections incidental to hospitalization.

Last week the agency posted hospitalization data through Feb. 26, showing that all children 5-11 and vaccinated 12-17 year-olds have a hospitalization rate under 1 in 100,000. Unvaccinated 12-17 year-olds (1.7) are comparable to boosted adults 18-49 (1.6). Unvaccinated 18-49 year-olds have a higher rate (8.7) than vaccinated 50-64 (5.7) but lower than even boosted individuals 65 and up (11.3).

None of the data includes relevant distinctions within each category, such as comorbidities and immune system condition. Unvaccinated groups are more likely to have medical conditions that make vaccination a higher risk for them.

The gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated has been closing since the Omicron variant emerged. The Epoch Times reported a month ago that vaccinated and boosted case rates jumped by 1,000 and 2,400 percent between Dec. 11 and Jan. 8.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has admitted its vaccine offers "very limited protection if any" protection against Omicron infection, and even the booster is only "reasonable" against hospitalization and death.

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Those who have recovered from the first version of Omicron, known as BA.1, appear to have substantial immunity against its second, BA.2, according to Denmark's State Serum Institute.

Among 1.8 million infections Nov. 22-Feb. 11 with BA.1, only 47 people had reinfections with the even more transmissible BA.2 between 20 and 60 days later, "mostly in young unvaccinated individuals with mild disease not resulting in hospitalization or death," the government research group said.

While the Danish research is awaiting peer review, the U.K. Health Security Agency found a similar number of BA.2 reinfections (43) among more than half a million documented infections Nov. 1-Feb. 21.

The U.K. is also having a reckoning about the quality of its COVID data. The University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence Based Medicine recently reported the country has 14 definitions for COVID deaths and cited red flags, such as death certificates that implausibly claim COVID is the only cause and deaths attributed to COVID with no positive test.

In a Twitter argument about how to interpret U.K. data on COVID deaths by vaccination status, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Jeffrey Morris, director of its biostatistics division, said he doesn't trust the CDC's "data split by vaccination status" because "the lack of centralized system and great heterogeneity makes it more unreliable than most."

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cdc-denies-withholding-data-vaccination-status-covid-deaths

Questions on feds' evidence for second COVID booster, refusal to consult advisers

 The federal government's enthusiasm for COVID-19 vaccine boosters is not matched by some of its outside advisers and other medical professionals, including the head of a leading medical journal who questions the evidence behind the decisions in the past several months.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized a fourth mRNA dose for ages 50 and older, expanding its availability beyond immunocompromised people, without input from its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed hours later without consulting its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The FDA previously overruled VRBPAC in November by authorizing a third mRNA dose for ages 16 and older. The agency's top two vaccine officials, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, resigned earlier in the fall when the Biden administration promoted boosters for all adults before the agency could weigh in.

Johns Hopkins University medical professor Marty Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, asked sarcastically whether "bypassing the typical voting process" of the VRBPAC was "following the science."

Instead, the agency plans to convene its outside experts to "discuss" the FDA's decision, which is like "a judge issuing a verdict and then having lawyers make their arguments," Makary wrote in a tweet thread.

"There is zero clinical data that a 4th dose reduces hospitalization risk," he said. "There isn't even any evidence that a 3rd dose reduces hospitalization risk in young people."

VRBPAC member Eric Rubin, editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, told CNN he has only seen fourth-dose data "for participants followed for just a few weeks." The committee needs to know how well it protects "highly vulnerable people against serious disease and death."

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and another VRBPAC member, said the committee has seen evidence only for "the possibility" that a fourth dose benefits those over 65. Without evidence for those over 50, "there shouldn't be this recommendation," he told CNN.

Former FDA Associate Commissioner Peter Pitts correctly predicted the FDA wouldn't "recommend" the second booster for ages 50 and up. The agency announcement Tuesday said the fourth dose "may be administered" to that age group, while the CDC said it was updating "recommendations to allow" the fourth dose.

Pitts told Just the News the FDA didn't have enough data to justify the "recommend" language. But "the data is crystal clear" that the second booster produces higher antibodies and thus "the benefit outweighs the risk" for that age group, which is why Pitts is fine with VRBPAC and ACIP being sidelined.

Authorizing a fourth dose would "cement a dangerous precedent: inadequate evidence being used to justify widespread vaccination for years to come," University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad wrote last week in City Journal. "Pfizer and Moderna will get rich, our arms will ache, and no one will know if we made the right decision."

The agency is relying on "two observational studies comparing people who rushed to be boosted with those who didn’t," one of which showed an implausibly large benefit the day after boosting, while the other "relied on actively testing people with no symptoms," said Prasad, who once reported the FDA to Twitter for misinformation.

Former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier approvingly shared Prasad's longer review of one of those studies. "Until recently, nearly all scientists" would have demanded evidence from a randomized trial, Flier wrote. "Not clear how this changed."

Asked to respond to VRBPAC members' claims and criticisms from other doctors, FDA spokesperson Abby Capobianco told Just the News that the authorization "does not raise new scientific questions that would benefit from additional discussion" by VRBPAC.

She pointed to a press call with the FDA's Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who appeared in the agency video Prasad reported for misinformation.

Marks told reporters "this was a relatively straightforward decision made based on data ... such as the survival benefit [and] the reduction of hospitalization." While he admitted the agency only had data on ages 60 and up, Marks said the FDA set the floor at 50 because "a significant enough group of people in that range that would be at high risk, and this reduces confusion for people with a very good [second booster] safety profile."

The CDC didn't answer whether the FDA's action prompted it to authorize the second booster as well, or respond directly to criticism from outside doctors.

Spokesperson Kate Grusich told Just the News the CDC "values" ACIP and the "voluntary service of its members," but to "ensure the best use of resources both internally and externally, some incremental changes to vaccine policy do not need to go before the full committee."

Its vaccine experts and ACIP's Vaccines Work Group "reviewed the available data and the CDC Director approved these updates" for the benefit of "those at highest risk for severe outcomes," Grusich said, but did not answer what feedback the ACIP work group provided and how Walensky responded to it.

Prasad also warned that vaccine mandates in "ultra-low-risk populations" were certain to stiffen when the feds authorize fourth doses for younger populations. Many colleges already require third mRNA shots for students, and the University of California's booster policy also applies to a school it runs with students as young as 12, he said.

A new study by University of Washington pediatrics researchers casts doubt on claims that the post-mRNA vaccination heart inflammation observed at higher rates in young people is mild or short-lived.

Accepted for publication in the Journal of Pediatrics, the Seattle Children's Hospital study tracked 35 patients diagnosed with myopericarditis within a week of receiving a second Pfizer dose. The final cohort was composed of 16 patients who had "acute phase and follow-up CMR [cardiac magnetic resonance studies] available for review."

All but one were male, and all but two were non-Hispanic white, with a median age of 15.

They all had chest pain, and 10 of the 16 had an "abnormal electrocardiogram." The median time between vaccination and treatment with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs was 2.5 days.

At their followup CMR 3-8 months later, 11 of the 16 had "persistent" late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), or scarring, "although there was a significant decrease in the quantifiable" percentage of LGE.

Philadelphia cardiologist Anish Koka said this scarring had not been observed in studies of multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) myocarditis, which results from COVID infection.

"Vaxx myocarditis is worse than MIS-C myocarditis," he tweeted.

University of Pittsburgh medical professor Walid Gellad, director of its Center for Pharmaceutical Policy & Prescribing, responded that he wouldn't call it "worse." But the research undermines the claim that children "fully recover" from vaccine-associated heart inflammation – talking points that some doctors "casually parroted."

The CDC "has a civic duty to ... rigorously study the long-term effects of vaccine-induced myocarditis" given this study, Makary of Johns Hopkins tweeted. A week earlier, other medical experts pointed to a small Israeli study of boosted adults, ages 18-44, that also found LGE in patients referred for CMR within 21 days of the booster.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/medical-experts-question-fdas-evidence-second-covid-booster-refusal

AHA redirects FTC, DOJ merger scrutiny from hospital deals to concentrated insurer markets

 As federal regulators work to overhaul merger and acquisition enforcement, hospitals say the industry’s guidelines “do not need major revisions” outside of two new measures related to the potential benefits of hospital consolidation.

In a March 30 letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the American Hospital Association (AHA) reinforced its merger-friendly position by referring the agencies to recent data on the positive outcomes of provider consolidation.

These reports and studies—some of which were conducted on behalf of the trade group—suggest efficiencies enabled by mergers allow hospitals to reduce costs, improve quality, better coordinate services or improve access by helping struggling facilities keep their doors open.

“For these reasons, it is essential that the antitrust agencies employ analytically sound merger guidelines that fairly account for the lifesaving benefits that hospital mergers produce,” AHA General Counsel Melinda R. Hatton wrote in the letter. “Changes to the guidelines should reflect years of scholarship that have documented these pro-competitive efficiencies.”

The FTC and the DOJ began soliciting public input on merger enforcement in January in the wake of “an ongoing merger surge that has more than doubled merger filings from 2020 to 2021.” The agencies received their directive last summer from President Joe Biden, who specifically called out hospital dealmaking as a driver of higher prices and consumer harm.

The AHA wrote in its letter that hospitals and other parties “rely on the merger guidelines for predictability and transparency of what constitutes lawful conduct” and that recalibration should only be considered for “significant developments in antitrust law and economics.”

Rather, AHA sought to redirect the regulators’ focus by advising the DOJ and the FTC to use the recently passed Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act (CHIRA) to “investigate and challenge anticompetitive mergers and deceptive conduct by insurance companies.”

Insurers, the provider group wrote, already operate highly concentrated markets permitting them to raise prices, restrict competition and limit patient choices. The AHA also referenced insurers’ “bait-and-switch tactics” to unexpectedly change coverage and restrictions on specialty drugs as harmful results of an under scrutinized slice of the healthcare industry.

“The current guidelines allow the agencies to challenge deals like UnitedHealth Group's proposed acquisition of Change Healthcare, a suit that was recently and rightfully brought by the DOJ,” the AHA wrote. “The AHA strongly urges the agencies to investigate and pursue these anticompetitive practices by health insurers using the powers granted to them by the passage of CHIRA.”

Still, the AHA’s letter did outline two hospital-specific guideline revisions for the agencies to consider.

The group first suggested that agencies “correct defects in the economic models they use to evaluate hospital transactions.”

For instance, a demand model FTC uses to predict how many patients view merging hospitals as their top two choices “overemphasize how much value patients assign to travel times and ignore other important considerations that affect how consumers select a hospital, such as past treatment experiences, where patients' physicians have admitting privileges and physician referrals,” AHA wrote.

The trade group also asked regulators to update their guidelines to recognize care coordination improvements enabled by hospital mergers.

“Economic research has shown that partnering with hospital systems typically enables the acquired hospital to provide measurable benefits to patients in the form of lower health care costs, improved patient care and better access to providers,” the AHA wrote. “The agencies and the guidelines should recognize these additional benefits to hospital mergers.”

The AHA’s support for hospital consolidation grapples with numerous studies published over the last several years suggesting that healthcare providers’ increased market power drives higher charges, service line cuts and fewer incentives to improve care.

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/aha-redirects-ftc-doj-merger-scrutiny-away-hospital-deals-concentrated-insurer-markets

CMS to give $110M to boost participation in Medicaid's Money Follows the Person program

 The Biden administration will distribute more than $110 million to help expand home and community-based services in Medicaid via the Money Follows the Person program that aims to boost home-based care for Medicaid beneficiaries. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Thursday that the funding will open the door for more than 20 states and territories not participating in the program.

“Our healthcare system works best when it meets us where we are and helps us get to where we want to be,” said CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure in a statement Thursday. “With this new funding opportunity, we’re expanding a program with a proven track record of helping seniors and people with disabilities transition safely from institutional care to their own homes and communities.”

Money Follows the Person was approved back in 2005 and aims to reduce the use of institutional-based services and transition beneficiaries to more home and community-based services. 

The additional funding aims to help states and territories get a new program off the ground, including recruiting home-care providers and experts for transition coordination and how to establish system assessments to understand how home-care services can support residents, according to a release on the funding. 

Any state Medicaid agency that isn’t participating in the program has until May 31 to apply for the new funding.

States that are already participating in the program will get an increased reimbursement rate for any supplemental services to be 100% federally funded with no requirement for a state match. 

CMS also is expanding the definition of a supplemental service to include short-term housing and food assistance. 

The funding comes as the Biden administration has moved to increase access to home-based services, especially considering the COVID-19 pandemic that caused an explosion in telehealth use. 

The $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act had included $150 billion in funding to overhaul home care, but the legislation stalled last year due to insufficient Democratic support in the Senate. 

CMS has also made moves to boost home-based services in Medicare and Medicaid. The agency issued a dialysis payment rule last year that aimed to decrease health disparities in access to home dialysis services. 

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/cms-give-110m-boost-participation-medicaids-money-follows-person-program

Glaxo: From Q1 2022 Results Co Will Report Results Under Three Segments

 * GLAXOSMITHKLINE PLC - GSK - SEGMENT AND PRODUCT SALES REPORTING CHANGES

* GSK: FROM Q1 2022 RESULTS GSK WILL REPORT RESULTS UNDER THREE SEGMENTS

* GSK - CONSUMER HEALTHCARE SEGMENT WILL BE REPORTED AS A "CONTINUING OPERATION" UNTIL SUCH TIME AS FORMAL CRITERIA FOR TREATING IT OTHERWISE

* GSK - SALES OF BRANDS DIVESTED IN Q1 2021 WILL NOT BE REPORTED IN SEPARATE BRANDS DIVESTED CATEGORY FOR COMPARATIVE PERIODS OF 2021

* GSK - AS A RESULT OF CHANGES, FROM Q1 2022 PRESENTATION OF A SEPARATE CATEGORY FOR BRANDS DIVESTED AND UNDER REVIEW WILL NO LONGER BE REQUIRED

* GSK: THREE PRODUCT GROUPS WILL BE SPECIALTY MEDICINES PRODUCTS, GENERAL MEDICINES PRODUCTS, AND VACCINES PRODUCTS 

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/GLAXOSMITHKLINE-PLC-9590199/news/GSK-Says-From-Q1-2022-Results-Co-Will-Report-Results-Under-Three-Segments-39938946/