Sydney Lupkin
Sydney Lupkin is the pharmaceuticals correspondent for NPR.
She was most recently a correspondent at Kaiser Health News, where she covered drug prices and specialized in data reporting for its enterprise team. She's reported on how tainted drugs can reach consumers, how companies take advantage of rare disease drug rules and how FDA-approved generics often don't make it to market. She's also tracked pharmaceutical dollars to patient advocacy groups and members of Congress. Her work has won the National Press Club's Joan M. Friedenberg Online Journalism Award, the National Institute for Health Care Management's Digital Media Award and a health reporting award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
Lupkin graduated from Boston University. She's also worked for ABC News, VICE News, MedPage Today and The Bay Citizen. Her internship and part-time work includes stints at ProPublica, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The New England Center for Investigative Reporting and WCVB.
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An NPR investigation found stalled confirmatory trials and lax enforcement are plaguing the FDA's accelerated approval of drugs for urgent medical needs.
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Stalled confirmatory trials and lax enforcement plague the Food and Drug Administration's accelerated approval pathway for pharmaceuticals that target urgent medical needs.
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NPR has obtained the government's $5.3 billion contract for the first 10 million courses of Paxlovid, an antiviral pill for COVID-19. Here's what's in it.
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Paxlovid and molnupiravir have been authorized for emergency use to keep COVID-19 patients out of the hospital, but don't expect to be able to go to your usual pharmacy and get them.
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Omicron has many more mutations than previous variants of concern, a fact that raises questions about how effective existing vaccines will be against the new form of the coronavirus.
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If all goes to plan, Americans who got Pfizer or Moderna shots can get a third dose eight months after their last jab. Here's why health officials think you'll need one.
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A Pfizer board member says the government declined to buy more doses beyond the initial 100 million already agreed upon. Demand from other countries could complicate future purchases.
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More than $6 billion in federal funding has been routed through a firm that manages defense contracts, making the agreements subject to less federal scrutiny and transparency.
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COVID-19 has led to the suspension of many clinical studies of experimental treatments. About a quarter of the stopped trials involved new cancer treatments, an NPR analysis finds.
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The Department of Health and Human Services outlines support for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, as the companies work to develop coronavirus vaccines. Beefing up manufacturing capacity is a priority.
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Chloroquine and hydroxycloroquine got the Food and Drug Administration's go-ahead to be put in the nation's strategic storehouses. But the drugs haven't been approved to treat coronavirus patients.
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By renouncing the special status, Gilead Sciences lets go of tax breaks, fee waivers and seven years without generic competition for remdesivir, its experimental COVID-19 treatment.