A 74-year-old woman was seriously hurt when she was hit by an SUV in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Tuesday evening.
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Massachusetts
A popular asthma medication was discontinued, leaving patients scrambling for alternatives
Flovent, a popular inhaler that has been used to treat asthma for the last 25 years, is disappearing from pharmacy shelves, leaving patients and doctors scrambling to find the medication they need in order to breathe.
The drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, discontinued the medication at the end of December. Keyes Drug store in Newton got their final shipment at the end of January and now there are just two left on the shelves.
“(We) definitely expect to run out soon. There’s like one left of each strength,” Keyes pharmacist Maryana Rodriguez said. “The highest strength hasn’t been available in a while.”
CDC data shows that 10% of adults and 13% of children in Massachusetts have asthma. Boston Medical Center pediatric pulmonologist Robyn Cohen said the generic version replacing Flovent is even more expensive for insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers to use.
“There are a lot of insurance companies that aren’t covering it,” Cohen said. “This is winter respiratory virus season. It’s flu season, the number one trigger for asthma exacerbations in children. And now suddenly families can’t get the preventive medication that they need for their children.”
Meanwhile, Cohen added that one of the only two alternatives for children – Asmanex – is on backorder and hasn’t been available since mid-January.
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“Flovent was very commonly prescribed to both children and adults. So it spans the entire spectrum,” Tufts Medical Center pulmonary physician Jeremy Weinberger said. “We wish that drug companies were just motivated by what’s best for the patients. But unfortunately, a lot of it comes down to what’s the bottom line and cost.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent this letter to the pharmaceutical giant Monday, accusing them of “price gouging” to avoid new government regulations, which fine companies when price increases for medications outpace inflation.
“For years, GSK has avoided accountability for aggressive price hikes on their life-saving drugs, and now, just ahead of allergy season, they’ve effectively ripped a go-to inhaler out of the hands of kids,” Sen. Warren said in a statement. “This is a shameful money grab that puts millions of children at risk. I’m pushing them for answers.”
A GSK spokesperson confirmed they got the letter and plan to respond.
“We made a business decision to launch Authorized Generics for Flovent HFA and Flovent Diskus as to way to help ensure patients continue to have access to these important medicines, potentially at a lower cost, knowing that we had been planning to discontinue the branded products for some time,” the spokesperson said via email. “The authorized generic contains the same medicine, in the same familiar device, and with the same instructions for use as Flovent HFA.”
Experts say families struggling with this should talk to their doctor or pharmacist, since different medications work differently for everyone.
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Years after audio prank at Boston’s MFA, BJ Novak gets official pardon
It’s not Boston’s most famous art heist, but it might be the funniest.
Back in 1997, when he was in high school, B.J. Novak and a friend made convincing replicas of an audio tour for an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. The Newton South student who would go onto fame as a TV star, writer and movie director swapped out some of the original tapes for the spoofs, which start off like the original version did before taking a wild and debaucherous turn.
The museum described it as “a stunt that both confused countless innocent visitors and showed us that even the pettiest and most sophomoric pranksters among us can leave an impact on a historic institution,” in a Facebook post Monday as they officially proclaimed that Novak was pardoned.
The Newton native returned to the museum to give a lecture called “Art & Pranks” last week, where he was presented with a scroll of the proclamation.
“We were such good kids that we took the tapes we had stolen and put them in a bag in a locker at the MFA and wrote a ransom note,” he said, according to to a Boston Globe account of the evening.
Safe to say it was not quite at the level of the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner heist seven years earlier, though apparently it made an impact on the MFA’s security, too.
“I even got to talk to Edwin the security guard who was there on the day of the prank. I thought it might be a sting operation at first. But it seems all is well. Thank you MFA for your sense of humor and mercy and to everyone in Boston who came to see it,” Novak said in an Instagram post Tuesday.
A representative for the museum didn’t have a copy of the recording they could share with NBC10 Boston. While Novak embedded a video of the recording in a 2014 post explaining the prank on his blog, that video is now private.
At a 2011 fundraiser at Newton South, he opened up about the prank for what he suggested then was the first time, according to a contemporaneous Globe piece, which described the recording.
But in 2007, before Novak first appeared on “The Office,” a recording matching the tour’s description was uploaded as a podcast, with a brief news clipping about the prank as its cover art. It’s credited to Peter Owen Nelson (a friend of Novak’s) and B.J. Novak, and at least as of Tuesday afternoon, was available to listen on Apple Podcasts. (If you do listen, there are some curse words.)
“Quietly remove the glass and smell the rich aroma of the paints,” the narrator says, sniffing. “That’s it. Take it right in. Then, please, replace the glass to its previous position.”
Later, in a sidebar on the Oscars, the heavily accented narrator says, “Show me the money,” in a Tom Cruise impression before an elaborate “Hokey Pokey” routine.
“You see, we are spicy here at the Museum of Fine Arts. We always keep you on your toes,” Bronstein says.
The recording ends with the narrator going off the rails, followed by about three uninterrupted minutes of a Tito Puente cha cha song.
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Investment group sells stake in Bulfinch luxury tower in $43M deal
A San Francisco-based real estate investment firm has acquired a partial interest in The Sudbury, the luxury residential tower that opened in 2020 as part of the Bulfinch Crossing mixed-use development near Government Center.
Carmel Partners paid …
