The new pharmacist.com is clean, contemporary, and designed with our members’ needs in mind. You’re too busy to spend 5 minutes or even 10 seconds navigating an information obstacle course, so the next generation of pharmacist.com makes finding what you need a cinch. Our search function is first class. 

We join all Americans in mourning the victims of this week’s horrific shootings in Atlanta. We don’t need authorities to formally declare a motive to know in our hearts that these were clearly hate crimes, perhaps driven by multiple pathologies.

A true pharmacy icon, Dr. Joseph A. Oddis, left the Earth this week. He began his life of service to pharmacy and its patients as a young man, going on to become the CEO of ASHP for 37 years and the recipient of the profession’s most distinguished accolades, including the Remington Medal and Hugo Schaefer Award. Over the course of his long career, Dr. Oddis touched every crevice and contour of pharmacy practice as we know it, and in doing so made an untold impact on the lives of millions of patients under pharmacists’ care.

It was the summer of 2020, and COVID-19 had pulled back the curtain on historic inadequacies in the American health care system—too little personal protective equipment, an unreliable drug supply chain, rampant health inequities, and a lack of coordination between the government, public health officials, and health care providers and facilities.

Operation Warp Speed leaders predicted that 20 million people, primarily frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, would receive the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in December. It’s now January, and media reports indicate that we’ve yet to break 5 million.

As with anything new, there will be bumps in the road as untested models are implemented. We are only in Phase 1a, and already we are seeing a need to refine the process. As more COVID-19 vaccines become available and more individuals become eligible to receive it, increased access points and optimal use of pharmacy teams will be critical to vaccinating more than 328 million Americans. We have got to kick this up a notch.