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.
-
House Rep. Gerry Connolly is pushing CDC leadership to explain why the personnel who handle FOIA requests lost their jobs, noting that that the public has a right to access federal records. -
The drug company Eli Lilly is suing four telehealth companies for allegedly selling copies made by compounding pharmacies of its drug Zepbound. -
While Food and Drug Administration inspectors who make sure food and drugs meet quality standards were spared in recent cuts, key support staffers were dismissed. -
The action is intended to build upon the existing program for Medicare drug price negotiations, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act that passed during the Biden administration. -
Health agency staffers describe a week of widespread uncertainty about who still has a job and how the work will get done as thousands of "reduction in force" notices went out beginning April 1. To many it's the opposite of "government efficiency." -
Federal health agencies have to slash their spending on contracts by more than a third, on top of the 10,000-person staffing cuts which started this week. -
Despite promises for "radical transparency," Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid off many staff on teams that fulfill public records requests at health agencies. -
Staffers began receiving termination notices this morning as part of a major restructuring at HHS. Some senior leadership are on their way out too. -
With no help from the federal government, states are trying to regulate recreational marijuana. California's Department of Cannabis Control works to keep contaminants out of joints, vapes and edibles. -
Compounding pharmacies have been allowed to essentially make a cheaper version of Eli Lilly's Zepbound, but they have to stop Wednesday. That has left many patients wondering what to do next.
