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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Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are in such high demand that many patients with Type 2 diabetes can't get them when they need them. -
Insurance companies are covering fewer drugs than they used to, and patients have to jump through more hoops to get many of them. When shopping for insurance, check for coverage of the drugs you need. -
As more people try weight-loss drugs like Wegovy, some skip the brand name and buy compounded semaglutide from online pharmacies. But some of these may not follow state and federal standards. -
When Thorsten Siess was in graduate school, he came up with the idea for a heart device that's now been used in hundreds of thousands of patients around the world. -
New medications like Wegovy are changing the way people lose weight and manage obesity, but many Medicaid beneficiaries can't get them. -
As a shortage of growth hormone used to treat rare diseases in children drags on, families and doctors are struggling with insurers' requirements to get prescriptions filled. -
Most of the largest pharmaceutical companies report losing money in the United States, despite the majority of their sales coming from Americans. The result is lower U.S. taxes for the companies. -
Opill, an over-the-counter birth control pill, goes on sale online today. The pill is expected to be available in stores within a few weeks. -
Bayer is adding two of its name-brand drugs to the roster of Cost Plus Drugs: the birth control pill Yaz and the menopause treatment Climara. -
The Senate HELP committee questioned pharmaceutical CEOs about how much more Americans pay for the same drugs sold for less in Canada, Japan and Europe.
