People have grown more attached to their pets — and more willing to spend money on them — turning animal medicine into a high-tech industry worth billions.Heather Massey brought Ladybird to the veterinarian when the 9-year-old mutt began having seizures. A scan from an M.R.I. machine revealed bad news: brain cancer.With the prognosis grim, Ms. Massey decided against further treatment at the animal hospital near her home in Athens, Ga., and Ladybird died four months later. The M.R.I. scan and related care had cost nearly $2,000, which Ms. Massey put on a specialty credit card she had learned about at a previous vet visit.That was in 2018. She is still paying off the debt, with more than 30 percent interest.“Could I afford to do that? Not really,” said Ms. Massey, 52, who is disabled and does not work. “Was it worth it to me? Yes.”Ms. Massey’s experience illustrates the expensive new realities of owning a pet. For decades, veterinarians typically operated their own clinics, shepherding generations of pets from birth to death. They neutered, vaccinated and pulled thorns from paws and noses. When animals became seriously ill, vets often had little to offer beyond condolences and a humane death.But in recent years, as people have grown more attached to their pets — and more willing to spend money on them — animal medicine has transformed into a big business that looks a lot like its human counterpart. Many veterinary offices have been replaced by hospitals outfitted with expensive M.R.I. machines, sophisticated lab equipment and round-the-clock intensive care units. Dogs and cats often see highly trained specialists in neurology, cardiology and oncology.This high-tech care has spurred a booming market. Veterinary prices have soared more than 60 percent over the past decade, according to federal statistics. Private equity firms and large corporations have bought hundreds of facilities around the country, an acquisition spree reminiscent of the corporate roll-ups of doctors’ offices.Veterinary care prices have soared in the past decade

.dw-chart-subhed {
line-height: 1;
margin-bottom: 6px;
font-family: nyt-franklin;
color: #121212;
font-size: 15px;
font-weight: 700;
}

Cumulative change in prices since April 2014
“All items” data is the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers. Data is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

We want to hear from pet owners about their experiences taking their animals to the vet, and how they paid for their animals’ care.Dogs and cats are members of the family. So when they are sick, many pet owners will go to nearly any length to make sure they’re taken care of.That care, however, increasingly comes at an eye-popping cost: Veterinary bills have skyrocketed in recent years. Even routine visits can add up to hundreds of dollars, and a frantic trip to the emergency vet can quickly max out credit cards.And while pet health insurance can help ease the financial strain, it has few of the consumer protections (like coverage of pre-existing conditions) that are required for human insurance.The New York Times is interested in speaking to pet owners who can share their recent experiences paying for veterinary care.We will not publish any part of your response to this questionnaire without talking with you first. We will not share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will use it only to reach out to you. If you would feel more comfortable sharing your story with us anonymously, please visit our tips page.

The governors of Maryland and New Jersey defended their moves to ease Covid restrictions, saying on Sunday that falling coronavirus cases in their states justified a change even as new cases and deaths still remain fairly high in some regions of the United States.“As best we can tell right now this thing is going from pandemic to endemic, and we feel it is the responsible step to take” to allow local school districts and municipalities to make their own decisions, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He is one of several Democratic governors who announced plans to lift statewide mask mandates last week, whether they applied to schools or in general, as the United States begins to emerge from the Omicron surge.His optimistic tone echoed that of Gov. Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor, who has called on his state’s Board of Education to lift its school mask mandate. Mr. Hogan removed Maryland’s state masking requirement last May, but the schools are governed independently. “I think it’s safe enough for our kids to just try to get back to normal,” Mr. Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”The move by several states to lift restrictions comes as a new CBS poll found that a majority of Americans still support mask mandates, including in schools, but that many are exhausted and frustrated by a pandemic that is grinding into its third year.Within schools, public health experts agree that mask requirements should not last forever, but differ on whether the time has come to remove them.According to many health experts, the next phase of the virus in the United States may depend on what new possible variants emerge, vaccination rates and risk tolerance. Herd immunity to Covid, public health specialists say, is unlikely to be achieved. And scientists have cautioned that protection may wane over time, and future variants may be better able to sidestep our defenses.Still, known coronavirus infections are falling across the country, though case numbers nationwide have not returned to pre-Omicron levels and remain high in states like Alaska, Mississippi and West Virginia. Hospitalizations and deaths are also on the decline, but are still elevated.This week, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, reiterated her agency’s position that masks should not be removed when gathering indoors. “We are not there yet,” she said at a White House briefing on Wednesday.As cases drop and restrictions lift, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said he thought the country seemed to be shifting away from a period of collective actions to protect vulnerable groups, to one where individuals must protect themselves based on their own risk assessments.“I think there’s portions of the population that are going to be in a very difficult spot right now because they remain vulnerable,” Dr. Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation.”Young children, he said, are one of those groups, referring to the F.D.A.’s announcement on Friday to postpone its decision about whether to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for children under 5 until more data becomes available. Studies so far have found that two doses are not sufficient to protect children aged 2 to 4, though in April the company expects to have data on the efficacy of a third dose.Dr. Gottlieb, who serves on Pfizer’s board, said the latest delay, which affects nearly 18 million children and their families, was frustrating. But he said the F.D.A.’s decision was prudent. By waiting, “they’ll have a very firm picture of what level of effectiveness the vaccine is delivering,” he said. “That is important for patients and pediatricians to make fully informed decisions.”

“I don’t see a lot going well for them at this point,” said one analyst.Novavax, one of the first players in the race to vaccinate the world against Covid, delivered disheartening news on Monday, saying that its highly protective vaccine would not be authorized in the United States or Britain until at least July, and that it would not reach peak production until the end of the year.The delays, announced during an earnings call with investors, are the latest setback for the little-known Maryland company, which was granted up to $1.6 billion from the U.S. federal government last year and whose product has shown robust results in clinical trials. Despite these wins, the company has struggled to demonstrate that it can deliver on its promise to supply the world with 2 billion doses this year. Novavax has never brought a vaccine to market in its 34-year history.On the call, the company’s president and chief executive, Stanley C. Erck, said that the regulatory and manufacturing hurdles causing the delay have now been resolved. “Nearly all of the major challenges have been overcome, and we can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.Investors did not appear to agree: By Tuesday morning, the company’s stock had fallen to $133.86, down nearly 17 percent, although it rebounded somewhat later in the day.“I don’t see a lot going well for them at this point,” said Rob Smith, the managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, an investment research firm.The company’s delay is unlikely to affect wealthy countries like the United States, which is flush with vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson.But it is likely to have significant repercussions for the rest of the world, given that just last week, Novavax finalized a deal with Gavi, a public-private global vaccine partnership, to supply 1.1 billion doses of its shot to low- and middle-income countries. Novavax has struck other deals with countries like South Korea, Japan and Australia, and has set up agreements with eight production plants around the world.In January, the company estimated that it would hit its full production capacity of 150 million doses a month by the middle of this year, a prediction it later revised after facing a shortage of supplies like filters and the giant single-use bags that are used in vaccine manufacturing. On Monday, the company delayed its estimate again, saying it expected to reach production of 100 million doses a month by the end of the third quarter, and to make 150 million a month by the fourth quarter.One of its major manufacturing partners, the Serum Institute in India, has faced its own production and geopolitical challenges. A fire at the facility earlier this year reduced its capacity, and in April, Serum’s chief executive, Adar Poonawalla, called out the United States for restricting access to raw vaccine ingredients. And though Novavax’s deal with Serum is intended to supply the rest of the world through its arrangement with Gavi, the Indian government has banned exports of vaccines from the country as it struggles with a deadly second wave of Covid-19.“Serum is the backbone of vaccine supply to the world,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, which is tracking global vaccine deals. “I think particularly for countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as countries in Africa, it is hard to overstate the impact that this is having.”Regulatory hurdles have also set Novavax back. On Monday, company executives said that a now-resolved issue with an “assay” — a test that was needed to confirm that their product can be consistently manufactured at commercial scale across multiple production plants — was delaying regulatory approvals around the world, and that countries like Britain and the United States would not grant authorization until at least July. Company officials once said they hoped to gain authorization for their vaccine in April.Serology test samples from the Novavax Phase 3 trial at the University of Washington Medicine Retrovirology Lab at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in February.Karen Ducey/Getty ImagesThe delay is particularly striking in Britain, since Novavax reported positive results of its clinical trial there in January.British officials persuaded Novavax to set up a trial there last year in part by promising speed in clinical development and regulatory approval. But time is running out: About two-thirds of British adults have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, most made by AstraZeneca, and every adult is expected to be offered one by the end of July.The vaccine’s role in Britain depends in part on how quickly Novavax can start distributing its shot. A British factory making the vaccines has said that it would be ready by the summer. The country has recently turned away from the AstraZeneca shot in younger people because of the risk of very rare blood clots, leaving room for Novavax to be an alternative for people under 40.The country is also studying the effects of administering a second dose of the Novavax vaccine in people who have already received a first dose from either Pfizer or AstraZeneca.In the United States, Novavax’s setback casts new light on its massive deal with the U.S. government. As recently as 2019, the company was on the verge of closing after a major trial failure for another vaccine, and it was forced to sell off its manufacturing facility to raise money.Last year, the Trump administration placed a major bet on the tiny company as part of its Operation Warp Speed project, signing a $1.6 billion contract for delivery of 110 million doses by early this year. In April, the total amount of the deal was increased to $1.75 billion, according to Novavax’s financial filings. The company’s large trial in the United States and Mexico has still not been completed, although executives said on Monday that they expected results from that study “in a few weeks.”Novavax officials said they now did not expect to deliver those doses until the end of this year or early 2022. A spokeswoman for Novavax said there was no penalty for later delivery in its contract with the U.S. government.Novavax’s spotty track record does not offer confidence that it can rise to the challenge of producing billions of doses, said Les Funtleyder, a health care portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management who invests in domestic and emerging markets. “It seems they were really unprepared for a challenge of this magnitude,” he said.Recent news of internal turnover — such as the departure last month of Novavax’s chief financial officer, five months after taking the role, for personal reasons — does not help, Mr. Funtleyder said. “It’s a bad look,” he said.Pharmacists prepared doses of Novavax’s vaccine candidate at the Wits RHI Shandukani Research Centre in Johannesburg, in December.Joao Silva/The New York TimesBut even if it has a challenging path as a latecomer, Novavax’s vaccine could fill important gaps, some experts said. In the United States, it could be used as a booster shot to shore up waning immunity, or the Biden administration could choose to donate the vaccine to other needy countries, as it has with its unused supply of AstraZeneca doses.Novavax has said it is developing a new version of its vaccine to address the variant circulating in South Africa. And it recently announced it would begin studying the shot in children older than 12, in an effort to catch up to Moderna and Pfizer, which have already tested their products in that age group.The vaccine can also be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures, without the freezing temperatures required by Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines.“By the end of 2021 there will still be a great need for safe and effective vaccines that can travel well,” said Ms. Taylor, of Duke University. “Novavax looks like it can fit that description.”Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, noted that when concerns were raised over the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines because of links to blood clots, countries with multiple vaccines available were able to switch to other options.“It’s good to hedge our bets,” he said. “If we want to avoid, for example, body blow after body blow to low-income countries in many parts of the world that has an impact on everyone, we need to vaccinate a huge chunk of the world.”Benjamin Mueller and Noah Weiland contributed reporting.

He was a top executive at Memorial Sloan Kettering before resigning over payments from health care companies. He went on to lead cancer research at AstraZeneca.Dr. José Baselga, a renowned cancer researcher and pharmaceutical executive whose work helped transform the treatment of breast cancer patients, died on Sunday. He was 61.His employer, the drug maker AstraZeneca, confirmed the death but did not say where he died. The Washington Post reported that he died at his home in the Cerdanya region of Spain and that he had maintained another home in New York City. His family confirmed that the cause was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurological disorder, but declined to comment further.Dr. Baselga had worked at AstraZeneca since 2019 as the executive vice president for research and development in oncology. Before that he was chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, until he resigned in 2018 following revelations reported jointly by The New York Times and ProPublica that in his published research he had failed to disclose payments from health care companies.“His visionary leadership, deep scientific expertise and strategic insight have delivered so many achievements that we can all be proud of and that will benefit patients’ lives in the years to come,” Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said in a statement.In a decades-long career in the United States and his native Spain, Dr. Baselga was known for his work in developing and testing targeted cancer treatments, including the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody that zeroes in on a particular protein, known as HER2, which is implicated in aggressive and deadly breast cancers.Targeted cancer drugs allow doctors to tailor treatment to specific types of cancer cells. This can lead to fewer side effects and better results than those obtained through blunter instruments like chemotherapy.Dr. Baselga led an early-stage clinical trial of Herceptin, and his research contributed to the recognition that when the drug was combined with chemotherapy, it extended the lives of women with so-called HER2-positive breast cancer, said Dr. Clifford Hudis, the chief executive of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.“It’s the dream that everybody has when you do research,” said Dr. Hudis, who had known Dr. Baselga since the 1980s. “He was dedicated to translational research, and he was unbelievably demanding when it came to execution. He expected everything and everybody to understand his vision and to deliver on it.”Dr. Baselga was also involved in the clinical development of other breast cancer drugs like Perjeta, or pertuzumab, and Afinitor, or everolimus. More recently he studied the development of drugs targeting tumors that have a mutation known as PI3K. His work also focused on drug resistance in some cancers.José Baselga was born in Barcelona on July 3, 1959, and earned his medical and doctoral degrees from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He caught the attention of cancer researchers after participating in a medical fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where he worked with Dr. John Mendelsohn in researching the use of monoclonal antibodies in targeting certain proteins associated with aggressive cancers, including lung and breast cancers.Dr. Larry Norton, a senior vice president at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the medical director of the hospital’s Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center, quickly took an interest in Dr. Baselga and served as an early mentor. “He was an artist,” Dr. Norton recalled, adding that he had “a driving force within him, and he would focus all of his energies on accomplishing what was necessary to fulfill that vision.”Dr. Baselga returned to Spain in 1996 to found the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona. Under his leadership, the center became an international powerhouse in cancer research, testing targeted cancer therapies in early-stage clinical trials. Dr. Baselga became a well-known figure in Spain.“Spain was not known in the world as a cancer research place,” Dr. Antoni Ribas, the president of the American Association for Cancer Research, who did his medical residency at Vall d’Hebron just before Dr. Baselga assumed his role there, said in a phone interview. “He put Vall d’Hebron, Barcelona and Spain on the map of cancer research.”Following a stint from 2010 to 2013 at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was the chief of the division of hematology and oncology, Dr. Baselga returned to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2013 to become physician in chief and, later, chief medical officer.He also held several leadership roles in the world of cancer research, including president of the American Association for Cancer Research and editor of Cancer Discovery and other medical journals.Dr. Baselga resigned from Sloan Kettering in September 2018 under pressure after The Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism outfit, reported that he had failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in dozens of research articles in The New England Journal of Medicine and other publications.In resigning, he said he was “extremely proud” of his work at Sloan Kettering and added, “It is my hope that this situation will inspire a doubling down on transparency in our field.”His departure led the cancer center to overhaul its conflict-of-interest policy. Dr. Baselga later stepped down from the boards of Bristol-Myers Squibb and the radiation equipment manufacturer Varian Medical Systems.The Post said his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Silvia Garriga; four children, Marc Baselga, Clara Baselga-Garriga, Pepe Baselga-Garriga and Alex Baselga-Garriga; his mother, Esther Torres; two sisters; and a brother.AstraZeneca announced in January 2019 that it had hired Dr. Baselga to lead its cancer research. In his time with the company, Mr. Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said, Dr. Baselga had championed the company’s collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo to develop two cancer treatments and built a “world-class” team of cancer researchers at the company.“I will continue to be inspired by his work and vision,” Mr. Soriot said.