In an effort to emphasize its commitment to healthcare, CVS Caremark will now be known as CVS Health at its 7,700 drugstores. CVS CEO Larry Merlo says, We're doing more and more to extend the front lines of health care. This includes building walk-in clinics and expanding services offered, such as vaccine coverage.
Additionally, after an announcement earlier this year, CVS has stopped the sale of tobacco products in advance of the originally anticipated date of October 1st. According to company representatives, CVS could no longer sell tobacco in a setting where health care is delivered, and the presence of that product was hard to justify when it tried teaming up with hospital groups and doctors to help with patient care.
While this banning of tobacco products is being posited as a public health move, in reality this is really just a PR move for CVS Health. Nice work on the name too but it will have ZERO effect on the nation's smoking rates: addicted smokers will cross the street or go to the other side of town to get their craved product. If they really wanted to reduce the dreadful toll of smoking in the USA, they would throw out all those expensive J&J, GSK and Pfizer useless NRTs which work perhaps 1 in 10 times, and replace them with safe and effective e-cigarettes. Unfortunately, CVS has now proudly announced that their devotion to helping smokers quit does not extend to stocking e-cigs, a technology which would actually accomplish that difficult task. How come their public health geniuses can t distinguish tobacco from electronic nicotine delivery?
