U.S. Healthcare January 2025-

US FDA asks fired scientists to return, including some reviewing Musk’s Neuralink
FDA plans to rehire around 300 recently fired staff, sources say
Rehiring follows Trump’s firing spree, raising efficiency concerns
Elon Musk has been leading charge to fire federal workers
(Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is asking some of its recently fired scientists if they will come back to their jobs, including some employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink, multiple sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The FDA plans to rehire around 300 people in total, according to four sources with secondhand knowledge of the situation, following President Donald Trump’s rush last week to fire employees at the agency responsible for reviewing drugs, food safety, medical devices and tobacco.
Scientists warn of long-term damage as Trump’s orders slow research
By blocking announcements in the Federal Register, the administration is keeping experts from meeting to evaluate funding proposals.
Biomedical research in America hasn’t been halted outright. But the Trump administration’s interference with the most routine operations of the world’s premier funder of that work has gummed up the system for selecting and funding new science projects.

13 February
RFK Jr.’s plans could make Musk’s look small
The Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary on a mostly party-line vote Thursday
RFK Jr.’s plans could make Musk’s look small
The Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary on a mostly party-line vote Thursday.
(Politico) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now in charge of the nation’s health agencies. His plans to upend them could make Elon Musk’s budget-cutting spree look modest by comparison.
Kennedy won Senate confirmation on Thursday even after vowing to take nutrition and health programs in a radical new direction, and despite his long history of criticizing the safety of scientifically proven vaccines.
Frank Bruni: Susan Collins and Her Cowardly Caucus Bow Down to Trump
I wonder what, in the end, persuaded Senator Susan Collins that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the right stuff to be the official steward of Americans’ health.
(NYT) Was it his past assertion that the coronavirus had been engineered to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews? Or his comparison of Americans being pressured to get Covid-19 vaccines to Jews in Nazi Germany?
Was it his overwrought and irresponsible vaccine alarmism? His failure during a recent Senate hearing to distinguish between Medicare and Medicaid? Or the chilling words of his cousin Caroline Kennedy, who felt so strongly about his nefariousness that she bucked her customary reserve, came out publicly against him, called him a predator?
He’s a crank and Collins is a coward. Worse yet, she’s a bellwether. Make that a church bell, the kind that tolls when there’s a death. In this case, it marks the passing of any independence, any dignity, any scruples among Republicans in the Senate, who are letting President Trump have whomever he wants and seem poised to let him do whatever he pleases because it’s the easy path, the one that protects them from his rancor and retribution.

Heather Cox Richardson: February 8, 2025
Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.
NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior.
As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”
Trump Administration Cuts Put Medical Progress at Risk, Researchers Say
Grants from the National Institutes of Health come with additional money for overhead. A planned $4 billion cut would leave colleges with large budget gaps.
The nation’s universities and academic medical centers were reeling on Saturday from a directive by the Trump administration to slash funding for medical research, a decision that doctors and scientists said would have a devastating effect on studies aimed at finding treatments for diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

31 January
Trump Has Created Health-Care Chaos
The White House’s health-care strategy appears to be no strategy at all.
By Kristen V. Brown
(The Atlantic) On day two of Donald Trump’s presidency, the White House ordered a freeze on communications from federal health agencies. The government’s medical-research agency, the National Institutes of Health, devolved into chaos; many employees wondered whether they could continue with basic functions of their job, such as attending scientific meetings and reviewing grants. Days later, a new memo clarified that they could continue their work, but not say anything about it to the public.
This week, after the White House budget office released a memo ordering a freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, state Medicaid agencies, hospitals, and community centers were unsure if they could continue operating. The administration had said the freeze would not affect Medicaid, but state administrators were locked out of the federal-funding portal. Soon, states regained access, a judge temporarily blocked the order, and the administration rescinded the memo. (Trump’s orders requiring government agencies to eliminate spending on “woke” ideologies remain in effect.)

Trump Just Made America More Vulnerable to Ebola—Here’s How
America’s Ebola shield is gone.
(Global Dispatches) At the center of these efforts to stop the international spread of Ebola are the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United States Agency for International Development. These agencies work with local authorities and provide platforms for international cooperation that help develop and deploy vaccines, conduct disease surveillance, and work directly with local health officials to provide capacity where it may be lacking.
But now, there’s no one left to execute that playbook. Trump fired most of them.
Most, if not all, of the American officials whose job it is to stop Ebola before it spreads to the United States are now out of work. Those who are still in office are banned from engaging in the kind of international cooperation required to support an Ebola response in Africa.

29 January – 1 February
Support letter for RFK Jr’s confirmation includes signatures of doctors with suspended or revoked licenses
Meant to lend credibility to his nomination to head HHS, the letter is signed by some doctors disciplined for not following Covid guidelines
Cassidy faces pivotal moment with RFK Jr. vote
Over the course of six hours in two hearings, Cassidy indicated he holds serious doubts about whether Kennedy is qualified to lead the agency, casting a cloud of uncertainty over Kennedy’s path to confirmation.
RFK Jr. tries to convince skeptical senators that he won’t undermine vaccines
Kennedy’s bid to serve as America’s top health official may be decided by a handful of Republicans, including several senators who questioned him Thursday.
RFK Jr.’s rocky rollout
(Politico Nightly) He flip-flopped on vaccines. His answers on the health care system, particularly Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, were sloppy.
He got the programs mixed up. He got the numbers mixed up. He got the financing mixed up.
To put it mildly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing today to become Health and Human Services secretary didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Many of us who write about or work in health care occasionally say Medicare when we mean Medicaid — but we catch ourselves and fix it. We don’t get it wrong again and again through a three-plus hour hearing when we’re shooting for the top health job in the country.
Between them, Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA cover somewhere around 170 million Americans — that’s roughly a third of the U.S. population. Oversight and regulation of those government health systems is under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Trump wants Dr. Mehmet Oz to run that. But CMS is part of HHS. As secretary, Kennedy would be atop it all.
Yet he got them all jumbled up — and said they don’t work. And that everyone hates them.
In one rambling answer, Kennedy said Medicare is paid for by employer taxes (in fact, it’s employer taxes, employee taxes, premiums, deductibles and tax dollars). He said Medicaid is “fully-paid for by the federal government” (no, it’s split with the states.).
Confusing Medicare for Medicaid and misrepresenting public attitudes is bad enough. But Kennedy’s bigger problem might be his answers to questions about the U.S. health care system posed by the Louisiana Republican who might have the single biggest influence over whether he is confirmed as HHS secretary — Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
Cassidy is a doctor. He knows a lot about health care. He’s more moderate than most Senate Republicans. And, as a member of the Finance Committee and the chair of the Senate HELP committee, which will hold its own confirmation hearing tomorrow, Cassidy could potentially sink the nomination.
In response to Cassidy’s questions, Kennedy looked and sounded exactly like someone in a cold sweat nightmare trying to take an exam for a course he didn’t know he was enrolled in. He did, however, slip in a reassurance that even though he believes in healthier diets as the key to conquering chronic disease, he isn’t going to take away anyone’s Twinkies.
Watching RFK Jr. in the Senate Was Personally Painful
Jeff Greenfield
I worked for his father. He never would have been so slippery.
At his confirmation hearing Wednesday, again and again, the younger Kennedy simply would not accept the many on-the-record comments from his past: full endorsement of abortion rights (“Every abortion is a tragedy,” he repeatedly recited by rote), constant warnings about the deleterious impact of vaccines (“News reports have claimed that I’m anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither.”), and even comparing the CDC to Nazi death camps (“I don’t believe that I ever compared the CDC to Nazi death camps. I support the CDC,” he said.)

27 January
CDC ordered to stop working with WHO immediately, upending expectations of an extended withdrawal
(AP) — U.S. public health officials have been told to stop working with the World Health Organization, effective immediately.
A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, John Nkengasong, sent a memo to senior leaders at the agency on Sunday night telling them that all staff who work with the WHO must immediately stop their collaborations and “await further guidance.”
Experts said the sudden stoppage was a surprise and would set back work on investigating and trying to stop outbreaks of Marburg virus and mpox in Africa, as well as brewing global threats. It also comes as health authorities around the world are monitoring bird flu outbreaks among U.S. livestock.
The Associated Press viewed a copy of Nkengasong’s memo, which said the stop-work policy applied to “all CDC staff engaging with WHO through technical working groups, coordinating centers, advisory boards, cooperative agreements or other means — in person or virtual.” It also says CDC staff are not allowed to visit WHO offices.

23 January
Tough questions for RFK Jr.
(Politico Nightly) At his Senate confirmation hearings next week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will get plenty of scrutiny for his anti-vaccination activism (and recent attempts to distance himself from it). Ditto for his finances and potential conflicts of interest, which intersect with his vaccine stances.
But the HHS secretary has a really big job, with an expansive mandate that reaches well beyond vaccines.
Nightly asked health and public health leaders — what questions do they want senators to ask Kennedy at the hearings?
Tom Frieden, President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former Centers for Disease Control director.
“President Trump announced on the first day of his presidency his intent to withdraw from the WHO. Through WHO governance and World Health Assembly resolutions, the U.S. has enormous influence over global health policy that applies to all countries, including those countries with which the United States does not have productive (or in some cases any) bilateral relations. What is your strategy for ensuring we can protect Americans from global health threats that do not respect borders if the U.S. separates itself from the international health community?

22 January
Trump administration freezes many health agency reports and online posts
In a memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dorothy Fink told agency staff leaders Tuesday that an “immediate pause” had been ordered on — among other things — regulations, guidance, announcements, press releases, social media posts and website posts until such communications had been approved by a political appointee.
The pause also applies to anything intended to be published in the Federal Register, where the executive branch communicates rules and regulations, and the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientific publication.

WITHDRAWING THE UNITED STATES FROM THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
EXECUTIVE ORDER
January 20, 2025
Purpose. The United States noticed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states. In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.