First Edition: Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024

KFF Health News: A Toddler Got A Nasal Swab Test But Left Before Seeing A Doctor. The Bill Was $445
Ryan Wettstein Nauman was inconsolable one evening last December. After being put down for bed, the 3-year-old from Peoria, Illinois, just kept crying and crying and crying, and nothing would calm her down. Her mother, Maggi Wettstein, remembered fearing it could be a yeast or urinary tract infection, something they had been dealing with during potty training. The urgent care centers around them were closed for the night, so around 10:30 p.m. she decided to take Ryan to the emergency room at Carle Health. (Sable-Smith, 11/27)

KFF Health News' 'What the Health?' Podcast: Public Health And The Dairy Cow In The Room
Public health, one of the more misunderstood concepts in the health world, is about the health of entire populations, rather than individuals. As a result, public health is closely tied to things like the environment, nutrition, and safety. With major concerns such as bird flu looming, President-elect Donald Trump’s priorities could translate into efforts that undermine those of public health workers. (Rovner, 11/26)

KFF Health News: Trump Doesn’t Need Congress To Make Abortion Effectively Unavailable
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump tried mightily to reassure abortion rights supporters, vowing he would not sign into law a nationwide abortion ban even if Congress sent him one. But once he returns to the White House in January, Trump can make abortions difficult — or illegal —across the United States without Congress taking action at all. (Rovner, 11/27)

KFF Health News: Listen To The Latest 'KFF Health News Minute'
This week on the KFF Health News Minute: In states without abortion bans, programs are trying to train more types of medical personnel to offer abortion care. Separately, some OB-GYNs are asking pregnant patients to pay for their deliveries in advance. (11/26)

The New York Times: Trump Picks Stanford Doctor Who Opposed Lockdowns to Head N.I.H.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist whose authorship of an anti-lockdown treatise during the coronavirus pandemic made him a central figure in a bitter public health debate, to be the director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable. (Stolberg, 11/26)

Politico: Trump Picks NIH Critic Jay Bhattacharya To Lead The Agency
Bhattacharya, 56, has advocated for a major shakeup of the agency and accused former NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of suppressing scientific debate and research during the pandemic. “The rot, having accumulated over decades, was plain for all to see,” Bhattacharya wrote earlier this month on the British news and opinion site UnHerd, in an endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary. (Schumaker, 11/26)

Politico: Trump Picks Jim O’Neill For No. 2 Spot At HHS 
President-elect Donald Trump tapped Jim O’Neill, a close associate of early Trump backer Peter Thiel, for HHS deputy secretary. The rise of the former CEO of the Thiel Foundation comes years after O’Neill was in the mix to be Trump’s first FDA commissioner in his first term. O’Neill has ties across Silicon Valley and previously served as HHS principal associate deputy secretary during the George W. Bush administration. (Lim, 11/26)

The Washington Post: Trump’s Cabinet: Loyalists, Competing Ideologies And Government Skeptics
Donald Trump entered the White House eight years ago with a Cabinet full of traditional conservative credentials, tapping some people he barely knew to help him learn his way around Washington. Now the president-elect has rapidly assembled a different kind of team for his second term — enlisting people deeply critical of the agencies they will lead, bucking conservative orthodoxy with some of his picks and, above all, rewarding his most loyal allies. (Knowles, LeVine and Zakrzewski, 11/26)

CNN: One Major Challenge Facing Trump’s Chosen Health Leaders: Keeping Politics Separate From Science 
The announcements came Friday night, one after another, President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for the country’s premier health leadership roles: a New York family physician and Fox News medical contributor for surgeon general; a Florida physician and former congressman to lead the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins for the US Food and Drug Administration. (McPhillips, 11/26)

Axios: A Medicare Minefield Awaits Oz
Mehmet Oz, President-elect Trump's pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is about to land in the middle of brewing tensions among Republicans over how the Medicare Advantage program works. Privately run Medicare Advantage plans now enroll more than half of America's seniors, costing the federal government an estimated $83 billion more per year than the traditional Medicare program would for the same enrollees. (Goldman, 11/27)

Bloomberg: Vaccine Head Sees Scope For Support Despite Trump’s RFK Jr. Pick
Donald Trump’s administration will likely support global immunization efforts, even though his proposed secretary of health and human services has voiced skepticism about such initiatives, according to the head of an organization that helps to vaccinate more than half of the world’s children. Sania Nishtar, chief executive officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said she’s hopeful that the bipartisan support the group received during Trump’s previous term as US president will carry through to his next four years. (Furlong and Lacqua, 11/26)

Politico: US Membership In The World Health Organization Is On The Line With Trump’s Return 
The United States’ future in the World Health Organization is again in flux with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House. If the U.S. withdraws from the global health body, as Trump attempted to do in his first term, the WHO could lose its top government donor and hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions. In exchange, America could lose access to the global network that sets the flu vaccine’s composition every year, and U.S. drugmakers could lose the WHO’s help in selling their products, current and former U.S. government officials say. (Paun, 11/26)

The Washington Post: Trump Tied Tariffs To Migrants And Fentanyl. Here Are The Facts. 
Donald Trump’s claim that illegal border crossings are out of control — which was among the reasons he cited for the tariffs he said Monday he plans to enact against Mexico, Canada and China — is contradicted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection data showing lower levels of crossings this fall than during the final months of Trump’s first term. Neither his claim that border crossings constitute an unchecked “invasion” nor his depiction of drugs pouring across an “open” and unguarded border has any basis in federal data. (McDaniel and Miroff, 11/26)

The Wall Street Journal: Why Mexico Will Find It Tough To Heed Trump’s Calls To Tame The Cartels 
President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries. Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the U.S. (Cordoba and Bergengruen, 11/26)

The Wall Street Journal: Transplant Charity Used Organ-Transport Jet For Personal Trips 
A nonprofit that collects donated organs and transports them to transplant patients around the U.S. used its airplanes for other purposes, including travel for employees and for fundraisers. Indiana Donor Network operates a fleet of small jets that fly kidneys and other vital organs to desperate patients across the U.S. The mission, the fleet says, is to ensure “that each donor’s gift of life is transported to transplant recipients quickly and safely.” (Walker, Bernstein and McGinty, 11/27)

The Washington Post: Americans Are Not Getting Seasonal Vaccines Ahead Of The Holidays 
As the holiday season approaches, public health experts are sounding the alarm about low vaccination rates against the coronavirus, flu and RSV. With gatherings and travel on the rise, many people are heading into the next few months unprotected against these respiratory illnesses, which typically peak from December to February. As of this month, about 37 percent of adults 18 and older had received a seasonal flu shot, while 19 percent had received updated coronavirus vaccines and 40 percent of adults 75 and older — the group at greatest risk — got an RSV vaccine. (Malhi, 11/27)

CIDRAP: Survey: Doctors Rank Pertussis Vaccine Less Important Than Those For Other Respiratory Diseases 
An online survey of physicians in the United States, France, and Germany reveals that they consider pertussis (whooping cough) vaccines less important than those against COVID-19, influenza, and pneumococcal disease, although they recognize that adults with weakened immune systems and chronic respiratory illnesses are at elevated risk. (Van Beusekom, 11/26)

CIDRAP: Sluggish Gas Exchange In The Lungs May Be Involved In Long-COVID Brain Fog 
Lower rates of gas exchange in the lungs may contribute to impaired cognitive function ("brain fog") tied to long COVID, according to a small study to be presented at next week's Radiological Society of North America's (RSNA's) annual meeting in Chicago. Pulmonary gas exchange is the movement of oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream and carbon dioxide from the bloodstream to the lungs. (Van Beusekom, 11/26)

CIDRAP: Canadian Probe Into Teen's Critical H5N1 Infection Finds No Clear Source 
As a Canadian teen remains in critical care with an H5N1 avian flu infection in a British Columbia hospital, health investigators said today they haven't identified the source, but have found other clues such as virus changes that may have led to a more severe lower respiratory infection. ... Bonnie Henry, British Columbia's health officer, said the teen, sick since November 2 and hospitalized since November 8, remains seriously ill and requires breathing assistance, but is stable and has shown progress over the past few days. (Schnirring, 11/26)

Modern Healthcare: Medicare Advantage Proposal Targets Prior Authorization, GLP-1s
Medicare Advantage insurers would no longer be allowed to reconsider approved prior authorization requests for inpatient hospital admissions and face new limits on using artificial intelligence for precertifications under a proposed rule issued Tuesday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services draft regulation also would introduce Medicare and Medicaid coverage of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1s, such as Ozempic and Zepbound, to treat obesity as a chronic disease. (Early, 11/26)

CBS News: Pontiac General Hospital Files For Bankruptcy After Announcing Medicare Funding Loss, Layoffs 
Pontiac General Hospital has filed for bankruptcy days after announcing the loss of Medicare funding and announcing over 240 layoffs. According to a court document, the hospital, located on 461 W. Huron St., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Saturday. The document shows the hospital has between $1 million and $10 million in assets, owes somewhere between $1 million and $10 million and has between 50 and 99 creditors. (Lentz, 11/26)

MedPage Today: Another Emergency Medicine Staffing Firm Goes Under 
NES Health, the staffing firm that drew attention recently for not paying its doctors, says it will "wind down its operations and cease doing business," according to a company email shared on social media. Doctors who worked for the company may be out several months of pay, and NES said it won't provide malpractice tail coverage either, according to the email. ... NES Health is the third physician staffing firm in recent years to shutter. (Fiore, 11/26)

Modern Healthcare: Private Equity Staffing Companies Losing Physicians To Providers
Health systems are hiring specialists from private equity-backed companies as hospitals look to reduce costs by cutting out staffing agencies while easing staff shortages. Higher pay and the prospect of less administrative work have allowed health systems to hire an increasing number of specialists from private equity-backed staffing firms and independent clinics, industry observers said. Health system executives said they plan to directly employ more physicians to combat persistent gaps in specialty care without relying on staffing agencies. (Kacik, 11/26)

Modern Healthcare: Prospect Medical Holdings Approved To Sell CharterCare Hospitals
Rhode Island's Director of Health Dr. Jerry Larkin signed off on Prospect Medical Holdings' pending sale of two CharterCare hospitals to the Centurion Foundation. On Monday, Larkin accepted the state Health Services Council's recommendation to approve the sale, which involves Providence-based Roger Williams Medical Center and North Providence-based Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, according to a news release from the Rhode Island Department of Health. (Hudson, 11/26)

The New York Times: New Obesity Drug MariTide Helps Patients Lose Up To 20% Of Weight, Early Data Shows 
The pharmaceutical manufacturer Amgen announced on Tuesday that an experimental obesity drug helped patients lose up to 20 percent of their weight in a year. The drug, MariTide, is given by injection once a month, compared with once a week for other obesity drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound that are already on the market. Those drugs have stunned longtime obesity researchers, who had all but given up on ever seeing safe and effective weight loss drugs. Now, dozens of similar drugs are in development, as companies try to improve on the current ones. Amgen’s is among the first to show what might be possible. (Kolata, 11/26)

MedPage Today: U.K. Data Tie Acetaminophen To Increased Ulcer Risk
Widespread belief holds that the popular over-the-counter painkiller acetaminophen does not cause stomach ulcers, but a new study from Great Britain puts that in doubt. Acetaminophen use was also associated with increased rates of more general health problems including heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and hypertension, the group reported in Arthritis Care & Research. (Gever, 11/26)

The Wall Street Journal: A Scientist’s Final Quest Is To Find New Schizophrenia Drugs. Will He Live To See Them? 
Edward Scolnick led the development of dozens of medicines while at Merck; his current mission pits him against time and the mental illness of millions, including his son. (Marcus, 11/26)

Stat: BIOSECURE Act On Chinese Biotechs Is Harder To Pass Next Year 
Legislation targeting Chinese biotechnology companies caused a ruckus early this year. None of that may matter if Congress doesn’t pass it in December. The BIOSECURE Act would restrict U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies from doing business with certain Chinese companies, including WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics. The bill would increase costs for drugmakers. (Wilkerson, 11/27)

Bloomberg: Sanofi Boosts Preparedness With $600 Million Singapore Plant
Sanofi SA added a new plant in Singapore to make vaccines and other medicines, as the French pharmaceutical group seeks to bolster preparedness for emergencies, including potential pandemics. The facility, named Modulus, came up at investment of S$800 million (nearly $600 million) at Tuas Biomedical Park in the city-state, according to a statement. It can be adapted to manufacture up to four vaccines or biopharmaceuticals at the same time, and will be fully operational in mid-2026 and create 200 skilled jobs in Singapore. (Kan, 11/27)

Stat: New Report Urges Guidelines For Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models
Policymakers and scientific groups need to specify guidelines for the burgeoning field that uses stem cells to mimic aspects of embryonic development, including by establishing certain red lines on research, an influential U.K. bioethics group said Wednesday in a new report. (Joseph, 11/26)

Modern Healthcare: How GE HealthCare's AI-Enabled Devices Are Aiding Oncologists
GE HealthCare is betting big on artificial intelligence, with plans to ramp up development of AI-enabled devices by adding more than 120 new ones to its portfolio in the next three years. The company, which reported $1.2 billion in revenue from its digital platforms and software in 2023, told investors at an event last week it seeks to increase that revenue number by 50% by 2028. (Dubinsky, 11/26)

The Boston Globe: Tufts Is Developing A Tiny Wearable To Detect Cognitive Decline
From sleek wrist watches to gleaming rings, wearable sensors that track a growing array of your daily activities ... are getting smaller, more sophisticated, and pricier. But one large group of consumers that could greatly benefit from such precise trackers, older adults with chronic health problems, are the least likely to don them. Now a team at Tufts University is developing a tiny, gel-like patch that would detect both cognitive decline and a person’s risk for falling in real time and be unobtrusive and appealing to older adults, as well as affordable. (Lazar, 11/26)

MedPage Today: Texas Governor Scolds Hospital After Doctor Goes Viral On TikTok 
After a TikTok video in which a Texas physician informed the public of their right to not respond to a citizenship question on hospital intake forms went viral, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) fired back on social media. In a post on X on Monday, Abbott wrote, "Hey Texas Children's Hospital & Baylor College of Medicine, this doctor is putting your Medicaid and Medicare funding at risk. You better think twice & have crystal clear records. There will be consequences for failing to follow the law in the Executive Order." (Henderson, 11/26)

The Washington Post: Texas Committee Won’t Examine Maternal Deaths In First Years After Abortion Ban 
The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group. In a September meeting, leaders of the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee said the change was made to “be more contemporary” — allowing them to skip over a backlog of older cases and review deaths closer to the date when they occurred, and therefore offer more relevant recommendations to policymakers. (Kitchener, 11/26)

The Boston Globe: New Leadership At The Helm Of N.H.'s Largest United Way
New Hampshire’s largest United Way has a new president and CEO – a position with sway over the organization’s considerable philanthropic efforts around the state. Nichole Martin Reimer was named to the top position at the Manchester-based nonprofit that covers about 85 percent of New Hampshire. ... The top issues the Granite United Way is working on are likely familiar to most Granite Staters: early childhood learning, including child care, housing, financial stability, and work on mental health and substance use disorder. (Gokee, 11/26)

Military.com: For Soldiers At Fort Carson, Food Is Scarce 
As Americans gather for Thanksgiving feasts, soldiers at Fort Carson, Colorado, are contending with a far less festive reality -- months of insufficient meals, confusing schedules, and limited food options at the base's dining facilities that have ignited widespread frustration among the rank and file. Dining facilities -- critical for sustaining the health and readiness of troops -- are reportedly offering fewer options, with some meals falling short of basic nutritional standards. Earlier this month, the issue was exemplified by a meal in which soldiers were served a single piece of toast and a handful of lima beans for dinner, according to one soldier stationed there who shared imagery of the meal. (Beynon, 11/26)

CBS News: Coal Dust Present On Schools, Homes In South Baltimore Neighborhood Bordered By Coal Plant, Study Finds
Measurable amounts of coal dust are present on schools, playgrounds and houses in South Baltimore's Curtis Bay neighborhood which is bordered by an open-air coal terminal, according to a new Johns Hopkins study. Curtis Bay borders an industrial area with multiple plants, terminals and port facilities, including an open-air coal export facility owned by CSX. (Thompson and Dingle, 11/26)

CBS News: Bay Area Residents Urged To Avoid Wood Burning This Thanksgiving
Bay Area Air Quality Management District regulators are asking people not to burn wood during the Thanksgiving holiday to help reduce air pollution and protect public health. The air district made the request Tuesday, saying that while a Spare the Air alert isn't in effect and people are allowed to have fires, wood smoke contains fine particulate matter and cancer-causing substances. (11/26)

North Carolina Health News: Don't Poison Your Family With Undercooked Turkey 
Kate Houghton-Zatz was more than a little nervous about Thanksgiving. Her in-laws and parents had only met once before, and they were all coming for the big meal to the small apartment she shared with her husband, Dave, and brand-new baby, Zoe, in Teaneck, NJ. Then she got more nervous when the turkey just wouldn’t cook. (Hoban, 11/27)

Stateline: The Next Census Will Gather More Racial, Ethnic Information
The U.S. Census Bureau and a growing number of states are starting to gather more detailed information about Americans’ race and ethnicity, a change some advocates of the process say will allow people to choose identities that more closely reflect how they see themselves. Crunching and sorting through those specific details — known as data disaggregation — will help illuminate disparities in areas such as housing and health outcomes that could be hidden within large racial and ethnic categories. (Henderson, 11/26)