Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: H-1B Visa Fee Unfairly Targets Critical Indian-Born Doctors; Autistic People Don't Need To Be Cured
Stat: A $100,000 Fee For H-1B Visas Will Devastate U.S. Health Care
Last Friday, President Trump announced that every new H-1B visa application will carry a $100,000 fee. In practice, this will end the H-1B program and with it, a critical pipeline of health care workers the U.S. cannot afford to lose. (Geeta Minocha, 9/25)
USA Today: I'm Autistic. Trump And RFK Jr. Must Stop Treating Us Like A Plague To Be Eradicated.
[Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] has painted autistic people's existence as a plague. In their news conference, he and [President Donald] Trump reaffirmed that the administration's goal is to end autism. (Colin Killick, 9/23)
Stat: How President Trump's Remarks About Autism Hurt Autistic People Like Me
The reality is that there’s no “epidemic” of autism. As pointed out time and time again by the autistic community, the increase in the number of people being diagnosed can be largely explained by better screening and more awareness. (David Rivera, 9/25)
The Washington Post: Jailing Of Journalist Shows China Still Fears Covid Truth
Nearly six years after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, sparking a pandemic, Chinese authorities are still acting as though they have something to hide — and fear. Last Friday, a brave journalist who helped expose the impact of the coronavirus’s early days in Wuhan was once again sentenced to four years in prison, apparently for continuing to rattle authorities by speaking truth and refusing to be silenced. (9/24)
The Washington Post: AI Just Created A Working Virus. The U.S. Isn’t Prepared For That.
In a remarkable paper released this month, scientists at Stanford University showed that computers can design new viruses that can then be created in the lab. How is that possible? Think of ChatGPT, which learned to write by studying patterns in English. The Stanford team used the same idea on the fundamental building block of life, training “genomic language models” on the DNA of bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria but not humans — to see whether a computer could learn their genetic grammar well enough to write something new. (Tal Feldman and Jonathan Feldman, 9/25)
