Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Trump Administration Is Wreaking Havoc On Americans' Health; The Courts Must Protect Us From Harm
The CT Mirror: Democracy, America's Health And The Common Good At Risk
I am a family physician with 39 years experience caring for patients and teaching medical students and family medicine residents. Donald Trump’s executive orders and election have removed the sense of stability and security that many, but not all Americans had become accustomed to — much in the same way that a child relies on the safety provided by his or her parents in a home that feels safe and secure. (Howard A. Selinger M.D., 4/28)
The Baltimore Sun: Are Courts Doing Enough To Protect Public Health?
A lawsuit in late March that awarded Georgia man John Barnes $2.1 billion in damages looked like another piece of good news for one of the tens of thousands of litigants against Bayer, the agrochemical giant that since 2018 has owned Monsanto, maker of the popular weedkiller, Roundup. (John Klar, 4/27)
The Boston Globe: For Immediate Health Benefits, New England Should Accelerate Clean Energy Transition Locally
As the Trump administration downplays climate change and its harms, a transformative shift is underway that is reshaping how we use energy and offering extraordinary health benefits. Regardless of what happens in Washington, here in New England we should embrace clean-energy technologies — not only because it’s good for the planet, but for the immediate health benefits in our communities. (Dr. Ashish K. Jha, 4/28)
Kansas City Star: I Have Autism And RFK Jr. Is Wrong About My Life And Future
Dear Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Autism hasn’t and won’t ever stop me from reaching my goals. Your start as director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been incredibly toxic, specifically to the autism community. You have aggressively pushed a narrative about a so-called autism “epidemic” that simply isn’t there. You have compared this supposed epidemic to COVID-19, claiming that people with autism cannot work, play sports, write poems or function in day-to-day life. It even led to ideas to create an autism registry, which your agency walked back on Friday. (Madden Rausch, 4/27)
The New York Times: ‘A Veneer Of Official Medical Knowledge’: Three Opinion Writers On Kennedy’s Tenure
There’s absolutely room for new research and new debate about the causes of chronic illness or autism or obesity — all areas where the official understanding of things doesn’t have definite answers for a lot of people. And there’s always good reason for skepticism about the medical-industrial complex writ large. But Kennedy seems committed to his own set of low-evidence theories — the vaccine-autism link being the most prominent example — and he seems to be working backward from the outsider perspective, rather than trying to genuinely create dialogue between the establishment and its critics. (Ross Douthat, Jessica Grose and David Wallace-Wells, 4/27)
Stat: A Poet And Psychiatrist On The Two Fields’ Surprising Similarities
Who’s on the couch here? The psychiatrist or the poet? The poem or the practice of psychiatry? As a poet and a psychiatrist/therapist, I exist in both practices, and the worlds of each enrich the other. Each speaks with abandon, and each interrogates the other, and there are many ways in which each discipline supports the other, some obvious, some not so obvious. (Owen Lewis, 4/28)
