Great thinkers have sought for centuries to convey a crucial truth about humanity’s interconnection. As the poet John Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Poet Francis Thompson took up the fundamental idea this way: “[T]hou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.” And, of course, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, observed: “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.…”
In health and medicine, it makes no sense to think of the world in strident terms of us and them. The global coronavirus pandemic provided a harsh reminder that what happens thousands of miles away can have major effects on Americans.
But the current administration has launched multi-front attacks on those it deems “others.” These rapid, little-explained actions will cause significant harm to our health.
They include a slashing of global humanitarian aid and the elimination of overseas public health initiatives. They target non-American production of goods, notably some that affect prescription drugs as well as medical devices and supplies. They are aimed with cruelty at immigrants and advocacy of diversity, equity, and inclusiveness — measures with significant implications for the brilliant minds that provide medical-scientific breakthroughs, and the big numbers of those who staff important research efforts and those who medically treat and care for patients.
The late Colin Powell, in warning U.S. leaders about the dire consequences of hasty, poorly supported but dramatic interventions, coined what he called the Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you own it. With a blitzkrieg of extreme actions under way by leaders in Washington, D.C., how will all the regular folks in this country account for all that has occurred — and been reversed and then reversed again — in only the first 100 days of the new administration?
A risky retreat from global roles
Medical advances — notably antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines — have tamed an array of once-familiar, debilitating and lethal ills. Still, fearsome diseases continue to take a terrible toll in foreign lands.
Mindful of how disastrous the results would be if these plagues got to the United States, courageous doctors, public health experts, and scientists labored in demanding conditions as caregivers and sentinels to avert worsening outbreaks on distant shores.
The administration of the 47th president has slashed this important work.
He empowered his chainsaw-wielding mogul and chief donor, with a corps of unidentified tech-savvy young folks, to tear into the federal government. They purportedly sought waste, fraud, abuse, and imagined huge savings. Even as the president’s Cabinet members were tying up their U.S. Senate confirmations, Elon Musk and his DOGE lads leaped in and schemed to eliminate USAID, the agency through which flowed most of this nation’s foreign assistance funds. This included sums that battled the rapid-spreading hemorrhagic fever Ebola, the health-destroying disease of tuberculosis, and the treatable but still potentially lethal illnesses of malaria and HIV-AIDS. Without U.S. assistance, experts fear these diseases will worsen, spread, and become more deadly.
As this nation seeks natural resources, allies, and commercial partners around the world, especially in developing parts of the globe, exactly how will business people and diplomats from the wealthiest, most powerful country explain:
§ Why the United States is withdrawing from the World Health Organization. It received a major share of its funding — a pittance in real dollar terms — from this country. The 47th president has assailed WHO for what he deems its poor handling of the pandemic. Doctors, medical scientists, and public health officials warn that the U.S. exit will blind this country to sentinel programs about the risks of spreading flu, avian flu, polio, TB, and other infectious diseases. Amesh Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, explained in an interview: “Leaving the WHO will put the U.S. in a position where it will be without full situational awareness of infectious disease outbreaks that are occurring globally, it will hamper the ability of the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to be most effective in global health, and will likely only increase Chinese influence on the organization.”
§ How this nation cut off relatively small sums (a few billion dollars annually), likely leading to an estimated 11 million new HIV-AIDS infections and 3 million deaths (by 2030) in 55 countries receiving assistance in battling the viral infection under the program known as PEPFAR.
§ How the United States slashed relatively few dollars, leading to drastic reductions in battling malaria. Experts estimate that “just a year of disruption in the malaria-control supply chain would lead to nearly 15 million additional cases and 107,000 additional deaths globally.” In contrast, reducing malaria’s economic burden on African nations where it is most common would boost the continent’s GDP by an estimated $16 billion annually, making those markets even more salient for positive U.S. financial activity.
Flip-flops and critical responses
Administration officials have flip-flopped about who, what, and how much will be cut in U.S. foreign aid. But doctors and public health officials warn that the chaos, distress, and still remaining cuts in humanitarian and medical aid will harm American interests as well as the poor and suffering worldwide. They wrote in a perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine:
“Since U.S. foreign assistance accounts for about 1% of the federal budget, we are skeptical of cost-savings–based arguments for [the aid’s] elimination. Moreover, the retrenchment of U.S. foreign assistance could have adverse and unpredictable political consequences … Relationships among acute and chronic diseases, food insecurity, political instability, and armed conflict are complex, and food security has declined in sub-Saharan Africa since 2015. The abrupt withdrawal of many USAID-supported programs for preventing and treating malnutrition and reducing child mortality may threaten political stability in Africa and elsewhere.
“The Trump administration’s gutting of USAID and other foreign-assistance programs marks a break from decades of evidence-based practices that have improved lives throughout the world. In addition to pushing millions of people into poverty and leading to an estimated 160,000 or more avoidable child deaths each year, these reforms will undermine health and the economy in the United States. The United States runs the risk of losing the trust of many people in [low- and middle-income nations], which could jeopardize international relations.”
Critics have assailed this country’s spending, say, $1 billion to battle African outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers. But just consider the potential costs to combat the disease, which spreads like wildfire, if it gained a foothold in the United States. Infectious disease experts tried in 2016 to get a financial handle on what top-line, highly specialized facilities might do if confronted with such a scenario. Just to make rudimentary preparations cost several dozen of these care centers $55 million, the researchers found, explaining:
“The care of a hospitalized patient with confirmed [Ebola] in high-level isolation units requires large specialized teams of nurses, physicians, laboratory technologists, environmental service workers, and waste management specialists, and inpatient care may continue for weeks.”
As for tuberculosis, critics, again, may gripe about U.S. expenses for dealing overseas with this wasting respiratory disease. This nation’s overpowering interest in doing so, however, traces to a grim aspect of the disease — how it has become resistant to existing medications. The poverty, sanitation, poor health care and hygiene in the developing world has fueled a resurgence in drug-resistant TB.
Cases of the rising, “extensively resistant” strain cost as much as $430,000 per patient to treat in the United States — an expense heavily borne by taxpayers. Many of those with drug-resistant TB are poor, unhoused, substance abusers, and downtrodden in many other ways. To ensure their treatment succeeds, medical staff often must rely on “DOT” care — they must stand and watch to double-check that patients take medications and other treatments. As researchers noted of increasing numbers of TB cases in this country: “Drug resistance was extensive, care was complex, treatment completion rates were high, and treatment was expensive … Preventing [multi-drug resistant and extensively drug resistant] TB in the United States will require addressing factors associated with development of drug resistance in countries where foreign-born U.S. patients originate, as well as rapid diagnosis, appropriate regimen selection, [and] robust case management practices … in the United States.”
Putting at peril the vital U.S. supplies of drugs, medical devices, medical goods
It’s accurate to criticize unfair trade practices and to seek to address these. But how will this country get an array of prescription medicines and vital medical devices and supplies no longer manufactured here?
Think back to just a few years ago. Everyone in this nation — especially doctors, nurses, hospitals, and clinics —got a slap of reality regarding supply chains and their role in modern medicine. A global shutdown, especially in manufacturing and transportation, demonstrated this country’s giant, painful reliance on importing vital medically related items. Like PPE, personal protective equipment including many different kinds of face masks, gowns, and gloves. Nasal swabs. Antibiotics. Anesthetics. Ventilators and other breathing assistance devices. And chemicals and goods for medical testing.
A panicked, all-out national push — including with huge federal, state, and local government spending and activity — got this country through a once-in-a-century crisis. Commissions, corporations, medical leaders, economists, and others then pledged to get to work to avert future crises.
The current administration has set off new global alarms with its sweeping tariffs on at least five dozen nations, including America’s closest allies and neighbors. The 47th president, insisting that every other country has “ripped us off very badly,” has defended his plan, which the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page has described as “the dumbest trade war in history.”
To be clear, the president has turned his tariff regime off and on like the light switch at a teen make-out party. This has created trillion-dollar shifts on the world’s stock markets and contributed to global economic uncertainty not seen for almost a century.
‘Bracing for chaos’
Prescription drugs and many medical devices and goods typically are exempted from tariffs — which inarguably are a tax on consumers. Still, the administration has launched an investigation into U.S. drug imports, and the president has threatened that tariffs are likely to hit these vital products soon. This attack, combined with what has become a major trade war with China — a dominant force in the manufacture of drugs and other medical goods — has shaken experts’ confidence anew. It also forecasts painful cost increases in a sector of the economy that now consumes almost 1 in 5 dollars of the nation’s GDP. As the news site The Hill reported of the shudders shaking U.S. medicine:
“The pharmaceutical industry is bracing for chaos if President Trump follows through on his threat to impose ‘a major tariff’ on prescription drug imports. Tariffs would disrupt international supply chains, force companies to decide whether to pass increased costs on to patients and exacerbate existing drug shortages. The administration wants more drug companies to onshore their manufacturing, but experts said such a process would take years, while the pain from tariffs could be much more immediate.”
While big-name drugs and their giant corporate makers are seeking work-arounds and may not feel the most harm from tariffs, Fierce Pharma, an industry-focused newsletter, has reported that generic manufacturers will bear the brunt of tariffs’ harms. They will be hit by both costs on their products and the supplies needed to make them:
“[G]eneric medicines and the companies that manufacture them will be uniquely vulnerable in the event of a trade war given just how ‘little resilience’ the industry enjoys compared to its patented counterpart. That’s the take according to Ronald Piervincenzi, Ph.D., CEO of the United States Pharmacopeia —a nonprofit that publishes drug quality, purity, strength and identity standards that are enforced by the FDA and followed by manufacturers. “Ultimately, any disruption to the already fragile generics ecosystem could trigger manufacturing discontinuations, shortages and a multitude of other issues for off-brand drug makers and the U.S. patients who rely on their products ….”
Patients also could be staggered by tariff-related cost spikes for an array of medical devices and goods, including “oxygen equipment, suction pumps … and mobility devices like wheelchairs,” as well as “blood glucose meters, test strips, syringes and continuous glucose monitors,” Rolling Stone magazine has reported, noting:
“Researchers [have] found that around 75% of U.S.-marketed medical devices are, at least in part, manufactured abroad. It also found that respiratory devices—one of the most common medical device imports, and very much not optional for those who rely on them—are likely to be one of the more seriously impacted products.”
The consulting firm Global Data also reported that “13.6% of the total U.S.-marketed medical devices … are currently manufactured in China. Hospital supplies, diagnostic imaging and anesthesia … [these are among] the most common types of medical devices imported to the U.S.; therefore, these types of products are expected to be significantly impacted.”
Assessing fully how tariffs will spike costs for medical devices and goods will take time, experts say. That’s because increasingly complex items like these could be subject to price hikes and shortages due to materials in them — which would be subject to tariffs, even if the final product might not be.
Reversing a bounty into a brain drain
Respondents to national political polls have affirmed it. So did the vote in the last presidential election. Americans have great concerns about a broken immigration system and an insecure border.
But the harsh, xenophobic crackdown on immigrants and immigration in this country has provoked its own backlash, recent polling shows. The sweep of the administration’s immigration efforts undermines some of this nation’s most prized resources: a globally admired medical system and medical-scientific research capacity.
The United States has reaped an unimaginable bounty from the intellectual firepower of foreign-born medical-scientific researchers at the most elite levels. Here’s just one tally of this from the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy:, which found that:
“Immigrants have been awarded 40%, or 45 of 112, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics since 2000 … four of the six U.S. recipients of Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics were immigrants to the United States. In 2021, three of the four U.S. recipients of Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics were immigrants to America. Between 1901 and 2023, immigrants have been awarded 36%, or 115 of 319, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics.”
The foundation, as with many other voices in this country, says that America’s long history of welcoming those from other shores and offering them unparalleled opportunities has made the nation a top destination for game-changing researchers, writers, artists, and other world-class talents. That situation could evaporate rapidly — with great, lasting damage, the New York Times reported:
“The Trump administration in recent weeks has canceled or frozen billions of dollars in federal grants made to researchers through the National Institutes of Health, and has moved to sharply curtail funding for academic medical centers and other institutions. It has also, through the [DOGE] initiative, … tried to fire hundreds of workers at the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency. And it has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign-born students. To economists, the policies threaten … U.S. competitiveness in emerging areas like artificial intelligence, and to leave Americans as a whole poorer, less healthy, and less productive in the decades ahead.”
Top talents can vote with their feet
Vilifying high-level talent ignores that able and ambitious people are not anchored in this country. Three professors at Yale have decided to abandon the U.S. for Canada, according to a CNN news article. MSN reported that a French institution already has seen a startling response (and distressing one for the United States) to its offer as a haven for American researchers:
“Nearly 300 scholars currently working in the United States have applied for positions at Aix-Marseille University in France, which has announced a program to provide a haven for academics affected by the Trump administration’s policies. Aix-Marseille [is] offering three-year funded placements for approximately 20 researchers … Within a month, the program drew 298 applications, of which 242 met eligibility criteria. Applicants came from prestigious institutions including Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and NASA.”
Rigorous medical-scientific research relies not only on big-name principal investigators but also grad students, new Ph.D.s, and postdocs, many of whom are foreign-born, especially in STEM areas. They work long hours for lesser pay that often doesn’t always match their hard-won academic labors and credentials. Their toil is vital to advancing basic, bench-to-bedside, and top-flight studies.
The administration, with an array of assaults on medical-scientific research, is killing this “seed corn,” including by denying entry or trying to deport foreign-born scholars, canceling (then reinstating!) visas for university students across the country, and threatening to conduct immigration raids in research facilities. As the scientific journal Nature reported:
“Data from the Nature Careers global science jobs platform show that U.S. scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024. At the same time, the number of U.S.-based users browsing jobs abroad increased by 35%.
“’To see this big drop in views and applications to the U.S. — and the similar rise in those looking to leave — is unprecedented,’ says James Richards, who leads the Global Talent Solutions team at Springer Nature … The release of the Nature Careers jobs-board data follows a separate poll of researchers by Nature’s news team, which found that 75% of researchers in the United States who responded were keen to leave.”
News outlets across the country have reported that colleges and universities have counseled international students to rethink their spring break, summer, and fall travel plans, perhaps finding ways to avoid leaving this country to prevent being barred from returning to school. While many colleges and universities had recruited international students with zeal — they often pay higher and full tuition and help bring a global sophistication to campuses — how long will young people from other countries want to study and then become part of a hostile, threatening United States?
Cutting pipelines for vital medical talent
The current administration, which is big on sloganeering, talks a lot about Making America Healthy Again. That sounds like a great idea. It will be difficult to do, though, if the nation’s leaders keep up with the aggressive, divisive talk and actions that quickly will prove detrimental to medicine.
Let’s recognize that this country faces a significant shortfall of doctors — and patients are starting to feel the crunch. There are longer waits for appointments, and in swaths of the nation medical care is getting downright hard to find. In the next dozen or so years, according to medical educators, the physician shortage will amount to almost 90,000 clinicians. That is fewer than some glum forecasts calculated, but this is a looming public health problem that will not be easily resolved. It takes a long time and a pile of money and other resources to train doctors. That leaves aspirants with not only demanding years of work but also debts that stack up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This country has leaned on the rest of the world to ease its shortages in doctors and nurses, as well as health aides and others involved in medical care. The Migration Policy Institute reported how the pandemic surfaced the big role that foreign-born people of various legal statuses play in U.S. medicine:
“Immigrant professionals have long played an important role in the U.S. health care workforce and make up disproportionate shares of both certain high- and low-skilled health care workers. For instance, the foreign-born accounted for 26% of the 987,000 physicians and surgeons practicing in the United States in 2021 and almost 40% of the 559,000 home health aides.” The group found that 16% of registered nurses are immigrants, while 21%+ of nurses’ aides came from other countries.
While extremists assail immigrants for purportedly taking jobs away from Americans, in health care, experts note, immigrants are holding down many difficult-to-fill roles. These often are low-paying jobs with long hours, heavy lifting, unpleasant, routine tasks, and challenging patient-clients. As David Grabowski, a Harvard Medical School professor, has observed in an interview with the Axios news site:
“Some of the earliest and lasting effects from [President] Trump’s promised immigration crackdowns would be in home health and long-term care, both of which rely on a substantial number of immigrants and undocumented workers … Reducing an already thin labor market could have serious ramifications for aging adults or those with disabilities — and potentially put more stress on family caregivers …
“‘Immigration policy is long-term care policy,’ said Grabowski, who has chronicled how foreign-born workers filled key nursing home roles early in the pandemic. He found nursing homes in regions with a higher share of foreign-born nursing assistants provided more direct care and better quality.”
Waking up to anti-wokeness’ costs
By the way, the administration’s campaign to root out “wokeness” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness efforts in education — including in medical schools — is another problematic Them and Us initiative. It upends efforts to ensure that underserved patients and communities get the care they desperately need and that medicine has hope for a tomorrow without harmful biases of the past.
Medical schools, for example, warn that they struggle already to enroll sorely needed, under-represented black and Latino doctors. DEI crackdowns, including now those aimed at the accreditors of institutions, will erode any gains. These already were imperiled by lawsuits and other claims that DEI initiatives are themselves discriminatory, especially against white and Asians. As the nonpartisan Kaiser Health News service reported, quoting Norma Poll-Hunter, senior director of workforce diversity for the Assn. of American Medical Colleges:
“If the recent decline in diversity among newly enrolled students holds or gets worse, it could have long-term consequences for patient care, academic experts said, pointing toward the vast racial disparities in health outcomes in the U.S., particularly for black people. A higher proportion of black primary care doctors is associated with longer life expectancy and lower mortality rates among black people, according to a 2023 study published by the JAMA Network. Physicians of color are also more likely to build their careers in medically underserved communities, studies have shown, which is increasingly important as the AAMC projects a shortage of up to 40,400 primary care doctors by 2036.
“‘The physician shortage persists, and it’s dire in rural communities,’ Poll-Hunter said. ‘We know that diversity efforts are really about improving access for everyone. More diversity leads to greater access to care — everyone is benefiting from it.’
Dismay and resistance to barrage of funding cuts
What about us? patients from across the country may be asking as the nation learns more about the administration’s assault on medicine and science and how it affects regular folks.
A newsletter like this one could only start to scratch the surface in recording the stunning actions of the federal government’s top leaders, including Elon Musk and his DOGE minions, as they affect health, medicine, and science. The numbers and proposals change, almost by the day.
Some of the most accessible information, though, has been served up by 60 Minutes and its primetime interview with Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, the world-renowned federal research complex in nearby Bethesda, Md. As CBS News reported of the esteemed researcher and medical leader and his comments about the tens of billions of dollars in vital work at NIH:
“Dr. Francis Collins, who led the agency for 12 years under three administrations, says this aggressive downsizing [ordered by the administration] could impact the health of Americans for generations to come. ‘When you’re talking about medical research, when you’re talking about people’s lives, when you’re talking about clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease or cancer that may take three or four years, you can’t just go in and decide, “I’m going to shut those down and maybe I’ll try something else.” Those are people’s lives at risk,’ Collins said. According to NIH employees, work on child cancer therapies, dementia and stroke have slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.”
Over on HBO, satirist John Oliver ripped Robert Kennedy Jr., the head of the sprawling Health and Human Services agency, for the sweeping cuts he has overseen in the new administration’s first 100 days. As the Deadline news site reported of Oliver’s takedown of Kennedy, including his video-recorded comment that half the population of China is diabetic:
“This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head,” Oliver said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research … RFK in this job is dangerous.”
These are a sample of the glaring areas of research slammed by announced billions of dollars in cuts at NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies:
§ Studies funded by NIH and involving HIV-AIDS, transgender people and their health, Covid-19, and climate change, according to an analysis by the scientific journal Nature. These were the areas most targeted in NIH cuts.
§ HHS has dismantled several key groups that had been hugely successful in helping to curb smoking rates in the U.S. for decades, NBC News reported: “The groups also tracked youth smoking and vaping rates as well as the appeal of nicotine pouches for teens. The Office on Smoking and Health at CDC — which had been crucial in investigating a deadly wave of lung injuries linked to contaminated vaping devices in 2019 — was gutted. Dozens of staffers at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products — which oversees warning labels and restrictions on marketing — were placed on leave, including the center’s director, Brian King.”
§ The Guardian newspaper reported that “Hundreds of millions of federal grant dollars meant to prevent and respond to gun violence, opioid addiction, and support victims of violent crimes were cut … by the U.S. Department of Justice [which] emailed more than 350 organizations … DOJ said the money was rescinded because it ‘no longer effectuates Department priorities.’” The New York Times reported that the administration’s cuts in the battle against the opioid epidemic included slashing money to make even more widely available Narcan, the drug hailed for reversing overdoses and saving lives.
§ The New Yorker reported that at Columbia University alone “at least a hundred clinical trials are at risk of stopping or have already halted, including some dedicated to preventing sexually transmitted infections, reducing rates of postpartum depression, and keeping organ-transplant recipients safe from infectious threats.” Druv Khullar, the author-physician, shared the information about the terminated research as part of his longer magazine article on how the administration cancelled an important, long-running study on diabetes. That was a flummoxing decision, considering RFK Jr.’s insistence on battling chronic, debilitating illnesses — like diabetes.
Schools take big and hard knocks
Punish and accuse first, then investigate.
Colleges and universities are learning that this is the current administration’s brusque approach to institutions of higher education and whether they possibly have problems with DEI, antisemitism, and long-accepted grant-use practices.
The administration has put in its crosshairs dozens of private and public, big and small colleges and universities across the country. Besides castigating them at the outset for purported damaging policies and practices, the institutions have been walloped with billions of dollars in funding freezes.
These also have ripped at medical care and studies in schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Columbia — universities with prominent hospitals associated with them.
Harvard has decided to be a leader and to fire back at the administration’s bellicose claims that the school has problems with antisemitism and wokeness. The university’s website is worth viewing because it has become a long, robust display of how the school — across its many departments and affiliated medical care institutions — benefit real people’s lives, health, and well-being.
Northwestern has put up a similar online display, which notes, among many other things, that more than 300,000 patients participated in one year in potentially life-changing and life-saving clinical trials and studies.
The impressive Johns Hopkins online revelations about how its “research saves lives” includes notable features — like links to other universities’ webpages describing the direct impact to improve the public’s health and well-being and salient news coverage of the administration’s assaults on higher education and research.
Columbia, which became one of the administration’s earliest targets and essentially gave in to harsh demands, has not put up an online counteroffensive like those put up by others. The New York Times has detailed some of the medical and health damage attributable to the administration’s harsh funding measures against the school, reporting:
“Cancer researchers examining the use of artificial intelligence to detect early signs of breast cancer. Pediatricians tracking the long-term health of children born to mothers infected with the coronavirus during pregnancy. Scientists searching for links between diabetes and dementia. All these projects at Columbia University were paid for with federal research grants that were abruptly terminated following the Trump administration’s decision to cut $400 million in funding to Columbia over concerns regarding the treatment of Jewish students. Dozens of medical and scientific studies are ending, or at risk of ending, leaving researchers scrambling to find alternative funding. In some cases, researchers have already started informing study subjects that research is suspended.”
Recent Health Care Developments of Interest
Here are some recent health- and medical-related news articles that might interest you:
§ The already lethal 2025 measles outbreak has continued to spread to 29 states and grown in its number of cases (~900). Whooping cough cases also have spiked into the thousands — double the amount at this same time last year. Public opinion surveys show that misinformation is rampant and increasing about preventable infectious diseases like measles. Robert Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services chief, keeps making tepid — at best — comments about a proven way to prevent serious illnesses like measles (and whooping cough): immunizations. Instead, he is downplaying outbreaks and dodging questions, for example, by saying that one of the leading health organizations in the world (his) just urges new parents to do their own research. And speaking of studies, a new one finds that even a small decline in already falling vaccination rates could be damaging for the nation’s health, allowing a disproportionately large flourishing of highly infectious and preventable measles. If vaccination rates fall even a little, the experts warn, and messes — an infection that experts declared eradicated in this country — would return as a too-common scourge.
§ The new folks in charge of the quality and safety of the nation’s food supplies have reversed their predecessors on a major issue: the acceptable levels of and testing for salmonella in raw chicken and turkey products. Suspending a previous effort to toughen federal standards, federal regulators have sided with owners and manufacturers of raw poultry products. They claimed the rules, which included requirements for more testing to safeguard against the bacteria, were too burdensome. Consumer and health advocates denounced the decision, saying it favored industry interests over public health. As CBS News reported: “The U.S.D.A. has estimated there are 125,000 salmonella infections from chicken and 43,000 from turkey each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year, most through food, and about 420 deaths.”
The administration has drawn the ire of consumer and health advocates, too, for its announced suspension of the federal Food and Drug Administration’s programs to provide quality control over milk and other dairy products. The FDA says it is determining how best to run such efforts after 10,000 agency employers were fired. The agency already had made plans to hand over much of its routine food inspections to already strapped state officials, many of whom will lack the expertise and resources to take on new duties, critics say. FDA officials say they are still in the planning stage of any hand-over.
§ Grownups’ ga-ga-gooing of babies keeps going, going, going. That’s because the U.S. birthrate, even with a tiny increase, remains at historic lows, new data shows. As the New York Times reported: “More than 3.6 million babies were born in the United States last year, a meager rise from the record-setting low in 2023. The fertility rate, approximately 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime, is well below the 2.1 births needed to maintain the country’s population through births alone. The new data represent ‘the continuation of a long-term decline of births in the United States that began really with the Great Recession in 2007,’ said Ken Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.” The administration has taken up a controversial response to declining birth rates, adopting “pronatalism,” and trying to determine ways to get more women to have children. Birth rates are falling globally and Asian nations like Japan have seen the extreme outcomes, as reported by CBS’ 60 Minutes. Declining birth rates can have profound economic effects, as societies struggle with smaller numbers of highly productive young people and their need to support a big population of their elders.
§ Federal regulators are warning hirsute wannabes about hair-raising side effects of a prescription medication promoted for helping with hair loss. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “The Food and Drug Administration [has] posted a warning about generic forms of a popular hair-loss medication often sold by major telehealth companies … citing reports of side effects including sexual dysfunction and suicidal thoughts.The warning relates to a topical spray form of the drug finasteride, also known by the brand name Propecia. The FDA said it hasn’t approved the sale of those topical forms of the drug, or any safety information related to them. Only the pill version is FDA-approved. Telehealth companies market the topical form of the medicine in extensive social-media campaigns, often with limited or no side-effect information. Such advertising is legal because telehealth companies aren’t required to follow the same regulations as drugmakers when advertising medicine.”
HERE’S TO A HEALTHY 2025 AND BEYOND!
Sincerely,
Patrick Malone
Patrick Malone & Associate
