Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Are The 'Blue Zones' A Fraud?; Oversight Is Necessary For FDA's Fast-Track Of Psychedelics
When French geneticist Jean-Francois Deleuze first launched the AGENOMICS study in 2022, he hoped to identify genetic patterns among 1,200 French citizens who鈥檇 lived more than 100 years and to compare those to centenarians hailing from one of the world-famous 鈥渂lue zones.鈥 Then he started having doubts. (Shelley Wood and Eric J. Topol, 5/4)
The attention to psychedelics is overdue, and there鈥檚 a real opportunity to build a stronger scientific base for a promising field. Yet this area of medicine also demands extra care 鈥 or the US risks unleashing complex therapies into an infrastructure unprepared to support them. (Lisa Jarvis, 5/4)
Prices at hospitals have grown faster than prices in virtually any other sector of the economy. (Zack Cooper, 5/4)
They operate like big businesses while not providing enough charity care. (Scott Hodge, 5/4)
A recently published paper delivers a finding that should be well known to every executive in Western pharma: China has gone from accounting for less than 8% of global clinical trials in 2010 to surpassing the United States in annual registered trial volume by 2020, reaching more than 5,000 trials per year in 2024. Eighty-eight percent of that growth, among private-sector sponsors, was driven by domestic Chinese firms, not multinationals relocating R&D. (Dennis Kwok, 5/4)