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The US biotech industry’s main lobby group issued a rare warning following the forced and abrupt resignation of the nation’s top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), saying the loss of his experienced leadership would “erode scientific standards” and affect the development of transformative therapies to fight disease. The statement, issued on Saturday by John Crowley of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), followed the news a day earlier that Dr Peter Marks had resigned over what he called “misinformation and lies” from health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. It was an uncommon admonition from a sector that has largely been silent amid the second Donald Trump presidential administration’s first months in office. (Vargas, 3/30)

Since even before Trump took office, the pharma and biotech industries have adopted a cautious approach to the new administration, electing to largely operate behind the scenes when it moved in directions that threatened their interests and seizing at least a couple of opportunities to meet with him. The question now is whether the ouster of Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, will change the industries’ strategy — and whether it will matter. (Mast and Feuerstein, 3/29)

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official has been pushed out, according to people familiar with the matter. Dr. Peter Marks, who played a key role in the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed to develop Covid-19 vaccines, stepped down Friday. He submitted his resignation after a Health and Human Services official earlier in the day gave him the choice to resign or be fired, people familiar with the matter said. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks wrote in a resignation letter referring to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Whyte, 3/28)

President Trump has selected Sara Carter, a conservative journalist and Fox News contributor, as the nation’s next drug czar. Carter’s selection comes as a surprise: Her background is not in drug policy, public health, or law enforcement, and she has never served in government. Her journalism in the past decade, however, has been staunchly pro-Trump, with a particular emphasis on border issues and former President Biden’s perceived failure to stem illegal immigration and the trafficking of illicit drugs. (Facher, 3/28)

The United States, the richest country in the world and once its most generous provider of foreign aid, has sent nothing. (Beech and Wong, 3/30)

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says sweeping layoffs and restructuring in the department will bring order to a bureaucracy he claims is in "pandemonium." But experts say the overhaul also likely gives him far greater control over dozens of federal health agencies. (Reed, 3/31)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to reshape the federal health department has left its roughly 1,000 emergency response workers in limbo, and with a daunting order: Sort out how you break up — this weekend. (Owermohle, 3/28)

Former Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure is not buying the Trump administration’s claim health programs won’t be impacted by the most recent round of federal cuts. Brooks-LaSure is skeptical they can hold to their promise after the latest round of cuts and regional office consolidations, since many fired workers do influence the rollout of these programs. “Just because someone’s title doesn’t say that they work on Medicare and Medicaid doesn’t mean that much of the work that they’re doing doesn’t affect those programs,” she said, now as a senior fellow at progressive think tank The Century Foundation, in a press conference Friday. “I think it’s on them to prove that the claim is true.” (Tong, 3/28)

Families with children enrolled in scores of child-care centers in federal buildings hoped that the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate for federal employees would give a boost to these facilities and lead more to open after pandemic-era closures. Instead, the administration has eliminated an office responsible for overseeing that network and stopped providing accreditation to the centers, leaving them vulnerable to a drop in quality, higher costs or outright closure, former employees said. (Wiener, 3/30)

Wisconsin, California and New York are among the states that have in recent weeks launched campaigns to reel in candidates from a fresh and massive pool of people newly on the job market: fired federal workers. Since President Donald Trump took office, tens of thousands of federal employees have been caught in his sweeping job cuts, which have been led by billionaire Elon Musk. State and local governments — largely led by Democrats — have taken up hiring former federal workers as their cause, with recruitment drives tailored to those who had once expected to spend their careers in service to the federal government. (Somasundaram, 3/30)

The Trump administration’s firing and furloughing of tens of thousands of federal workers and contractors have obviously caused economic hardship for Americans employed in national parks, research labs and dozens of government agencies. As a professor of social work who studies how people’s finances affect their physical and mental well-being, I’m concerned about the health hazards they’ll face too. (Anvari-Clark, 3/29)

The president’s spotlight is giving Monday’s Transgender Day of Visibility a different tenor this year. “What he wants is to scare us into being invisible again,” said Rachel Crandall Crocker, the executive director of Transgender Michigan who organized the first Day of Visibility 16 years ago. “We have to show him we won’t go back.” So why has this small population found itself with such an outsized role in American politics? (Mulvihill and Bedayn, 3/30)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Journalists Talk Public Health Data Under Trump, Therapists' Discontent With Insurers

�鶹Ů�� Health News senior correspondent Aneri Pattani discussed how mental health therapists are finding it difficult to work with insurance companies on WOSU Public Media’s “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on March 27. �鶹Ů�� Health News national public health correspondent Amy Maxmen discussed the effects of President Donald Trump’s policy changes on the collection and sharing of important scientific health data on Big Picture Science on March 24. (3/29)

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff [last] week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica. In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show. (Callahan, 3/28)

The number of measles cases has risen to 400, a spike of 73 cases over the last three days, as the historical outbreak continues to rage on in West Texas, according to state officials on Friday. Of those, 41 patients have been hospitalized. As of Friday, most of the measles cases reported since January –– 270 –– were centered in Gaines County, about 90 minutes southwest of Lubbock on the New Mexico border. Earlier this week, state officials confirmed Lamb County, northeast of Lubbock, reported its first measles case. On Friday, two more counties, Andrews and Midland counties which are within an 80-mile radius of Gaines, reported their first cases. (Langford, Simpson and Klibanoff, 3/28)

Kennedy made a show of shipping vitamin A to measles-stricken communities. The state’s public-health department didn’t take up the offer. (Florko, 3/28)

Former White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha on Sunday laid the blame for an ongoing measles outbreak currently centered on West Texas squarely at the feet of new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “This is all wholly preventable,” Jha told Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “We’ve already had two people die. I’m worried we’re going to see more children get very, very sick and die. We should not be at this point in our country, and yet here we are because of bad information being spread by Secretary Kennedy and others.” (Svirnovskiy, 3/30)

As a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico continues to grow, and other states report outbreaks of their own, some pediatricians across the U.S. say they are seeing a new trend among concerned parents: vaccine enthusiasm. "Our call center was inundated with calls about the MMR [measles, mumps, rubella] vaccine," says Dr. Shannon Fox-Levine, a pediatrician in Broward County, Fla. She says parents are asking if their child is up to date on their vaccinations. Or "should they get another vaccine? Should they get an extra one? Can they get it early?" (Godoy, 3/30)

More microhospitals are popping up nationwide as health systems try to increase access to care without pouring money into large-scale projects. Hospital operators have touted the model as cheaper to build and requiring less capital to operate than a traditional hospital, while still providing critical services to patients in areas with care gaps. Services can also be customized based on what a market needs, operators say. (Hudson, 3/31)

Solventum, the 3M healthcare spinoff, eliminated 800 positions as part of a restructuring strategy to help fuel growth. CEO Bryan Hanson, in an investor day presentation last week, said the restructuring plan would save the company $120 million annually and require a one-time cost of $120 million. The plan, called the “Solventum Way,” was announced in December. (Zipp, 3/26)

An initiative Corewell Health launched four years ago with Grand Valley State University to bring more nurses into the profession has been meeting expectations amid a persistent staffing shortage. Since starting in 2022, hundreds of GVSU nursing students have gone through the scholarship and mentorship program that provides a talent pipeline for Corewell Health, which committed to invest more than $19 million over six years to support 500 students who pursue a nursing degree at the university. (Sanchez, 3/27)

Nonprofit hospitals’ 2024 financial performances are beating the prior year’s tough numbers, though even the stronger organizations remain “well below pre-pandemic levels,” Fitch Ratings said. In a Thursday brief describing the financial profiles of its rated nonprofit hospitals, the agency attributed the year-to-year improvements to stronger revenues and volumes as well as slightly mitigated, but still pressured, labor spending. (Muoio, 3/27)

Health systems could spend less money and time fighting fraud allegations if their legal challenges to federal oversight are successful. Supreme Court cases, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, along with a federal lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of whistleblower cases are poised to revamp healthcare fraud enforcement. Decisions in these cases, combined with the Trump administration's renewed emphasis on deregulation, could narrow the scope of healthcare fraud investigations and ease federal oversight, healthcare lawyers said. (Kacik, 3/28)

The Department of Justice agrees that Claritev, formerly known as MultiPlan, conspired with health insurers to underpay doctors for medical care, according to a statement of interest filed by antitrust regulators on Wednesday in the consolidated lawsuit from providers against the cost management firm. (Pifer, 3/26)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: ‘They Won’t Help Me’: Sickest Patients Face Insurance Denials Despite Policy Fixes

Sheldon Ekirch spends a lot of time on hold with her health insurance company. Sometimes, as the minutes tick by and her frustration mounts, Ekirch, 30, opens a meditation app on her phone. It was recommended by her psychologist to help with the depression associated with a stressful and painful medical disorder. In 2023, Ekirch was diagnosed with small fiber neuropathy, a condition that makes her limbs and muscles feel as if they’re on fire. Now she takes more than a dozen prescriptions to manage chronic pain and other symptoms, including insomnia. (Sausser, 3/31)

In a blow to the pharmaceutical industry, a U.S. court judge ruled that a Colorado state board can proceed with plans to place limits on the prices paid for medicines, the first such decision to support the controversial attempts by some states to control their prescription drug spending. (Silverman, 3/28)

A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit against Wells Fargo from a group of former employees arguing that the bank violated its fiduciary obligations by agreeing to pay steep prices for prescription drugs. It’s a victory for employers concerned they could be the next company accused of mismanaging health benefits. The litigation against Wells Fargo is the second lawsuit accusing a large, self-funded employer of failing to bring down drug costs for their workers and acting as a poor steward of their healthcare dollars in violation of ERISA. (Pifer, 3/26)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Montana’s Small Pharmacies Behind Bill To Corral Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Montana’s small, independent pharmacies say they’re getting increasingly squeezed on reimbursements by pharmacy benefit managers — and are pushing an ambitious bill to rein in what they say are unfair practices by the powerful industry negotiators known as PBMs. “Who in their right mind would subject themselves to this sort of treatment in a business relationship?” said Mike Matovich, a part owner of eight small-town pharmacies in Montana. “It’s such a monopoly. We can be the best pharmacy in the world, and they can still put us out of business.” (Dennison, 3/31)

As Florida officials enable Trump’s mass deportation policies, lawmakers in the state are looking to children to take on some of the jobs that have typically been done by immigrants. Making its way through the state Senate is a new law, Senate Bill 918, that aims to loosen child labor laws and allow teenagers to work overnight shifts. S.B. 918 also “includes a number of changes including eliminating working time restrictions on teenagers aged 14 and 15 if they are home-schooled and ending guaranteed meal breaks for 16 and 17 year olds,” CNN reported. (Jones, 3/27)

A bill that would ban the manufacture and drastically restrict the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms that can accept detachable ammunition magazines in Colorado is now headed to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk after it cleared its final legislative hurdle Friday. (Paul, 3/28)

Between 74% and 95% of incarcerated women have survived domestic abuse or sexual violence, according to the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Many were tried without fair opportunities to prove the scope of the abuse and how it led them to act in self-defense, while others were coerced into crimes, according to advocates, who add that certain laws disproportionately criminalize abused women. At other times, they say, people simply don’t believe women’s stories, with women of color like Favors who survive abuse especially likely to end up in prison. But under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act, which passed the state House overwhelmingly with bipartisan support and still awaits Senate consideration ahead of the session’s end this week, abuse survivors could secure early release from prison. (Kramon, 3/30)

For years, North Carolina’s Republican-majority Legislature has taken steps big and small to wrench power from Democratic governors and the agencies under their control. One move that didn’t get much attention — tucked into a 628-page budget bill four years ago — was to direct $15 million in funding for sexual assault victims away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money. The money instead would be funneled through the North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission, an obscure group that’s part of the state’s GOP-helmed courts system. (Clark, 3/30)

More than four months after Missouri voters approved a measure that gave residents the right to an abortion, Planned Parenthood has begun offering the procedure at one of its St. Louis clinics. Clinic officials announced Friday that staff this week have started offering patients procedural abortions, sometimes known as surgical abortions. (Fentem, 3/28)

Honeybee colonies in the United States are projected to decline by up to 70% in 2025, entomologists at Washington State University said Tuesday. The university said in a news release that in the past decade, honeybee colony losses have averaged 40% to 50% annually. But this year, a combination of nutrition deficiencies, mite infestations, viral diseases and possible pesticide exposure during the previous pollinating season led to higher losses, the release said. The implications could be huge. About 35% of the world’s food depends on pollinators, according to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. (Lavietes, 3/26)

US flu indicators declined for the sixth week in a row, but levels remain elevated nationally, and activity is expected to continue for the next several weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its latest weekly update. Nationally, the percentage of outpatient visits for flulike illness, at 3.3%, remains above the national baseline for the seventeenth consecutive week, but five areas of the country are now below their regional baselines. (Schnirring, 3/28)

Bird flu wasn’t on Tim Hanson’s mind when he fed his cats specialty pet food containing raw chicken. “You go to the pet shop and it was the premium raw food,” he said. “It was finely ground to a consistency that I thought was beneficial to my cats.” But in early February, one of his cats, Kira, developed a fever and stopped eating. A test ordered by a veterinarian came back positive for bird flu. Within days, Kira’s condition had deteriorated — she became lethargic and had trouble breathing. After several trips to the vet and emergency room in Portland, Oregon, where Hanson lives, he made the painful decision to put Kira down.  (Bendix, 3/30)

Need another reason to prioritize your sleep? Not spending enough time in the two deep stages of sleep — slow-wave and rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep — may hasten the deterioration of parts of the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a new study found. (LaMotte, 3/31)

Sleep specialists have long warned of the hazards of bringing smartphones into the bedroom. Now, research has confirmed just how damaging that habit can be. The new study, which surveyed more than 45,000 university students in Norway, found that late-night screen was associated with a significant reduction in sleep quality and duration. (Fleur Afshar, 3/31)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Readers Shop For Nutritional Information And Weigh Radiation And Cancer Risks 

�鶹Ů�� Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories. (3/31)

From 2009 to 2019, avoidable mortality increased by an average of 33 deaths per 100,000 people across the United States, according to an article published in JAMA last week. In the same decade that avoidable deaths increased in the United States, they dropped by an average of nearly 23 deaths per 100,000 across all other countries in the study. Among countries in the European Union, there was an average decrease of 25 avoidable deaths per 100,000 people from 2009 to 2019. (McMahan, 3/31)

A government-sponsored junk food ban in schools across Mexico took effect on Saturday, officials said, as the country tries to tackle one of the world’s worst obesity and diabetes epidemics. The health guidelines, first published last fall, take a direct shot at salty and sweet processed products that have become a staple for generations of Mexican schoolchildren, such as sugary fruit drinks, packaged chips, artificial pork rinds and soy-encased, chili-flavored peanuts. (3/29)

A single dose of an experimental drug dramatically reduced levels of a deadly form of cholesterol, often thought to be untreatable, for up to one year. Lipoprotein(a) is a type of cholesterol that lurks in the body, undetected by routine tests and undeterred by existing drugs, diet or exercise. The findings, cardiologists say, are a critical step toward treating the millions of Americans genetically predisposed to abnormally high levels of lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a). (Edwards, 3/30)

Over a decade ago, psychologist and researcher Jae Sevelius had an idea: The behaviors that might put transgender people at particularly high risk of getting HIV stem from the fact that their gender wasn’t being affirmed as they needed. (Gaffney, 3/27)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved the first at-home, over-the-counter test for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis. The Visby Medical Women's Sexual Health Test is a single-use test intended for women with or without symptoms. The test, which includes a sample collection kit and a powered testing device that communicates testing results to an app, can be bought without a prescription and deliver results within 30 minutes. (Dall, 3/28)

Many people use a smartwatch to monitor their cardiovascular health, often by counting the number of steps they take over the course of their day, or recording their average daily heart rate. Now, researchers are proposing an enhanced metric, which combines the two using basic math: Divide your average daily heart rate by your daily average number of steps. The resulting ratio — the daily heart rate per step, or DHRPS — provides insight into how efficiently the heart is working, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association. (Richtel, 3/29)

A man who battled childhood cancer has received the first known transplant of sperm-producing stem cells, in a study aimed at restoring the fertility of cancer’s youngest survivors. Jaiwen Hsu was 11 when a leg injury turned out to be bone cancer. Doctors thought grueling chemotherapy could save him but likely leave him infertile. His parents learned researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were freezing testicular cells of young boys with cancer in hopes of preserving their future fertility — and signed him up. Hsu, now 26, is the first to return as an adult and test if reimplanting those cells might work. (Neergaard, 3/28)

The AngelEye CameraSystem allows parents to see their babies remotely through their cellphones or laptops. (Stahl and Nau, 3/24)

Abortion ban exceptions just don’t work. That’s why we see reporting about unnecessary deaths in states with abortion bans. It’s also why exceptions for the health or life of a pregnant woman have become a target of Democratic attacks on abortion bans — and of litigation in state and federal courts. (Mary Ziegler, 3/31)

Dana, a 29-year-old nurse in St. Louis, checks her phone to see if the gig nursing app CareRev still has her scheduled at the local hospital. She’s already arranged child care for her son, but cancellations are common. “It’s a gamble. … I’ll wake up at 5 in the morning, and I’ll find out if I’m canceled or not,” she told us. Cancellation means Dana will miss out on a day of pay. (Note: All names have been changed to protect privacy.) (Katie J. Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda, 3/31)

Many Americans have lost trust in public health agencies and the advice they offer, especially in more conservative parts of the country like mine. That declining trust is showing up in personal choices: In 2018, some 46,000 Texans requested vaccine exemption forms from the Texas Department of State Health Services. In 2024, more than 93,000 did. (Carrie McKean, 3/31)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forcing Peter Marks out of the Food and Drug Administration has blown a hole in the agency’s leadership ranks and threatens to unmoor the oversight of drugs and vaccines from bedrock scientific principles. For biotech investors, Marks’ ouster is a worst-case scenario realized — an FDA riven by dysfunction and uncertainty. And it comes at a time when the sector is already suffering through a years-long public markets slump. (Adam Feuerstein, 3/30)

I will never forget stepping into the cadaver lab for the first time. As the doors swung open, a sharp, sour wave of formaldehyde hit me and made my stomach churn. I pulled my thin polyester scrub shirt over my nose, but it did little to block the smell, let alone shield me from the bone-chilling temperature. Steel tables surrounded me, each holding a body, and I could see grayish-yellow skin peeking out from beneath the white drapes. Everything about that moment was deeply unsettling. (Nadir Al-Saidi, 3/31)

When I founded Safe Reflections, I envisioned it as more than just a charity — it was my response to a growing societal need for awareness and compassion surrounding body dysmorphia. My project began in December of 2023 as a spark of concern, rooted in my personal journey of overcoming body confidence struggles. Along with my co-founder and vice president, Ipsi Bapat and Sahasra Balusu, I set out to address the stigma surrounding body dysmorphia and create a safe space. Today, it has transformed into a beacon of hope for individuals grappling with self-image and mental health challenges. (Aashritha Musti, 3/31)