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In October, Jay Bhattacharya, then a health economist at Stanford University, posted on X: “If you favor government control of misinformation, you are an enemy of free speech.” On Wednesday, on his first morning serving as director of the National Institutes of Health, the agency directed staff to compile a list of grants and contracts related to “fighting misinformation or disinformation” — a step that in recent weeks has preceded the termination of research funding in areas that run counter to the Trump administration’s priorities. (Oza, 3/26)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to swiftly bar the use of food stamps to buy soda is fueling tensions between his team and the Agriculture Department, according to four people inside and outside government familiar with the dynamics. The Health and Human Services secretary wants the Trump administration to approve state petitions banning soda from the program for the first time. But he doesn’t control the massive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is managed by the USDA. (Cancryn and Brown, 3/27)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Trump Turns Homelessness Response Away From Housing, Toward Forced Treatment 

President Donald Trump is vowing a new approach to getting homeless people off the streets by forcibly moving those living outside into large camps while mandating mental health and addiction treatment — an aggressive departure from the nation’s leading homelessness policy, which for decades has prioritized housing as the most effective way to combat the crisis. “Our once-great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares,” Trump said in a presidential campaign video. “For those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.” Now that he’s in office, the assault on “Housing First” has begun. (Hart, 3/27)

The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday placed deputy director Tara Schwetz on administrative leave, according to a source familiar with the decision, marking the third time a senior leader has departed the agency since the Trump administration took power roughly nine weeks ago. (Facher, 3/26)

A federal judge indicated Wednesday that he may narrow an earlier ruling that required the Trump administration to rehire nearly 25,000 probationary workers. U.S. District Judge James Bredar entered a sweeping order two weeks ago reversing the administration’s mass terminations at 18 major federal agencies, including most Cabinet departments. That order applied nationwide, but Bredar said at a court hearing Wednesday that he may replace it with a more limited injunction that applies only in 19 states and the District of Columbia — the jurisdictions that sued over the firings. (Gerstein, 3/26)

Research and patient care may quickly stop at 14 of the country's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers (ADRCs) due to lack of funds. Funding has effectively been halted at 14 of the nation's 35 ADRC after the Trump administration repeatedly canceled NIH advisory council meetings, the final step required in the ADRC grant approval process. "The 14 ADRCs remain in limbo," Alzheimer's researcher Ann Cohen, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh, told MedPage Today. (George, 3/26)

The United States is planning to terminate more than $1 billion in funding for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, an international organization that offers lifesaving vaccinations for millions of people each year in some of the world’s poorest countries, according to information in a document the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sent to Congress this week. The surprise cuts to Gavi “would have a disastrous impact on global health security, potentially resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million children over five years and endangering lives everywhere from dangerous disease outbreaks,” said Sania Nishtar, a Pakistani doctor and chief executive of the organization. (Taylor and Martinez, 3/26)

Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election. (Dawsey, Zuckerman and Hopkins, 3/26)

The Social Security Administration on Wednesday abruptly backed off planned cuts to phone services for disabled and some elderly Americans applying for benefits amid an uproar from advocates. The originally proposed changes — scheduled to take effect Monday but now delayed to April 14 — would have directed all people filing claims to first verify their identity online or in person, removing a phone option in place for years. Advocates said the shift would make it impossible for many disabled and elderly people with limited mobility or computer skills to apply. (Rein and Natanson, 3/26)

Nearly half a million Americans will be affected by President Trump's order that will cease Social Security payments by paper check. Why it matters: The switch risks disrupting the financial lives of some of the most vulnerable Americans, at a time when Social Security is cutting back services to help them. (Fitzpatrick, 3/26)

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed likely to preserve the $8 billion a year the government spends to subsidize phone and internet services in schools, libraries and rural areas. The justices heard nearly three hours of arguments in a new test of federal regulatory power, reviewing an appellate ruling that struck down as unconstitutional the Universal Service Fund, the tax that has been added to phone bills for nearly 30 years. (Sherman, 3/26)

Using Meta Quest 3 headsets, the VR simulation recreates real-life encounters with veterans contemplating suicide by lethal means, such as firearms. This immersive experience helps providers recognize warning signs, practice intervention strategies, and gain confidence in managing high-risk scenarios. (Lopez, 3/25)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: With Few Dentists And Fluoride Under Siege, Rural America Risks New Surge Of Tooth Decay 

In the wooded highlands of northern Arkansas, where small towns have few dentists, water officials who serve more than 20,000 people have for more than a decade openly defied state law by refusing to add fluoride to the drinking water. For its refusal, the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority has received hundreds of state fines amounting to about $130,000, which are stuffed in a cardboard box and left unpaid, said Andy Anderson, who is opposed to fluoridation and has led the water system for nearly two decades. (Kelman, 3/27)

Health insurers got double-paid by the Medicaid system for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in extra payments. The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled—and paid for—in other states, a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data found. (Weaver, Mathews and McGinty, 3/26)

The House’s plan to cut government spending, including on Medicaid, to help pay for the extension of tax cuts is already hitting snags. The House budget resolution, which sets broad plans for GOP efforts to cut taxes, directs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut government spending by $880 billion over a decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said hitting that target would require significant cuts to Medicaid. (Wilkerson, 3/26)

Iowa Republicans are closer to requiring thousands of Medicaid recipients to fulfill work requirements or lose their health care benefits after a House vote. Although Senate Republicans have passed legislation seeking to institute Medicaid work requirements in past years, Wednesday's vote is the first time the House has done so. (Gruber-Miller, 3/27)

Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that represented the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American Airwaves” — opened her remarks by deriding PBS and NPR as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming. (Mullin and Grynbaum, 3/26)

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the federal government’s ban on so-called ghost guns — effectively untraceable weapons that can be easily assembled from parts kits often purchased on the internet. The justices split 7-2, with four conservative justices and three liberals backing the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to regulate kits used to make guns that lack serial numbers and are typically sold without a background check. Such weapons are frequently used in crimes. (Gerstein, 3/26)

Lawyers for the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City gave him clothes for a hearing last month that included a hidden heart-shaped note touting his public support, prosecutors said Tuesday. The note was found in a pair of argyle socks given to Luigi Mangione for his appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on Feb. 21 on state murder and terrorism charges, according to a letter from the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “Know there are thousands of people wishing you luck,” the note said, according to the letter, which was addressed to the judge overseeing the case. (Stelloh and Reiss, 3/26)

The country’s largest public pension fund claims in an amended lawsuit that UnitedHealth Group’s leaders have hid the company’s illegal behavior for years — even as damning media reports and government investigations emerged as recently as last month — so they could continue to make millions from selling stock. (Bannow, 3/26)

The American Hospital Association on Wednesday said the FBI found no specific, credible threats after investigating a potential terror risk to hospitals in several cities. The FBI said if it received any further, credible information on the possible threat it would immediately contact potential targeted hospitals and make a broader announcement through the AHA and Health-ISAC if necessary, according to a news release. (DeSilva, 3/26)  

A St. Louis County jury has awarded $48.1 million to the family of a child who suffered brain damage after his parents claimed Mercy Hospital botched his delivery. Staff at Mercy Hospital St. Louis, in Creve Coeur, allowed Sarah Anyan to keep pushing for 12 hours during labor despite warning signs that her baby was in distress. Anyan’s baby was in the wrong position and monitors displayed warning signs about his vitals, her lawyers said. (Kull, 3/26)

The University of Pennsylvania Health System said Tuesday it is cutting about 300 positions. The cuts equate to less than 1% of the system's total workforce. More than 100 of the affected positions were either vacant or held by employees looking to retire in the coming months, a spokesperson said. (Hudson, 3/26)

Two Chairs, a mental health startup, is planning to expand its services into 19 states, the company said Wednesday. Two Chairs founder and CEO Alex Katz said the company will be immediately launching in multiple states including Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The company, which offers both virtual and in-person therapy, will be live in all of the new states by the end of June, he said. (Turner, 3/26)

Measles vaccination rates for young children may be far lower than publicly reported, a troubling development that could mean the United States is closer than expected to losing its “elimination status” for the extremely contagious disease. “We are experiencing an extremely concerning decline in measles vaccination in the very group most vulnerable to the disease,” said Benjamin Rader, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of a recent study that looked at children’s vaccination rates.  (Sudhakar, 3/27)

A measles outbreak in Kansas doubled in less than a week to 23 cases and has “a possible link” to outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico that have sickened more than 370, the state health department said Wednesday. And health officials in Ohio say a single case identified in Ashtabula County has spread to nine others. Even before these two growing clusters were reported, the number of measles cases in the U.S. had already surpassed the case count for all of 2024, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Shastri, 3/26)

The Lubbock public health director said Wednesday local efforts to fight a measles outbreak will be affected by the federal government’s announcement that it’s pulling $11 billion in COVID-era funding for public health departments. (Langford, 3/26)

The Florida House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a proposal that could lead to more medical malpractice lawsuits, while a similar bill cleared a major hurdle in the Senate. (Saunders, 3/27)

Los Angeles County has been using potentially faulty DNA test kits in criminal investigations for months. According to the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, on Wednesday, a supervisor became aware on Monday of a notice from a DNA testing kit manufacturer indicating that a specific lot of kits was prone to poor performance with the potential to cause incomplete results. The maker of those kits recommended that the department stop using the kits. (Stone, 3/26)

A federal judge on Wednesday found the extreme heat in Texas prisons is “plainly unconstitutional,” but declined to order the state to immediately start installing air conditioning, which could cost billions. The judge affirmed claims brought by advocates of people incarcerated in the state, where summer heat routinely soars above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). But they will have to continue pressing their lawsuit later in a trial. (Vertuno, 3/26)

A Michigan resident who received a transplant in December died after having been infected with rabies from the new organ, the state health department said Wednesday. The patient received the transplant at a hospital in Ohio in December, then died in January, the department said. The statement did not include information about identity of the recipient or the type of organ that was transplanted. The donor was not a resident of Michigan or Ohio, it said. (Richardson, 3/26)

The findings of a government probe confirm what many adoptees attested to for years: Babies were sent abroad for profit, often with falsified backstories. (Cho, 3/27)

A crowd of protesters on each side of the abortion debate flooded a windowless Georgia Capitol hallway Wednesday with chants and signs as lawmakers held a hearing on a bill that would ban the procedure in almost all cases. Although the bill will not go anywhere this year because a deadline has passed for consideration by both chambers, the hearing granted by the House’s Republican leadership gave anti-abortion activists a chance to speak out on an issue near and dear to their constituents. The bill would make most abortions a crime from the point of fertilization, at which point one would be considered a person, and classify the procedure as a homicide. (Kramon, 3/26)

Texas Republicans have proposed changes to the state’s strict abortion ban they say would make clear that doctors can terminate pregnancies for serious medical risks without having to wait until a patient’s condition becomes life-threatening. The legislation comes in response to a ProPublica investigation last fall that revealed how three Texas women died after they did not receive critical procedures during miscarriages. (Surana and Jaramillo, 3/27)

Gov. Glenn Youngkin has signed Senate Bill 1352 and House Bill 1635, which build on a 2021 law that allowed some midwives to establish private practices after completing 1,000 training hours under agreements with other physicians. The new bills will extend that opportunity to other types of midwives. Youngkin also signed House Bill 1904, which will allow midwives and nurse practitioners to be on 24-hour on-call duty rosters. But for the second year in a row, he is seeking an amendment on the unconscious bias training bill. Senate Bill 740 and House Bill 1649 would require workers to complete unconscious bias and cultural competency training to renew medical licenses. (Woods, 3/27)

A House budget panel is recommending that lawmakers eliminate funding for a family planning program for low-income Granite Staters. That funding allows certain health centers to provide contraception, STI testing and other reproductive and sexual health care at no cost. (Cuno-Booth, 3/26)

A 66-year-old woman in Germany gave birth to her 10th child on March 19. Alexandra Hildebrandt, the mother, tells TODAY.com that she did not use fertility drugs, and had no difficulty conceiving. The baby, a boy named Philipp, was delivered through a cesarean section at Charité Hospital in Berlin. Hildebrandt says he weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, and was “healthy.” (Abrahamson, 3/27)

At first glance, you might think that sugar substitutes are a more calorie-conscious way to sweeten your coffee without the extra calories. Most packets clearly state they are a zero-calorie sweetener—but just because it’s not adding any calories to your daily calorie intake doesn’t mean it’s not causing weight gain in more indirect ways. A new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Metabolism found that consuming sucralose, a common artificial sweetener, stimulates the brain to send out signals involved in feelings of hunger. Research also found evidence of sucralose interfering with communication between different brain areas, including those involved in motivation. Splenda is one of the most common sucralose-based sugar substitutes. (Solis-Moreira, 3/26)

Chinese researchers are reporting new steps in the quest for animal-to-human organ transplants – with a successful pig kidney transplant and a hint Wednesday that pig livers might eventually be useful, too. A Chinese patient is the third person in world known to be living with a gene-edited pig kidney. And the same research team also reported an experiment implanting a pig liver into a brain-dead person. (Neergaard, 3/26)

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first medicine to treat people with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic disease that causes an insatiable desire to eat. The drug, a once-daily pill called Vykat XR, was developed by Soleno Therapeutics. (Feuerstein, 3/26)

Ticks, once latched onto a fleshy target with their barbed, needle-like mouths, are ready for almost anything. They glue themselves to the skin using a complex, cement-like substance. And then, like a “little pharmacological company,” they dole out proteins to keep the blood flowing, make it relatively painless, and hamper any immune response that might reveal their parasitic presence, Yale University researcher Erol Fikrig says. (Cueto, 3/26)

The NCAA basketball tournament is not only exciting, it's loud! The roar of the crowd and the buzzing of the buzzer as time expires can reach the same volume levels as a jackhammer! Those noises can also be too much for little ears, according to Dr. Emily Boss, director of children's ear, nose and throat surgery at Johns Hopkins University. (Gordemer, 3/27)

UK and US researchers determine that, in patients at high risk for severe COVID-19, the benefits of early treatment with the monoclonal antibody sotrovimab may extend beyond the acute phase of COVID-19 and contribute to the prevention of long-COVID symptoms. The findings are published in the journal Infection. (Soucheray, 3/25)

Notably, the authors found that people who later had persistent COVID-19 symptoms following acute infections—or long COVID—had higher resting heart rates (RHRs; mean difference, 2.37 beats per minute) and lower daily step counts (mean, 3,030 fewer steps), at least 3 weeks prior to SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to negative controls. (Soucheray, 3/21)

Scientists used advanced data analysis and machine learning to identify the viral proteins that may trigger autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. (University of Utah Health, 3/26)

Researchers have discovered that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have a persistent effect on the innate immune system. These mechanisms may help the human body to better protect itself against potential future infections. (University of Cologne, 3/26)

A large study to gauge how susceptible US dairy and beef cattle are to influenza A viruses found that they are susceptible to human seasonal flu strains as well as swine influenza viruses, researchers based at the University of Missouri reported yesterday in mSphere. Yesterday marked 1 year since H5N1 avian flu was first confirmed in dairy cattle, which occurred in a herd from Texas. (Schnirring, 3/26)

Obesity was tied with 16 common health concerns in a longitudinal cohort study, with the magnitude of risk correlating with the level of obesity. (Monaco, 3/26)

President Trump has made his hostility toward transgender people abundantly clear. On the first day of his second term, he issued a sweeping executive order against “gender ideology” that led federal employees to erase public health data from websites and remove pronouns from email signatures, among other actions. (Jesse Singal, 3/27)

Friday was my last day leading communications at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I left my job because I believe public health policy must always be guided by facts and not fantasy. (Kevin Griffis, 3/25)

As all providers know, one of our principal partners is often our biggest nemesis: the insurance companies that pay our bills. The relationships with payers vary from one company to another, and there are many examples of productive relationships. Overall, however, they are too often marked by tension, combativeness, misaligned incentives and diminishing trust. (Michael Dowling, 3/25)

There is a “last mile” problem in health care. The United States spends billions of dollars on basic science research, drug development, and clinical trials, but after that, it leaves it up to the health care system to make sure that effective treatments get in the hands of patients who need them. (Jeffrey L. Schnipper, 3/25)

Thirty-five years ago, the state of Connecticut initiated a controversial program of needle and syringe exchange to improve the health and ultimately save the lives of people whose wellbeing had previously been ignored. At that time, Connecticut was experiencing one of the worse HIV/AIDS epidemics in the country. (Robert Heimer, 3/27)

In last year’s November general election, Missouri residents went to the polls and voted for Proposition A, a referendum that increased the state minimum wage to $15 per hour and imposed new requirements for businesses to provide paid sick leave for their employees. With 57% of the vote, Missourians approved the measure, parts of which go into effect on May 1. (Jon Patterson, 3/25)