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The Trump administration responded quickly to Harvard University's defiance on Monday, freezing more than $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts after the university rejected demands that it change hiring, admissions and other policies. Earlier in the day, Alan Garber, Harvard's president, said in a letter to faculty and students that the university would not submit to a list of demands made last Friday. Among them are that it eliminate DEI programs, screen international students who are "supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism" and ensure "viewpoint diversity" in its hiring. At stake, the government said, was some $9 billion in federal funding. (Mehta, 4/14)

Across Boston, researchers waited wearily for blowback from the administration. It wasn’t just Harvard University. Although protests have almost exclusively occurred on undergraduate campuses, the Administration’s cuts to funding have hit medical schools and their associated hospitals, which get substantial grants that NIH and other federal agencies dole out. (Mast, 4/15)

As they battle the Trump administration in court over its plan to slash the amount of overhead and other “indirect costs” paid to recipients of National Institutes of Health research grants, universities have begun discussing alternative funding ideas in hopes of finding an approach that might be acceptable to all sides. (Oza, 4/15)

As the Trump administration threatens to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard University and its affiliates, more than 220 physicians and other workers at Mass General Brigham have called on leaders of the health system to reject a litany of demands by the government. In a signed letter sent to top executives on Monday, employees of the Harvard-affiliated system said MGB and other teaching hospitals in the country should band together and stand up for diversity, evidence-based medicine, and preservation of constitutional rights. (Saltzman, 4/14)

The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. (Siegel, Natanson and Meckler, 4/15)

Kay Ochi’s parents were 21 and 22 years old when they were forced to leave San Diego, where they were born, and taken to an incarceration camp in the desert of Poston, Arizona, simply because of their Japanese heritage. “That was three years of pure hell,” said Ochi, a third-generation Japanese American, or Sansei, who is president of the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego. (Taketa, 4/13)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Deportation Fears Add To Mental Health Problems Confronting Colorado Resort Town Workers

When Adolfo Román García-Ramírez walks home in the evening from his shift at a grocery store in this central Colorado mountain town, sometimes he thinks back on his childhood in Nicaragua. Adults, he recollects, would scare the kids with tales of the “Mona Bruja,” or “Monkey Witch.” Step too far into the dark, they told him, and you might just get snatched up by the giant monstrous monkey who lives in the shadows. Now, when García-Ramírez looks over his shoulder, it’s not monster monkeys he is afraid of. It’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (Skowlund, 4/15)

The Trump administration disclosed it formally opened an investigation into the extent to which the importation of certain pharmaceuticals may threaten national security, a move that is a widely anticipated prelude to imposing tariffs on a potentially large number of medicines. (Silverman, 4/14)

Despite the Trump administration's recent 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, hospitals and health systems remain concerned about the ongoing impact of tariffs on medical devices. Industry organizations including the American Hospital Association continue to push for tariff exemptions for medical devices, but to date, no action has been taken by the administration. (Dubinsky, 4/14)

In March, the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca — which is working on opening a research and development center in Cambridge in 2026 — announced it would spend $2.5 billion to build a global R&D center in Beijing. The company’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, noted the center reflects “the extensive opportunities that exist for collaboration and access to talent, and our continued commitment to China.” (Miller, 4/14)

During an on-camera interview with CBS News last week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Matthew Memoli, MD — currently the principal deputy director at NIH — will be the next director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Memoli, "the top flu researcher at NIH, is going to be running NIAID," Kennedy said in response to a question from Jon LaPook, MD, CBS News chief medical correspondent, about who is making decisions about NIH research. (Fiore, 4/14)

The Food and Drug Administration earlier this month fired dozens of staffers responsible for going after retailers who illegally sell tobacco to minors. Now it’s begging them to come back. Senior FDA officials asked laid-off employees in recent days to temporarily return after mass cuts decimated the agency’s ability to penalize retailers that sell cigarettes and vapes to minors, four federal health officials familiar with the matter said. (Cancryn and Gardner, 4/14)

In interviews, three former health communications specialists whose positions were terminated said they’re concerned about the impact on the agency. Their jobs were to get the message out about key health issues, be it by sharing information about contaminated medicines, informing the public on drug shortages and spreading the word about fraudulent health products. (DeGroot, 4/14)

A group of more than 40 organizations is urging Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reinstate staff who were purged at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. (DeGroot, 4/14)

The Federal Trade Commission wants the public to suggest regulations to revoke as part of President Donald Trump's far-reaching deregulation agenda. The FTC issued a formal request for information seeking suggestions for federal rules deemed 'anticompetitive' as a follow up to an executive order Trump signed last Wednesday. Submissions are due May 27. (Kacik, 4/14)

For the first time since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, vaccine advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are meeting publicly to discuss the nation's vaccine policies. A meeting of the CDC's advisory committee on immunization practices was initially scheduled for February but was postponed, raising concerns among some scientists and those working in public health about political interference in vaccine policy. The two-day meeting starts Tuesday morning. (Huang, 4/15)

Seven U.S. service members exhibited “COVID-19-like symptoms” during or after their return from the 2019 World Military Games in Wuhan, China, according to a Pentagon report recently made public. The report indicates the service members had symptoms between Oct. 18, 2019, and Jan. 21, 2020. The symptoms all resolved within six days, according to the report, which is dated December 2022. (Fortinsky, 4/14)

Five years after the pandemic’s start, millions of Americans are still struggling with long-lasting symptoms of Covid-19. Cognitive difficulties are among the most troubling and common symptoms in people both old and young. These ailments can be severe enough to leave former professionals like Ken Todd unable to work and even diagnosed with a form of mild cognitive impairment. (Reddy, 4/14)

New studies on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in both adults and young children show that infections are linked to a higher risk of death in adults, and children born prematurely or with pulmonary or neurologic conditions are at greater risk of severe RSV infections. In research presented this week during the annual Congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases meeting in Vienna (ESCMID Global 2025), researchers presented new data showing that adults with RSV acute respiratory infections face a 2.7-fold higher risk of death within 1 year of infection. (Soucheray, 4/14)

Over the last few days the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has reported four more H5N1 avian flu detections in dairy cattle, two from California and two from Idaho, lifting the national total to 1,009 from 17 states since March 2024. Also, APHIS has confirmed more H5N1 detections in poultry flocks from two states. (Schnirring, 4/14)

When President Trump recently griped about Europe's distaste for buying American chicken, his comments touched on a long-running and divisive trade spat that's flared up from time to time. Europeans disparage U.S. poultry as "chlorinated chicken," or "Chlorhünchen" in the German press, and see it as possibly unsafe. The phrase refers to the use of chlorine in poultry processing plants after the birds have been slaughtered in order to cut down on harmful bacteria that are frequent sources of food-borne illness like Salmonella and Campylobacter. (Stone, 4/15)

On four separate occasions, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has suggested that the measles outbreak in Texas, which is now over 500 cases, is beginning to subside and grow more slowly. But a review of state data indicates there’s no decline yet in the pace of cases. (McDonald, 4/14)

The City of El Paso confirmed three new cases of measles in an update given on Monday afternoon, April 14, bringing the total to eight in the El Paso region. The newly confirmed cases involve an unvaccinated female infant, a vaccinated male teenager, and a woman in her 30s with unknown vaccination status. (Burge, 4/14)

After seeing the latest case of measles in Colorado, an infection prevention manager with Common Spirit, Aaron Parmet, said things are changing in the fight against the extremely contagious disease. The reported cases have been similar in the sense that in the first two, the patients had recently visited Mexico, but in the third case out of Pagosa Springs, the patient had no obvious travel history where an exposure to the virus could be found. That unknown has Parmet concerned. (Wilson, 4/14)

DaVita Inc. said it has been impacted by ransomware that had locked down parts of its network. The company, which specializes in providing kidney dialysis to patients at more than 700 hospitals in the US, said in a statement Monday to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the incident was impacting some of its operations. (Gallagher, 4/14)

Two women have filed a class-action lawsuit against Oracle Health, accusing the company of failing to protect sensitive patient information during a recent cyberattack that allegedly compromised data from several U.S. hospitals. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri on April 11, alleges that hackers accessed Oracle’s legacy Cerner servers — which had not yet been migrated to Oracle Cloud — using stolen customer credentials. The breach, which Oracle discovered around Feb. 20, exposed names, Social Security numbers, clinical testing results and other protected health information, according to the filing obtained by Becker’s. (Diaz, 4/14)

Approximately 93 million computed tomography examinations, or CT scans, are performed on 62 million patients annually in the United States — but the radiation from that process can raise the risk of future cancers. Now a new study is projecting just how many cases of cancer could be linked to CT scans. In the study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday, researchers estimate that over the lifetime of those millions of patients, about 103,000 radiation-induced cancers are projected to result from CT exams done in 2023. (Moniuszko, 4/14)

Dozens of state attorneys general are urging Congress to pass a law prohibiting pharmacy benefit managers from simultaneously owning pharmacies, arguing such a move would boost competition and create more affordable prescription drug prices for Americans. (Silverman, 4/14)

Pfizer is stopping development of its experimental oral GLP-1 drug for obesity, the company announced Monday, after a patient in a trial suffered a liver injury potentially caused by the drug. The patient did not experience any symptoms, and the injury resolved after discontinuation of the drug, Pfizer said in a statement. After reviewing all clinical data for the medicine and consulting with regulators, Pfizer said it decided to halt research on it. The case occurred in a dose optimization trial, aimed at finding the highest tolerable dose in a short amount of time. (Weixel, 4/14)

A pill developed by GSK was found to be safe and effective in treating gonorrhea in a late-stage clinical trial, according to a study published Monday in The Lancet. If approved, it would become the first new class of antibiotic for the sexually transmitted infection in more than two decades. The pill, called gepotidacin, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in March to treat uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women and girls 12 and up — the most common type of infection in women. The drug is sold under the name Blujepa. (Lovelace Jr., 4/14)

A study presented late last week at the annual congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) shows that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was linked to the deaths of 3 million children in 2022. Nearly half of the deaths from AMR-related complications were in children in Southeast Asia and Africa, and many were linked to the use of antibiotics that aren't intended for first-line treatment, according to researchers from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the University of Melbourne. (Dall, 4/14)

A man was arrested near UnitedHealthcare’s headquarters in Minnesota after threatening violence, months after the company’s CEO was killed, authorities said Monday. The man was spotted around 11 a.m. in a parking lot outside of the UnitedHealthcare corporate campus in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka. City spokesman Andy Wittenborg said the man contacted the FBI’s field office in Minneapolis once he arrived, and an FBI negotiator made contact with him by phone. (Karnowski, 4/15)

Health systems are spending millions of dollars ramping up security measures at their facilities to protect patients and staff. Many systems are hiring more officers, implementing weapons detection screenings and updating communication protocols. Executives said these efforts are a response to an uptick in workplace violence over the past several years, ranging from assaults on staff members to sexually aggressive comments and shootings. (Hudson, 4/14)

The Department of Justice will head to mediation with UnitedHealth Group and Amedisys April 18 as part of an ongoing antitrust lawsuit. Both companies are attempting to finalize a $3.3 billion merger, which was challenged under the Biden administration Nov. 12 for allegedly threatening competition in the home health and hospice industry. Now, mediation will occur Aug. 18, as signed by Magistrate Judge Susan Gauvey on April 10. (Minemyer and Tong, 4/14)

A growing number of hospitals are working to bolster providers’ legal fight to increase Medicare reimbursement for treating low-income patients. Nearly 150 hospitals filed three lawsuits last week alleging the Health and Human Services Department's Provider Reimbursement Review Board wrongfully denied appeals to boost Medicare disproportionate share hospital payments, which are meant to support providers that treat many low-income patients. (Kacik, 4/14)

Amid a potential shutdown, the CEO of the Crozer Health system in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, is stepping down. In an email to employees on Monday, Crozer CEO Tony Esposito announced that he will step down on Friday after five and a half years as the CEO. "It has been an honor to serve alongside this talented team, and I want to thank each of you for the dedication that you bring to caring for our patients and the Delaware County community day in and day out," Esposito wrote in the email in part. (Holden and Ignudo, 4/14)

Around 250 doctors at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) have been certified as the first unionized resident and fellow physicians in Minnesota, according to union officials. The physicians are represented by the Committee of Interns and Residents, a local of the Service Employees International Union (CIR/SEIU), who said the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services made the certification on April 3. (Lentz, 4/14)

Average physician pay rose 3.6% between 2023 and 2024, from $363,000 to $376,000—about in line with recent years but well behind increases from before the pandemic. That’s according to Medscape’s latest physician compensation report, which also highlighted particularly narrow increases in year-over-year compensation for primary care docs (1.4%, from $277,000 to $281,000) and specialists (1%, from $394,000 to $398,000). (Muoio, 4/14)

Last April, Rory McCarthy and her mother walked into their state representative’s monthly office hours and asked if there was a private room where they could talk. Over the next hour, McCarthy, 31, relayed a startling story about her former rheumatologist, Dr. Derrick Todd. McCarthy told her representative, Marblehead Democrat Jennifer Armini, about the early morning appointment he scheduled for her at an unusually quiet time at the hospital, the long and disturbing pelvic exam, and how she just froze during it and didn’t know what to do. All three women ended up in tears. (Kowalczyk, 4/15)

At least 10% of patient safety events stem from poor communication among healthcare workers, patients and caregivers, according to a meta-analysis published April 14 in Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers at the University of Leicester reviewed 46 studies examining whether communication failures contributed to safety events — including adverse events, near misses, medical errors and medication errors. The studies involved data from 67,639 patients across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. (Twenter, 4/14)

Fewer people crossed state lines to obtain abortions in 2024 than a year earlier, a new survey has found. The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, estimates in a report released Tuesday that the overall number of clinician-provided abortions in states where it’s legal rose by less than 1% from 2023 to 2024. But the number of people crossing state lines for abortions dropped by about 9%. (Mulvihill, 4/15)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Monday to close a $2.8 billion budget gap in the state’s Medicaid services and ensure coverage through June for 15 million people, including immigrants, who receive health care via the program. The legislation is part of the state’s solution to solve the $6.2 billion hole in the state’s Medicaid budget. It comes a year after California launched an ambitious coverage expansion to provide free health care to all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status. (Nguyễn, 4/14)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: States Push Medicaid Work Rules, But Few Programs Help Enrollees Find Jobs

For many years, Eric Wunderlin’s health issues made it hard to find stable employment. This article is part of �鶹Ů��’s Medicaid Watch, featuring policy research, polling, and news about the Medicaid financing debate and related issues. Struggling to manage depression and diabetes, Wunderlin worked part-time, minimum-wage retail jobs around Dayton, Ohio, making so little he said he sometimes had to choose between paying rent and buying food. But in 2018, his CareSource Medicaid health plan offered him help getting a job. (Whitehead, Galewitz and Houghton, 4/15)

A progressive Democratic lawmaker is seeking a simple but jarring remedy of last resort for California’s college students navigating the state’s housing crisis: Let them sleep in their cars. While roughly half a dozen state legislative proposals this year seek to fund student or faculty housing or loosen building regulations, the benefits would come far too late for current students struggling to stay afloat. With one in four California community college students experiencing homelessness in the past year, Democrats — who have a supermajority in the statehouse — face increasing pressure to deliver on affordability issues. (He, 4/13)

General education teachers are more likely than ever to be working with students who have special needs. And yet, according to NPR reporting, the 10 largest universities in the country have a patchwork of special education requirements for future teachers. When it comes to elementary teacher prep programs, which are designed to prepare students to earn state teaching certifications, six of those institutions require education students to take just one dedicated course in special education. The remaining four require more than one course. (Wallis, 4/15)

As fundamental questions of gender and sexuality dominate Republican priorities at the state and federal level, the Texas Legislature is considering a record number of anti-trans bills this session. (Klibanoff, 4/14)

After two officers he had worked with during a 20-year stint in the U.S. Marine Corps took their own lives, Dustin Schellenger researched what mental health resources were available to his friends, both of whom were local first responders when they died. (Salhotra, 4/14)

In the U.S., thousands of donated organs never reach the patients who need them. CBS News found that last year, one in three kidneys recovered from deceased donors were never transplanted. Specialized organ recovery teams made more than 26 million attempts to place these kidneys with transplant centers, offering them again and again in search of a suitable match--before they were ultimately discarded as medical waste. And it's not just kidneys. Nearly 12,000 potentially life-saving organs were discarded last year in the United States. (Moniuszko, 4/14)

Several factors may decrease a child's chances of receiving a living-donor kidney transplant, a mixed-methods study found. ... Being a race other than white, preference for speaking a language other than English at home, needing an interpreter at appointments, and child welfare involvement all trended toward a lower chance of children receiving a living kidney donor, Stephanie Kerkvliet, MD, of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), said at the National Kidney Foundation's Spring Clinical Meeting. (Monaco, 4/14)

On the last day of March, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began an operation that they hoped might lead to a permanent change in how kidneys are transplanted in people. That morning’s patient was not a person. It was a pig, lying anesthetized on a table. The pig was missing one kidney and needed an implant. ... Never before had anyone transplanted a frozen organ into a large animal. There was so much that could go wrong. (Kolata)

Middle-aged and older adults who sought hospital or emergency room care because of cannabis use were almost twice as likely to develop dementia over the next five years, compared with similar people in the general population, a large Canadian study reported on Monday. When compared with adults who sought care for other reasons, the risk of developing dementia was still 23 percent higher among users of cannabis, the study also found. (Caryn Rabin, 4/14)

Older adults who frequently use digital technology may experience slower rates of cognitive decline, according to a sweeping new analysis that challenges long-standing concerns about so-called "digital dementia." The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, reviewed 57 studies involving more than 411,000 adults across the globe, with an average participant age of nearly 69. (Notarantonio, 4/14)

There is an ongoing race to build artificial intelligence to rival or exceed the human capacity for seeing, thinking, and feeling. While I share the accuracy, ethical, and safety worries that critics raise about the adoption of unregulated AI tools in medicine, as a patient I am also concerned about the erosion of the humane, therapeutic experiences of medicine with the intrusion of these tools on the patient-physician relationship. (Aliaa Barakat, 4/15)

As a pediatrician and a scientist-in-training, I conduct research on a critical question in my community: Where are families facing the greatest risks of housing and food insecurity? This work is fundamental to improving children’s lives. Yet recently, the National Institutes of Health abruptly terminated my funding. (Logan Beyer, 4/15)

At a certain age, the parts of a single body that have lived in harmony for years start to separate and insist on their own specialists. One PCP is not enough anymore. (Elissa Ely, 4/14)

Family caregivers need us to show up for them through structural investment in formal elder care, especially day programs for people with Alzheimer's and dementia. There are 7 million Americans who have Alzheimer's and about twice that many family caregivers. The lifetime risk for Alzheimer's at age 45 is 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 10 for men. (Courtney E. Martin, 4/14)

The Texas Senate has already passed a bill to allow Texas to prohibit the purchase of sugary beverages and unhealthful snacks like candy and potato chips using food stamps. Lawmakers are reacting to the reality that food stamps have become a major cause of our state’s and our country’s health crisis. (Victoria Eardley, 4/14)