Policy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health department has consistently touted radical transparency as being key to its mission. Recent instances—the FDA’s decision not to disclose the recipients of three Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers and FDA and CDC choices not to publish vaccine-related papers—call this intent into question.
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While requests by government officials for anonymity when speaking to the media are nothing new, the practice attracts more scrutiny when the Department for Health and Human Services has pledged a commitment to “radical transparency.”
TrumpRX and DTC sales may expand prescription drug access, but they will not solve the affordability crisis by themselves.
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President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law last week, reintroduces broader exemptions for orphan drugs from the IRA’s drug price negotiation program—a move welcomed by the biopharma industry. The new tax law also cuts Medicaid funding, posing a minimal risk to pharma’s bottomlines and potentially jeopardizing hospitals’ 340B status. It does not, however, include new rules for pharmacy benefit managers that had been in an earlier draft.
Societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, allege that Kennedy’s directive to remove COVID-19 from vaccination guidelines for healthy pregnant women and healthy children puts these vulnerable groups at risk of serious illness.
Despite rehiring hundreds of FDA, CDC and NIH employees, the Department of Health and Human Services is still a skeleton of its former self under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed the expanded use of RSV vaccines for people 50 through 59 years old who are at risk of severe disease.
An open letter signed by more than 50 industry executives blasts a “fundamentally, fatally flawed” report that urges greater restrictions on the abortion pill.
As an office of the executive branch, the Department of Health and Human Services “does not have the authority” to implement sweeping changes to the structure of the agency as created by Congress, a judge wrote.
Kennedy wants to expand the injury compensation program to include COVID-19 vaccines, while also stretching the “statute of limitations” to more than three years.
In an open letter addressing the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to HHS, the executives urged Congress to continue “robust federal funding” for scientific research, which they say will help maintain U.S. biotech leadership globally.
The revamped and “more anti-vax skewed ACIP committee” at the CDC “has a bone to pick with mRNA vaccines,” according to Truist Securities analysts. Meanwhile, the FDA moves forward on having Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna update labels for their COVID vaccines.
Susan Monarez, already acting director of the CDC, said during her confirmation hearing that she sees no causal link between vaccines and autism.