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UPI
8 hours ago
- UPI
CDC director: Misinformation 'lead to deadly consequence" in Atlanta
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta was attacked by a gunman on Friday. File Photo by Erike S. Lesser/EPA Aug. 13 (UPI) -- The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told employees about the dangers of misinformation, four days after a suspected gunman shot at the agency's headquarters in Atlanta, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine made him sick. On Tuesday, Susan Monarez met with staffers virtually and then sent a note to all 10,000 employees nationwide, obtained by ABC News. Staffers at the headquarters have been working remotely since the attack on Friday. "The dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led to deadly consequences," she wrote. "I will work to restore trust in public health to those who have lost it -- through science, evidence and clarity of purpose. I will need your help." The comments were slightly different than those during her staff meeting in which she said: "Public health should never be under attack. We know that misinformation can be dangerous." She said the health agency can rebuild trust with "rational evidence-based discourse" with "compassion and understanding." Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, told NBC News: "The irony is her boss is the biggest spreader of misinformation." Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is secretary of the Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC. In 2021, during the pandemic, Kennedy described the shot as the "deadliest vaccine ever made" after he filed a citizens' petition requesting that the Food and Drug Administration end emergency authorization. Last week, Kennedy announced that HHS was moving to terminate $500 million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology, which was used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020. "After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH [National Institutes of Health] and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses," The American Medical Association backs mRNA vaccine research and the CDC still says on its website: "During the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 vaccines underwent the most intensive safety analysis in U.S. history." Health officials have denounced skepticism of the research, noting the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives in the United States. "The Covid pandemic showed us what's possible when science moves fast," Rick Bright, who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development from 2016 to 2020, told NBC News. "Dismantling that momentum now is like disbanding the fire department because the fire's out." As head of the HHS, he has updated COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for the fall to be restricted to older adults and those with underlying health conditions. He also doesn't want children to get the shots. On Monday, Kennedy toured the CDC campus in Atlanta and met with the widow of the one person slain in the attack, DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose. He toured with Monarez and HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill. "He offered his deepest condolences and reaffirmed the agency's commitment to honoring officer Rose's bravery, sacrifice and service to the nation," HHS said. Today I traveled to Atlanta in the wake of the heartbreaking shooting at the CDC's Roybal Campus that took the life of DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose. @POTUS and the entire administration are deeply saddened by this tragic loss. We stand with Officer Rose's wife, his two... Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 11, 2025 Since the attack, the union representing CDC workers condemned the lack of support from top officials. "This leadership is critical in reinforcing public trust and ensuring that accurate, science-based information prevails," the union said Sunday. "This condemnation is necessary to help prevent violence against scientists that may be incited by such disinformation." The American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents more than 2,000 CDC workers, said in a statement Sunday that the attack "was not random and it compounds months of mistreatment, neglect and vilification that CDC staff have endured." The union also said: "The deliberate targeting of CDC through this violent act is deeply disturbing, completely unacceptable and an attack on every public servant." The father of the suspected gunman, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White, reportedly told authorities he targeted the CDC over health problems he blamed on the COVID-19 vaccine. He said the shot made him depressed and suicidal. He was fatally shot by police after around 200 bullets struck the six buildings. Five firearms were recovered. "All indications are that this was an isolated event involving one individual," Jeff Williams, the deputy secretary of the CDC's Office of Safety, Security and Asset Management, said during the staff meeting Tuesday.
NBC News
18 hours ago
- NBC News
Mother with cerebral palsy struggles to hire aides after private equity takeover
Renee Christian, a single mom with cerebral palsy, lives in Buffalo, New York, with her 12-year-old daughter. Although her condition forced her to spend most of her childhood at a nursing home, she has resided in her own home for years with the help of personal assistants she hires under a New York State Medicaid program. In April, however, Christian's life was upended when the state forced her and her assistants to work with a new company administering the nation's largest consumer-directed personal assistance program, called CDPAP. One by one, she lost nearly half her assistants because they said they did not receive the proper pay for their work, Christian said. She now fears for her future living at home where she needs help getting dressed, doing laundry and cooking meals. 'I'm trying to hire new staff, and I am very good at navigating technology,' Christian, 37, said. 'But it's hard when you have to tell your new hires, 'I can't guarantee you're going to get paid on time or get the appropriate amount of hours.'' Christian is not the only one affected by the state program's recent takeover. NBC News spoke with nineconsumers and personal assistants who described multiple problems since Public Partnerships LLC (PPL) won the $1 billion, five-year contract in 2024, replacing roughly 600 entities that had been administering the program. The issues range from assistants receiving checks for zero dollars to problems arranging for direct deposit, onboarding new workers and clocking hours worked. PPL, which has a staff of 1,400 on the New York program, is owned by two private equity firms. Its takeover as the program's sole administrator triggered an avalanche of complaints from consumers unable to reach anyone to answer questions and assistants unpaid for hours they worked and unhappy with reduced health insurance benefits, according to lawmakers, consumer advocates and the consumers and assistants interviewed by NBC News. Before the transition to PPL, roughly 280,000 consumers were participating in the CDPAP program, according to the New York Department of Health. Since PPL took over, some 80,000 have left the program, the department said. 'A lot of these folks need the services being provided by the program,' Gustavo Rivera, a New York state senator who represents constituents in the Bronx, told NBC News. 'It's likely they dropped out because of difficulties making the program work or they switched to programs that are more expensive.' Rivera has scheduled hearings in August about what he calls the botched transition to PPL. At a cost of $9 billion a year, New York's CDPAP is the largest personal assistance program in the nation. It allows consumers like Christian to directly hire the folks who help them pursue their lives rather than rely on a staffing agency. At-home programs like New York's are less costly than providing institutional care, research shows. In 2024, according to one analysis, a semi-private room in a nursing home cost an average $9,277 a month nationwide. That's 43% more than a home health aide costing on average $6,483 each month. Amanda Lothrop, chief operating officer for New York State's Medicaid program, told NBC News that the transition to PPL aimed to eliminate the former program's administrative inefficiencies while protecting taxpayers. She said fraud and abuse had marred the previous program, but the state has identified very few cases. A 2022 audit by the Office of Medicaid Inspector General in New York, for example, uncovered only $46,000 in overpayments in the program, a 99% accuracy rate. In response to questions from NBC News, PPL and the New York state health department said together they had identified 30 instances of home care workers under the previous system billing consumers who were hospitalized or dead, five cases of workers billing for work with consumers who were out of the country, one worker claiming to work for two people at the same time and another who claimed to be in two places simultaneously. More than 200,000 workers are in the CDPAP program. 'In partnership with PPL,' the department of health said in a statement, it 'is using enhanced data and monitoring tools to protect program integrity, support consumers, and take timely action when issues arise.' Meg Fitzgerald, a PPL spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company's 'systems and centralized control processes would have been able to identify and prevent these violations.' The contract New York State awarded to PPL is a recent example of private equity's increasing involvement in home health care, said Aditi Sen, managing director of research and campaigns at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that advocates for fairness in the U.S. financial system. Last month, Sen published a report detailing the industry's forays into home health care entitled, 'Wall Street on Your Doorstep: Protecting Home Care from Private Equity Abuses.' 'The private equity industry is looking for any streams of steady public funding,' Sen said in an interview. 'As advocates have secured more funding for home and community-based services, that has resulted in the private equity encroachment.' She said the next step for researchers is to analyze the quality of home care after private equity gets involved. Founded in 1999, PPL calls itself an industry leader 'in financial management services for consumer direction, serving consumers throughout the U.S.' As for the difficulties in the New York program, the PPL spokeswoman said in a statement: 'The transition to a single fiscal intermediary required a significant element of education and, in some cases, a change in practices for submitting and approving time. We have been committed to providing various methods of extensive education and resources to all stakeholders. Ultimately, we strive to provide the accountability this program deserves.' Three CEOs in five years Private equity firms have taken over wide swaths of the health care industry in recent years and ill effects on care have been well-documented in independent academic research. The firms typically acquire companies or doctors' practices using debt and hope to sell them within five to seven years at a profit. This requires the firms to improve the financial results of the companies they buy, often firing employees or cutting services to slash costs. The private equity firms bought PPL three years ago. Studies on hospitals and nursing homes have found significant deterioration in patient outcomes after private equity takes them over. Other research has found that prices rise significantly after private equity acquires a practice or operation. According to Sen, private equity firms have rolled up hundreds of small home health and home care chains into large companies like Comfort Keepers, Help at Home and Accentcare. Combined, private equity-owned companies offering home and community-based care services are second only in size to chains owned by insurers Humana and UnitedHealthcare, Sen found. Many acquisitions by private equity-owned chains have been in companies offering home and community-based services for people with physical, intellectual and developmental disabilities, Sen determined. Pediatric home care for children with disabilities is another area of interest as is the consumer self-directed care industry, PPL's focus. Private equity acquisitions are not always easy to track. PPL's website does not identify its owners, but a recent court ruling disclosed the two private equity firms that control it — DW Healthcare Partners of Toronto and Park City, UT, and Linden Capital Partners of Chicago. Although both the firms' websites list other companies they have invested in, neither lists PPL as an investment. After winning the New York State contract, PPL tried to keep its ownership secret. In a lawsuit filed last year against New York's Department of Health by a home care company over the transition to PPL, the company's private equity owners were identified in a document that PPL requested the judge keep under seal. If the information were made public, the company argued, it 'may put individuals in danger and/or allow them to become targets of violence.' Public disclosure would also increase the risk of 'unwanted attention and harassment,' PPL said. The company lost that battle and the document became public. Fitzgerald, PPL's spokeswoman, declined to elaborate on the company's desire for secrecy in its ownership. Neither DW Healthcare nor Linden Capital Partners responded to emails seeking comment for this story. PPL also objected to a 2024 Medicare rule affecting home care organizations. The rule mandated that at least 80% of Medicaid payments go to compensation for direct care workers, such as personal assistants, not a company's 'administrative overhead or profit.' Fitzgerald said the company's objections were not about worker compensation. Rather, she said, the company believed the rule would 'make it more difficult for states to initiate new self-directed programs and to maintain small self-directed programs.' Participants in the CDPAP program aren't the only ones experiencing upheaval in the transition to PPL. Recently, Vince Coppola, PPL's former chief executive, and Maria Perrin, its former president, departed unexpectedly. PPL has had three CEOs over the past five years, Fitzgerald said. Filling out forms for hours Tara Murphy said she enjoyed working as a personal assistant in the CDPAP program for 25 years. But when she tried to switch to PPL, she encountered multiple difficulties, she said. 'Their technology is so hard to navigate, it took me four and a half hours to fill out their forms,' she recalled. 'I uploaded them nine times before they were finally accepted in their system.' Murphy's hourly pay with PPL was 2% less than she had previously earned, she said, and she never received the correct pay under the new program. 'I ended up having to quit my job and leave my consumer,' she said. Rivera, the New York state senator, said he hopes to gain some answers from state officials on the PPL transition at the Aug. 21 hearings in New York City he co-sponsored with state Sen. James Skoufis. 'Last year, when it was pushed upon us in the budget process I said back then that I thought it was a bad idea,' Rivera said of the switch to PPL. 'Unfortunately, what I heard from my constituents is the transition was indeed bungled.' Meanwhile, Christian, the Buffalo mom who has lost five personal assistants since PPL took over, is especially worried about how it might impact her daughter. 'My daughter is 12 years old, she needs me here for her,' Christian told NBC News. 'If I have to go into a facility because I can't get care in my home, where is she going to go?'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Our 19 Most Popular Heart-Healthy Breakfast Recipes
Reviewed by Dietitian Jessica Ball, M.S., RD Improving your heart health can be as simple as making one of these delicious breakfast recipes tomorrow morning. These dishes, beloved by EatingWell readers, all have reduced levels of saturated fat and sodium, meaning they meet our parameters for a heart-healthy meal. With ingredients like whole grains, yogurt and berries, recipes like our Blueberry-Peach Chia Seed Smoothie or Baked Banana-Nut Oatmeal Cups will keep you energized throughout the day and may help your heart at the same time! Dylan Dreyer's Orange-Mango Smoothie For Dylan Dreyer, 'Today's 3rd Hour' co-host and NBC News meteorologist, this smoothie is a staple in her household during cold and flu season. The vitamin C from the oranges helps support immune health, so she and her kids can feel their best. Plus, it tastes just like a creamsicle. If you don't have almond milk, any other dairy or nondairy milk will work. View Recipe Peach-Oatmeal Breakfast Bars Peach-oatmeal bars are the perfect way to start your day, or enjoy them as a midday snack. Made with fiber-rich oats, ripe peaches and a touch of brown sugar, these bars hold together beautifully, making them the perfect thing to grab during the dash out the door. View Recipe Blueberry-Peach Chia Seed Smoothie This fruit smoothie is a nutrient-packed drink that's perfect for your next breakfast. It blends frozen peaches and sweet frozen blueberries with a splash of almond milk and yogurt for a creamy, fruity base. Chia seeds add fiber, omega-3s and a slight thickness to the smoothie as they soak up the liquid. View Recipe Overnight Oats with Chia Seeds This easy overnight oats with chia seeds recipe is naturally sweetened with peaches, but any chopped fresh or frozen fruit works well here. Chia seeds thicken the mixture as it sits, and they offer a healthy dose of fiber and omega-3 fats. Store these oats in individual airtight containers (like Mason jars) for an easy breakfast on the go. View Recipe Fruit & Yogurt Smoothie This easy fruit smoothie recipe calls for just three ingredients: yogurt, fruit juice and frozen fruit. Mix up your fruit combinations from day to day for a healthy breakfast or snack that never gets boring. View Recipe Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Unlike quick-cooking oats, old-fashioned oatmeal has time to turn extra-creamy and luscious with just a few more minutes of cooking time. With a bit of milk and the toppings of your choice, this oatmeal recipe can be your go-to morning staple for a filling, healthy breakfast. View Recipe Homemade Plain Greek Yogurt Learning how to make Greek yogurt at home is simple with this easy recipe. Start by making homemade yogurt by heating milk, combining it with a little bit of already-cultured yogurt and letting it sit in a warm spot until the milk turns into yogurt. Making protein-rich Greek yogurt takes one step beyond regular yogurt: straining the yogurt to thicken it. You can add the leftover liquid—also known as whey—to smoothies, or you can use it in place of buttermilk in baking. View Recipe Baked Banana-Nut Oatmeal Cups Muffins meet oatmeal in these moist and tasty grab-and-go oatmeal cups. View Recipe Raspberry-Oatmeal Muffins Before reaching for a muffin at the coffee shop or bakery, consider making your own nutritious muffins at home for a week's worth of breakfasts on the go. These raspberry-oatmeal muffins are made with whole-grain oats and flour and burst with juicy, nutrient-packed raspberries. The combination of whole grains and raspberries offers plenty of fiber for staying power that will keep you feeling full for longer. View Recipe Pumpkin-Date Overnight Oats The combination of prebiotic ingredients like oats, flaxmeal and dates makes these pumpkin overnight oats a delicious and nutritious option for supporting gut health. Dates add natural sweetness, while yogurt adds tang as well as a healthy dose of probiotics to start your day off right. View Recipe Really Green Smoothie The combination of kale and avocado makes this healthy smoothie recipe extra green. Chia seeds lend a heart-healthy punch of fiber and omega-3 fatty acids. View Recipe Banana Protein Muffins These healthy banana muffins are packed with protein, thanks to ingredients like peanut butter and Greek yogurt, while white whole-wheat flour gives them a fiber boost. Serve them for breakfast or for a grab-and-go snack. View Recipe Banana Oatmeal This banana oatmeal will fuel you up for the day. Mashed bananas add sweetness, and the warm spices and maple syrup complete this quick and comforting breakfast. View Recipe No-Bake Breakfast Cookies These no-bake breakfast cookies are the sweet start your morning needs! Packed with oats, almond butter, chia seeds and dried blueberries, these cookies offer a hefty dose of fiber to keep you feeling full, as well as healthy fats and plant-based protein for lasting energy. They're easy to make and perfect for busy mornings. Just grab-and-go for a breakfast you can feel good about! View Recipe Two-Ingredient Banana Pancakes These delicious and unbelievably simple pancakes are best enjoyed right after cooking. With just eggs and a banana, you can have healthy grain-free pancakes with no added sugar. View Recipe Anti-Inflammatory Lemon-Blueberry Smoothie The kale, hemp seeds and green tea in this bright, lemony smoothie all contain antioxidants that can help fight inflammation. If you can't find baby kale, baby spinach will work well in its place. Banana adds natural sweetness. If you want the smoothie a little sweeter, a touch of honey will do the trick. View Recipe High-Protein Cinnamon-Roll Oatmeal Flavored with cinnamon, vanilla, maple syrup and a Greek-style yogurt 'frosting,' this cinnamon-roll oatmeal is a winning breakfast worth waking up for. Oats offer lots of filling fiber to help keep you full and your heart healthy. Add toasted chopped walnuts if you want a little extra crunch. View Recipe Berry–Green Tea Smoothie This berry-green tea smoothie recipe is a refreshing, nutrient-packed beverage with plenty of anti-inflammatory benefits. It combines antioxidant-rich berries, green tea and omega-3-rich chia seeds with the natural sweetness of dates, blending into a delicious, healthy drink. It's perfect for starting your day or as a post-workout recovery drink. Your favorite berry or a blend of berries will work well here. View Recipe Watermelon-Peach Smoothie This watermelon-peach smoothie is a refreshing drink that's perfect for warm days. Made with ripe watermelon and frozen peaches, this smoothie bursts with fruity flavor without the need for added sugar. Use frozen peaches from a bag or freeze your own ripe, in-season peaches for the best sweet and fruity flavor. View Recipe Read the original article on EATINGWELL
