US plans to cut billions in healthcare funding present an 'opportunity' for UAE, says CEO
'Whatever is not being done in the US, we will do it here in Abu Dhabi,' Hasan Jasem al-Nowais told Al Arabiya's Hadley Gamble on Wednesday at the Abu Dhabi Global Health Week.
The message comes as the Trump administration looks to enact sweeping reforms of US government-backed health agencies. Moves that have already caused concern amongst global health experts who fear downsizing could impact the fight against disease and the prevention of future pandemics.
According to reports, $40 billion, or one-third of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) discretionary budget, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding would be cut by $20 billion in 2026, a 40 percent reduction overall, with 27 current divisions absorbed into 8, and 4 eliminated completely.
But even while acknowledging the cuts, the CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic, USA, pushed back on claims that the President is defunding the NIH.
'It's not defunding the NIH,' Dr. Tom Mihaljevic told Gamble. '[Right now], for every dollar used for research areas, there's 60 percent of overhead. And this has been in place for such a long time that nobody ever questioned it.' he said.
Speaking alongside al-Nowais in Abu Dhabi, Mihaljevic sought to downplay the real world impact the administration's proposals might have, framing the move as an attempt by the White House to cut out wasteful spending.
'I think there is a reasonable case to be made about how… we allocate the research dollars, and can we use them more efficiently. Do we really need to use 60 percent overhead for every dollar that is issued? I think that's a legitimate question.'
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Arab News
3 days ago
- Arab News
Pakistan reports two new polio cases, taking 2025 tally to 21
PESHAWAR: Pakistan's National Institute of Health (NIH) reported two new cases of the poliovirus on Monday, taking the total number of cases of the disease reported this year to 25 as Islamabad struggles to stem its spread of the infection. Polio is a highly infectious and incurable disease that can cause lifelong paralysis. Experts say the only effective protection is through repeated doses of the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) for every child under the age of five, alongside timely completion of all routine immunizations. The two new cases were reported from Pakistan's southern Sindh province, in a 21-month-old girl from Badin district, and in a 72-month-old girl from district Kohistan in northwestern Pakistan. 'With these detections, the total number of polio cases in Pakistan in 2025 has reached 21–including 13 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, six from Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan,' Pakistan's polio program said in a statement. The program said continued detection of polio cases shows that children remain at risk in areas with low vaccine acceptance. It said a Sub-National Polio Vaccination Campaign will take place from Sept. 1-7, targeting more than 28 million children under the age of five, in 99 districts across all provinces and regions. He said the campaign in southern KP will be conducted from Sept. 15, adding that the goal was to ensure every child in these districts receives the vaccine to protect them from polio. 'Parents and caregivers are strongly urged to ensure their children receive the polio vaccine during this and every campaign,' the statement said. Over the past year, the polio program has conducted six high-quality vaccination campaigns, four of them nationwide, each reaching over 45 million children. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where polio remains endemic. Islamabad made significant progress in curbing the virus, with annual cases dropping from around 20,000 in the early 1990s to just eight in 2018. Pakistan reported six cases in 2023 and only one in 2021 but the country saw an intense resurgence of the poliovirus in 2024, with 74 cases reported. Efforts to eradicate the virus have been repeatedly undermined by vaccine misinformation and resistance from some religious hard-liners, who claim immunization is a foreign plot to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western espionage. Militant groups have frequently targeted polio vaccination teams and the security personnel assigned to protect them, particularly in KP and Balochistan.
Arab News
07-08-2025
- Arab News
Harvard scientists say research could be set back years after funding freeze
CAMBRIDGE: Harvard University professor Alberto Ascherio's research is literally frozen. Collected from millions of US soldiers over two decades using millions of dollars from taxpayers, the epidemiology and nutrition scientist has blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The samples are key to his award-winning research, which seeks a cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. But for months, Ascherio has been unable to work with the samples because he lost $7 million in federal research funding, a casualty of Harvard's fight with the Trump administration. 'It's like we have been creating a state-of-the-art telescope to explore the universe, and now we don't have money to launch it,' said Ascherio. 'We built everything and now we are ready to use it to make a new discovery that could impact millions of people in the world and then, 'Poof. You're being cut off.'' Researchers laid off and science shelved The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world's most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer. And despite Harvard's lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume. The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country's top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country's oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force. The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment. Research jeopardized, even if court case prevails Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to 'surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.' 'Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus,' the university said in its legal complaint. 'But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.' The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons. The funding cuts have left Harvard's research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find nongovernment funding to replace lost money. In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of 'difficult decisions and sacrifices' ahead. Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers' salaries until next June. But he's still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year's delay can put his research back five years, he said. Knowledge lost in funding freeze 'It's really devastating,' agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia. At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists. 'Just thinking about all the knowledge that's not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost,' Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. 'It's all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day.' John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts. In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were canceled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said. 'I'm in a position where I have to really think about, 'Can I revive this research?'' he said. 'Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?' The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university's fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary. Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she's happy to see the culling of what she called 'politically motivated social science studies.' White House pressure a good thing? Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have 'really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.' But Madras, who served on the President's Commission on Opioids during Trump's first term, said holding scientists' research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn't make sense. 'I don't know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard,' she said. 'But sacrificing science is problematic, and it's very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.' Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country's reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector. 'We're all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,' Quackenbush said. 'We're going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.'
Al Arabiya
30-07-2025
- Al Arabiya
California governor signs executive order to support boys and men and improve their mental health
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday aimed at supporting men and boys and improving their mental health outcomes in an effort to lower suicide rates among young men and help them feel less isolated. The order directs the state Health and Human Services Agency to recommend ways to address suicide rates among young men and help them seek services to improve their mental health and well-being. It also requires the state to connect them with education and career opportunities. 'Too many young men and boys are suffering in silence–disconnected from community opportunity and even their own families,' Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. 'This action is about turning that around. It's about showing every young man that he matters and there's a path for him of purpose, dignity, work, and real connection.' The issue has come increasingly into focus for Democrats since last year's election when the party lost young men to President Donald Trump, who framed much of his campaign as a pitch to men who felt scorned by the country's economy, culture, and political system. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, while Democrat Joe Biden had won a similar share of that group four years earlier. Newsom, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, has talked about the need to support men and boys on his podcast. The majority of his guests, which have included MAGA figures, Democratic politicians, and book authors, have been men. He released an episode Wednesday with Richard Reeves, the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a group that researches issues affecting the well-being of men, to discuss what can be done to better meet their needs. Newsom said at the beginning of the episode that it's an important issue to address beyond just discussing it as a political hurdle for Democrats. 'If you tune into the podcast, you may have noticed a theme–a theme that continues to emerge around men and boys,' Newsom said. 'What is going on with our men and boys? Increasingly isolated, increasingly feeling disengaged, disconnected, depressed.' Newsom's order requires the state to try to get more men and boys to serve their communities through volunteer programs and support pathways to help more male students become teachers and school counselors. State agencies must also recommend ways to get more young men to participate in state career education and training programs as well as an initiative to help improve student outcomes. Officials must provide an update within two months. Men make up half the population but account for 80 percent of suicides in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The US suicide mortality rate–defined as deaths per 100,000 people–for men and boys in 2023 was 22.7, about four times higher than that of women and girls, according to the CDC. California had one of the lowest suicide rates in the country in 2023 per the CDC. The suicide mortality rate was about 10.2 compared with a rate of 14.1 in the US overall.
