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Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
HHS ends Biden-era COVID-19 testing program that bled taxpayers years after pandemic
FIRST ON FOX: The Department of Health and Human Services announced it is shuttering a nationwide program that offered free COVID-19 tests to community organizations, citing it bled taxpayer funds despite the pandemic's end. "With COVID-19 behaving more like the seasonal flu — rising and falling through the year — and tests widely available at retail stores nationwide, continued federal distribution is a significant waste of taxpayers' dollars," HHS told Fox News Digital Tuesday. "The COVID-19 pandemic is over and HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump's mandate to address the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again." The government had spent more than $1 billion on the program since it was established in 2021 under the Biden administration, Fox News Digital learned. The program deployed government-purchased COVID-19 tests to community partners across the country to deliver tests at no cost to the patient. HHS cited that testing for COVID-19 now mimics seasonal flu cases, with retail shops across the country stocking their shelves with COVID tests, meaning "continued federal distribution is a significant waste of taxpayers' dollars." Doctors Warn Of 'Trifecta' Of Chronic Illnesses Plaguing Americans After Maha Report Americans who ordered tests through community partnership by 5 p.m. May 30 will still receive their order, according to HHS. Read On The Fox News App HHS is in the midst of purchasing one million newer tests that are able to differentiate between the COVID-19 virus versus the flu, which will be deployed if there are any shortfalls or emergencies with the COVID testing, Fox Digital learned. State or local health departments, as well as community organizations that have a stockpile of tests and various local health centers may still provide free tests to Americans as the program shutters, according to HHS. The COVID-19 pandemic, which tore across the country in 2020, officially ended years ago. Then-President Joe Biden declared the pandemic was "over" back in 2022, while the World Health Organization determined the pandemic officially ended by 2023. The announcement comes as the Trump administration's top health department re-focuses its direction to addressing the nation's spiraling chronic health issues, which come in the form of health issues such as rampant obesity, spikes in autism diagnoses and teenage depression. Rfk Jr's Highly Anticipated Maha Report Paints Dismal State Of Child Health, National Security Concerns President Donald Trump's Make America Healthy Again Commission, which is chaired by HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr, released its anticipated report assessing chronic diseases that have gripped U.S. youth in recent years May 22. The report's findings include teenage depression nearly doubling from 2009 to 2019, more than one-in-five children over the age of six being considered obese, one-in-31 children diagnosed with autism by age 8 and childhood cancer spiking by 40% since 1975. Trump And A Healthier America Welcomed By Doctors: 'New Golden Age' "Over 40% of the roughly 73 million children (aged 0-17) in the United States have at least one chronic health condition, according to the CDC, such as asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune diseases, or behavioral disorders," the report stated. "Although estimates vary depending on the conditions included, all studies show an alarming increase over time." Chronic diseases have a chilling effect on national security, commission members said in a Thursday morning phone call with the media. Roughly 75% of America's youth aged 17–24 do not qualify to serve in the military due to obesity, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases or behavioral disorders, they said. "We now have the most obese, depressed, disabled, medicated population in the history of the world, and we cannot keep going down the same road," Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary said in the phone call with the media. "So this is an amazing day. I hope this marks the grand pivot from a system that is entirely reactionary to a system that will now be proactive." The MAHA report will be followed by a policy recommendation report for the federal government later this article source: HHS ends Biden-era COVID-19 testing program that bled taxpayers years after pandemic
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
CDC drops COVID-19 shots for healthy kids, pregnant women
May 27 (UPI) -- Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed the COVID-19 vaccine from its recommended immunization list "for healthy children and healthy pregnant women." In a post to social media, Kennedy called the decision to drop the recommendation "common sense" and "good science" and said the move brings the country "one step closer to realizing [President Donald Trump's] promise to 'Make America Healthy Again.'" The post also featured Kennedy in a video, in which he stood between the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and further alleged that in 2024, "the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot" without being based on any clinical data. Makary said, "There's no evidence healthy kids need it today, and most countries have stopped recommending it for children." The CDC does not currently have an acting director, which indicates the decision to end the recommendation was made by Kennedy. The removal of the COVID-19 vaccine from the list will make it harder to obtain, as it will now not be covered by government programs like Medicaid, and insurance companies can also choose not to cover the inoculation. The previous CDC recommendation was for everyone at least six months old, pregnant women included, to receive COVID-19 vaccines annually. Makary announced May 20 that the FDA planned to restrict the list of who can receive COVID-19 shots to older children, adults and adults with underlying medical conditions, and that any new COVID-19 vaccine would undergo placebo-controlled clinical trials. Such trials would mean some people would receive the actual vaccine, but others would receive an inactive substance, allowing the results to be studied. It is unclear at what age "older children" should be to receive the vaccine or what would constitute a pregnant woman to be healthy enough to skip the vaccination, as the HHS website still lists pregnancy as "considered high risk for a severe case of flu or COVID-19."
Epoch Times
07-05-2025
- Business
- Epoch Times
Agriculture Secretary Says New Dietary Guidelines Are Coming Later This Year
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins Rollins said she is working closely with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the rewrite. She said the project is part of a broader push to 'Make America Healthy Again' while boosting domestic farmers. 'Our Secretary Kennedy and I are working on that together as we speak,' she told lawmakers. 'You'll see by the end of this year—hopefully early fall—the new set of dietary guidelines coming out from our two agencies, and I think you will be very, very pleased, it will be very simple. It will speak directly to the American family.' During more than two hours of testimony, Rollins said the existing 400‑plus‑page draft is too complex for families and too timid in supporting home‑grown food products. The new document will 'support our local farmers and producers' and ensure that milk and other 'nutrient‑dense' staples remain prominent, she said. The guidelines, updated every five years, underpin nutrition standards for school meals, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Related Stories 1/24/2025 9/8/2023 The 421‑page draft released in January by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Rollins said the Biden-era draft would not be discarded entirely but would be overhauled to fit President Donald Trump's agriculture agenda, which emphasizes farmer profit, reduced regulation, and a 'buy American' approach to federal food spending. Rollins linked the rewrite to a parallel effort to Committee members pressed Rollins on disaster assistance, staffing, and avian influenza response. She pledged that portals for a 20 billion‑dollar disaster block‑grant program will open 'by the end of this month' and said USDA's five‑point plan has driven a 56 percent drop in wholesale egg prices since February. She also said that voluntary staff departures would not close local Farm Service Agency offices and promised to 'rebuild and revivify' the department around farmer needs. While Democrats questioned the legality of freezing several Biden‑era rural‑development and nutrition programs, Rollins said that her team is realigning spending to match voter priorities. She said trimming some climate and diversity initiatives allows the USDA to focus on food safety, disease control, and trade promotion. 'When farmers prosper, rural America prospers,' she said. Rollins closed by reiterating that the forthcoming dietary guidelines will reflect the Trump administration's view that good nutrition begins with food grown at home. Sheramy Tsai contributed to this report.
Chicago Tribune
04-05-2025
- Health
- Chicago Tribune
Cuts have eliminated more than a dozen US government health-tracking programs
NEW YORK — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s motto is ' Make America Healthy Again,' but government cuts could make it harder to know if that's happening. More than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease appear to have been eliminated in the tornado of layoffs and proposed budget cuts rolled out in the Trump administration's first 100 days. The Associated Press examined draft and final budget proposals and spoke to more than a dozen current and former federal employees to determine the scope of the cuts to programs tracking basic facts about Americans' health. Among those terminated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were experts tracking abortions, pregnancies, job-related injuries, lead poisonings, sexual violence and youth smoking, the AP found. 'If you don't have staff, the program is gone,' said Patrick Breysse, who used to oversee the CDC's environmental health programs. Federal officials have not given a public accounting of specific surveillance programs that are being eliminated. Instead, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman pointed the AP to a Trump administration budget proposal released Friday. It lacked specifics, but proposes to cut the CDC's core budget by more than half and vows to focus CDC surveillance only on emerging and infectious diseases. Kennedy has said some of the CDC's other work will be moved to a yet-to-be-created agency, the Administration for a Healthy America. He also has said that the cuts are designed to get rid of waste at a department that has seen its budget grow in recent years. 'Unfortunately, this extra spending and staff has not improved our nation's health as a country,' Kennedy wrote last month in The New York Post. 'Instead, it has only created more waste, administrative bloat and duplication.' Yet some health experts say the eliminated programs are not duplicative, and erasing them will leave Americans in the dark. 'If the U.S. is interested in making itself healthier again, how is it going to know, if it cancels the programs that helps us understand these diseases?' said Graham Mooney, a Johns Hopkins University public health historian. The core of the nation's health surveillance is done by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Relying on birth and death certificates, it generates information on birth rates, death trends and life expectancy. It also operates longstanding health surveys that provide basic data on obesity, asthma and other health issues. The center has been barely touched in layoffs, and seems intact under current budget plans. But many other efforts were targeted by the cuts, the AP found. Some examples: Pregnancies and abortion The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which surveys women across the country, lost its entire staff — about 20 people. It's the most comprehensive collection of data on the health behaviors and outcomes before, during and after childbirth. Researchers have been using its data to investigate the nation's maternal mortality problem. Recent layoffs also wiped out the staffs collecting data on in vitro fertilizations and abortions. Those cuts are especially surprising given that President Donald Trump said he wants to expand IVF access and that the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 playbook for his administration called for more abortion surveillance. Lead poisoning The CDC eliminated its program on lead poisoning in children, which helped local health departments — through funding and expertise — investigate lead poisoning clusters and find where risk is greatest. Lead poisoning in kids typically stems from exposure to bits of old paint, contaminated dust or drinking water that passes through lead pipes. But the program's staff also played an important role in the investigation of lead-tainted applesauce that affected 500 kids. Last year, Milwaukee health officials became aware that peeling paint in aging local elementary schools was endangering kids. The city health department began working with CDC to test tens of thousands of students. That assistance stopped last month when the CDC's lead program staff was terminated. City officials are particularly concerned about losing expertise to help them track the long-term effects. 'We don't know what we don't know,' said Mike Totoraitis, the city's health commissioner. Environmental investigations Also gone is the staff for the 23-year-old Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, which had information on concerns including possible cancer clusters and weather-related illnesses. 'The loss of that program is going to greatly diminish the ability to make linkages between what might be in the environment and what health might be affected by that,' Breysse said. Transgender data In some cases, it's not a matter of staffers leaving, but rather the end of specific types of data collection. Transgender status is no longer being recorded in health-tracking systems, including ones focused on violent deaths and on risky behaviors by kids. Experts know transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence, but now 'it's going to be much more challenging to quantify the extent to which they are at higher risk,' said Thomas Simon, the recently retired senior director for scientific programs at the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention. Violence The staff and funding seems to have remained intact for a CDC data collection that provides insights into homicides, suicides and accidental deaths involving weapons. But CDC violence-prevention programs that acted on that information were halted. So, too, was work on a system that collects hospital data on nonfatal injuries from causes such as shootings, crashes and drownings. Also going away, apparently, is the CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The system is designed to pick up information that's not found in law enforcement statistics. Health officials see that work as important, because not all sexual violence victims go to police. Work injuries The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which tracks job-related illnesses and deaths and makes recommendations on how to prevent them, was gutted by the cuts. Kennedy has said that 20% of the people laid off might be reinstated as the agency tries to correct mistakes. That appeared to happen last month, when the American Federation of Government Employees said that NIOSH workers involved in a black lung disease program for coal miners had been temporarily called back. But HHS officials did not answer questions about the reinstatement. The AFGE's Micah Niemeier-Walsh later said the workers continued to have June termination dates and 'we are concerned this is to give the appearance that the programs are still functioning, when effectively they are not.' There's been no talk of salvaging some other NIOSH programs, including one focused on workplace deaths in the oil and gas industries or a research project into how common hearing loss is in that industry. Smoking and drugs The HHS cuts eliminated the 17-member team responsible for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, one of the main ways the government measures drug use. Also axed were the CDC staff working on the National Youth Tobacco Survey. There are other surveys that look at youth smoking and drug use, including the University of Michigan's federally funded 'Monitoring the Future' survey of schoolkids. But the federal studies looked at both adults and adolescents, and provided insights into drug use by high school dropouts. The CDC also delved into specific vaping and tobacco products in the ways that other surveys don't, and was a driver in the federal push to better regulate electronic cigarettes. 'There was overlap among the surveys, but each one had its own specific focus that the other ones didn't cover,' said Richard Miech, who leads the Michigan study. Data modernization and predictions Work to modernize data collection has been derailed. That includes an upgrade to a 22-year-old system that helps local public health departments track diseases and allows CDC to put together a national picture. Another casualty was the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which tries to predict disease trends. The center, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, was working on forecasting the current multi-state measles outbreak. That forecast hasn't been published partly because of the layoffs, according to two CDC officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it and fear retribution for speaking to the press. Trump hasn't always supported widespread testing of health problems. In the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 diagnoses were exploding, the president groused that the nation's ability to do more testing was making the U.S. look like it had a worse problem than other countries. He called testing 'a double-edged sword.' Mooney, the Johns Hopkins historian, wonders how interested the new administration is in reporting on health problems. 'You could think it's deliberate,' he said. 'If you keep people from knowing, they're less likely to be concerned.'
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Alabama House committee considers bill to ban certain food dyes in schools
Rep. Reed Ingram, R-Pike Road, sits on the floor of the Alabama House of Representatives on April 25, 2024 at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) A bill seeking to remove certain food additives from Alabama's public K-12 schools faced discussion in the House Health Committee Wednesday, with proponents citing health concerns and opponents raising issues of regulatory burden and implementation timelines. HB 491, sponsored by Rep. Reed Ingram, R-Matthews, would prohibit schools from selling or serving food items containing specific artificial colorings, including common dyes like Red No. 40 and Yellow No. 5. The committee held the bill for a vote next week to allow members to review a potential amendment. 'Europe has banned it years ago, and all we're asking is just in the lunches, what's in the schools,' Ingram said to the committee. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Ingram argued passionately against the additives and said he doesn't 'think we ought to keep giving our kids poison.' 'Why not take a proactive approach to save a life? … we're prescribing so much medication now, it's got to be something that we're eating and something we're doing,' Ingram said to the committee. The scope of the bill focuses specifically on food provided by schools. It would not restrict items brought from home or shared by students for events like class parties. Alabama House bills would target some food additives But concerns were raised about the bill's impact. Virginia Banister, executive director at Alabama Beverage Association, said the bill would create 'unnecessary regulatory burdens, cost, consumer and retailer confusion.' She also said that it would undermine the role of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 'HB 491 would place the state of Alabama in an unprecedented position in regulating food and beverage ingredients. That's a role currently held by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,' Banister said. In a recent interview, Ingram indicated that a push by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to 'Make America Healthy Again' is allowing Republicans, who have historically opposed regulation, to talk about the issue. He also said that his grandchildren aren't allowed to have synthetic dyes, which led him to learn more about the issue. Kennedy has promoted numerous controversial and unfounded views around public health issues. He has made false claims about the safety of vaccines and the impact of environmental chemicals on a child's sexual orientation or gender identity. He has also baselessly connected anti-depressant use to school shootings and has advocated for raw milk consumption despite health risks. California banned Red Dye No. 3 in 2023 after a state report raised concerns about its link to increased youth ADHD and questioned federal safety levels for children. The FDA recently followed, announcing a Red Dye No. 3 ban in food effective in early 2027 and 2028 in drugs. Research continues on the safety of other food dyes. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
