Latest news with #HealthJustice
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Black Kids Are 5 Times More Likely to Get Severe COVID. Now Vaccines Are Being Cut.
The Trump administration has declared an end to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant people, and health experts have a warning: This is a threat to Black communities. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced the decision on May 27 and said vaccine guidance would now focus solely on adults over 65 and those with high-risk conditions, effective immediately. By June 3, Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos stepped down from her role helping lead the agency's COVID-19 vaccine advisory group, saying she could no longer support decisions that put pregnant people and children at risk. Before the changes took effect, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended for anyone 6 months and older. Kennedy did not offer a scientific rationale for the new recommendations. For Black Americans, the policy shifts are more than bureaucratic changes, according to Oni Blackstock, a physician and founder of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting practice. 'These new guidelines don't exist in a vacuum,' she said. 'Limiting booster eligibility risks further compromising the already fragile health status of many Black Americans.' Black Americans are 1.5 times more likely to contract COVID-19 and four times more likely to be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Research from the Center for Primary Care at Harvard Medical School found that Black children are more than five times as likely to die from the virus. An estimated 165,000 to 220,000 Black Americans have died from COVID-19, according to data compiled by the APM Research Lab. According to a 2023 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 32% of Black Americans who contracted COVID-19 also experienced long COVID symptoms. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cited a lack of evidence that annual boosters are needed by healthy, low-risk adults. However, Blackstock, a primary care and HIV physician, said the policy change marks a significant departure from past years when vaccines were broadly recommended and federally funded. 'This contradicts recent CDC data showing that the 2024–2025 boosters benefit people 18 years and older, especially early after vaccination,' she added. Blackstock noted that many Black Americans already struggle with health care access due to systemic barriers like a lack of insurance and residential segregation. 'When these combine with more restrictive vaccine guidelines,' she said, 'it becomes even harder for Black Americans to get boosters and worsens existing health disparities.' These barriers also deepen historic mistrust in health care, said Jerry Abraham, a family and community medicine physician. Abraham, who is director of the CDU-KEDREN Mobile Street Medicine program in Los Angeles, said the history of medical racism and continued treatment disparities fuel skepticism toward public health. Even as boosters offer real benefits, he said, many remain hesitant or disconnected from resources that ensure protection. 'If children and pregnant women are no longer recommended for vaccination, will grandma still go to CVS and get it herself?' he said. Abraham added that in an era where health care professionals can no longer trust the updated guidelines from federal agencies, it's deeply concerning and a reminder that Black communities must once again rely on themselves. For answers about what comes next, read on. Aisha Harris, a family medicine physician in Flint, Michigan, told Capital B that limiting access to COVID-19 vaccines for healthy adults exposes high-risk groups like seniors and those who are immunocompromised. 'Reduced protection in healthy people increases their risk of being infected by COVID and of being a carrier,' said Harris, who owns the direct primary care clinic Harris Family Medicine. 'When more people are contagious, with or without symptoms, they have a higher chance of infecting others around them, including in their household or those they are taking care of as caregivers.' She warned this undermines community immunity. Without widespread coverage, even eligible groups face elevated risks. FDA officials say the new approach mirrors those taken by Australia and several European nations that limit vaccines to older or high-risk adults. But some critics argue the shift ignores U.S. disparities and bypasses standard CDC procedures. You can pay out of pocket, but it could cost up to $200. If the CDC doesn't recommend vaccines, Abraham said health plans are much less likely to cover them, since insurers typically follow CDC guidance. Yes, COVID-19 vaccines have already undergone extensive clinical trials before being authorized for public use. The FDA says it will require longer clinical trials before approving updated shots for healthy kids and adults, with studies lasting at least six months, likely delaying fall approvals. The CDC's vaccine advisory committee is expected to vote on fall vaccine recommendations in late June, but it's unclear how much influence it will have over the newly announced changes. High-risk conditions for COVID-19 vaccine eligibility generally include chronic kidney disease, chronic lung diseases, asthma, diabetes, immunocompromised states (from cancer treatment, organ transplant, HIV, etc.), heart conditions, Alzheimer's disease, obesity, sickle cell disease, smoking, and stroke or cerebrovascular disease. Yes. Studies show COVID-19 vaccination, including boosters, reduces the risk of severe illness and may lower the chances of developing long COVID symptoms after infection. The post Black Kids Are 5 Times More Likely to Get Severe COVID. Now Vaccines Are Being Cut. appeared first on Capital B News.
CBC
08-05-2025
- Health
- CBC
What changes to B.C.'s mental health legislation could look like
Premier David Eby has announced a review of the province's mental health legislation in light of the Lapu-Lapu Day festival tragedy. Two lawyers with extensive professional experience, Laura Johnston of Health Justice and Kevin Love with the Community Legal Assistance Society, joined us to share their experiences with the Mental Health Act and what changes they do and do not want to see.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
RFK Jr.'s Stunning Claim About Black People And Vaccines Sparks Concern From Medical Experts
From COVID-19 conspiracy theories to confusion on the facts about Medicare and Medicaid to refusing to say that vaccines aren't linked to autism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s February confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill were anything but smooth for someone who is hoping to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. While his history of anti-vaccine remarks was a major talking point throughout the hearings, his beliefs were also front and center during a heated exchange in which Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) brought up a comment that Kennedy once made about vaccinations and the Black community. In 2021, Kennedy had said, 'We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that's given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.' Alsobrooks asked Kennedy to explain what he meant by that remark, and he went on to reference a 'series of studies' while saying research shows that 'Blacks need fewer antigens.' (For the record, experts say that this is not true.) 'Right now, how vaccine schedules are tailored is based on things like your age, your exposure risk, if you have other chronic underlying health conditions ― but race isn't one of them, and there isn't research that suggests that it should be,' Joel Bervell, a recent medical graduate and medical myth-buster on social media, told HuffPost. What especially bothered Bervell about Kennedy's exchange with Alsobrooks was the fact that he doubled down on his comment from 2021. Kennedy could have used this as an opportunity to admit that he needs to do more research and understand the vaccine schedule, 'but instead, he defended what he said, which I think, for me, that's where the problem lies in,' Bervell told HuffPost. 'Not necessarily the fact of the misinformation is out there, but the fact that he wasn't willing to at least confront it or admit that onstage.' Below, experts like Bervell share their concerns about Kennedy's statement and how it reflects a larger problematic picture: 'In medicine, in science, we know that race is a social construct, meaning that you can't look at someone's genes and identify what race they are,' Bervell said. That means differences in vaccine timelines just don't make scientific sense. 'The comment that [Kennedy] made about the vaccine schedule, it's basically scientific racism, which has been debunked,' Dr. Oni Blackstock, a primary care and HIV physician who is the founder and executive director of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting company, told HuffPost. 'He's really perpetuating this false belief that Black people are somehow biologically different from white people and, in that way, justifying differential and ultimately unequal treatment for Black people versus white people,' Blackstock added. 'By saying that, he was putting on one of the larger stages in health care this notion that race-based medicine should still exist, when that's actually what many scientists recently have been trying to root out,' Bervell said. Race-based medicine and scientific racism has led to undertreatment of Black patients, dismissal of pain and even death, Blackstock stressed. Both experts pointed to real-life examples of this, like the false belief that Black people have better-functioning kidneys than white people. This made it harder for Black people to get the treatment they needed, like kidney transplants, according to Bervell. And this thought pattern isn't from some faraway time ― a medical equation that reinforced this bias wasn't changed until 2021, Bervell said. What's more, during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Black people were believed to be resistant to yellow fever, which was not true and led to high mortality rates among Black people, Blackstock explained. 'The importance of understanding the problem with the myths is that they can literally lead to regulations being written into medicine that treat populations differently just based on race,' Bervell said. 'It can actually change the care that people receive.' While it's easy to look at a particular viewpoint as a one-off, medical racism has real-world consequences that irresponsible comments can make worse. Promoting debunked beliefs 'distracts us from really doing the work that we need to do, which is dismantling systemic racism in health care and ensuring that everyone has equitable access to preventive care and treatments that they need,' Blackstock added. 'One thing that is also kind of strange about him [Kennedy] is he's someone who for a long time has said that he doesn't support vaccines,' Bervell said. 'Apparently, now he's changed his mind, but for a long time he said he hasn't supported vaccines, and then he's also saying that Black people should get a different vaccine schedule. So you have to wonder, what is your goal in saying that if you don't even believe in vaccines?' Bervell said comments like those from Kennedy can sow vaccine hesitancy in the Black population, which is dangerous and can erode trust in evidence-based medicine. It's not the first time that this has happened, either, Blackstock added. In 2021, Kennedy produced a documentary called 'Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,' which Blackstock said promoted misinformation about health and vaccines to the Black community, along with other marginalized groups. 'It's interesting how some of his efforts have been focused on taking advantage of [and] exploiting the mistrust that some in the Black community have around vaccines and the health care system because of structural racism and medical racism,' Blackstock said. With misinformation and scare tactics rampant on social media, misinformation from government leaders will only make it harder to tell what's real and what's fake in medicine. Trust needs to be paramount for health care as an institution, Bervell said. 'The trust is already eroded in health care,' Bervell explained. 'We need to have someone that is going to work with scientists, researchers, doctors that are on the ground seeing these problems every day, not someone that's in an ivory tower watching from above without understanding of what's actually happening on the ground.' Blackstock stressed that while such false beliefs are very problematic, they track with much of the messaging from Donald Trump and his new presidential administration. 'It echoes some of the rhetoric that [Trump] has shared around eugenics and immigrants,' Blackstock said. 'He's talked about immigrants having 'bad genes' or 'poisoning the blood of our country.' It just speaks to this idea of racial purity or genetic purity, and this false idea that certain groups of people are inherently inferior or predisposed to certain behaviors because of their genetics.' And, again, race is a social construct and does not equal genetic differences. 'It's just really shocking that in the year 2025 we are still dealing with these beliefs being propagated that have been around for several centuries that have been used to justify slavery, used to justify inequitable treatment, used to justify forced sterilization,' Blackstock said. Blackstock added that she thinks individuals get away with this kind of rhetoric because people become accustomed to outlandish comments and bad behavior. 'But we need to really flag this and say this is really dangerous and really concerning rhetoric that can have real health implications,' Blackstock said. White House Press Secretary's Puzzling Remark About Black History Month Spurs Questions Experts Share What Another Trump Presidency Could Mean For Your Health 109 Ways To Fight Back Against What's Happening In The U.S. Right Now
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
RFK Jr.'s Stunning Claim About Black People And Vaccines Sparks Concern From Medical Experts
From COVID-19 conspiracy theories to confusion on the facts about Medicare and Medicaid to refusing to say that vaccines aren't linked to autism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s February confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill were anything but smooth for someone who is hoping to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. While his history of anti-vaccine remarks was a major talking point throughout the hearings, his beliefs were also front and center during a heated exchange in which Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) brought up a comment that Kennedy once made about vaccinations and the Black community. In 2021, Kennedy had said, 'We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that's given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.' Alsobrooks asked Kennedy to explain what he meant by that remark, and he went on to reference a 'series of studies' while saying research shows that 'Blacks need fewer antigens.' (For the record, experts say that this is not true.) 'Right now, how vaccine schedules are tailored is based on things like your age, your exposure risk, if you have other chronic underlying health conditions ― but race isn't one of them, and there isn't research that suggests that it should be,' Joel Bervell, a recent medical graduate and medical myth-buster on social media, told HuffPost. What especially bothered Bervell about Kennedy's exchange with Alsobrooks was the fact that he doubled down on his comment from 2021. Kennedy could have used this as an opportunity to admit that he needs to do more research and understand the vaccine schedule, 'but instead, he defended what he said, which I think, for me, that's where the problem lies in,' Bervell told HuffPost. 'Not necessarily the fact of the misinformation is out there, but the fact that he wasn't willing to at least confront it or admit that onstage.' Below, experts like Bervell share their concerns about Kennedy's statement and how it reflects a larger problematic picture: 'In medicine, in science, we know that race is a social construct, meaning that you can't look at someone's genes and identify what race they are,' Bervell said. That means differences in vaccine timelines just don't make scientific sense. 'The comment that [Kennedy] made about the vaccine schedule, it's basically scientific racism, which has been debunked,' Dr. Oni Blackstock, a primary care and HIV physician who is the founder and executive director of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting company, told HuffPost. 'He's really perpetuating this false belief that Black people are somehow biologically different from white people and, in that way, justifying differential and ultimately unequal treatment for Black people versus white people,' Blackstock added. 'By saying that, he was putting on one of the larger stages in health care this notion that race-based medicine should still exist, when that's actually what many scientists recently have been trying to root out,' Bervell said. Race-based medicine and scientific racism has led to undertreatment of Black patients, dismissal of pain and even death, Blackstock stressed. Both experts pointed to real-life examples of this, like the false belief that Black people have better-functioning kidneys than white people. This made it harder for Black people to get the treatment they needed, like kidney transplants, according to Bervell. And this thought pattern isn't from some faraway time ― a medical equation that reinforced this bias wasn't changed until 2021, Bervell said. What's more, during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Black people were believed to be resistant to yellow fever, which was not true and led to high mortality rates among Black people, Blackstock explained. 'The importance of understanding the problem with the myths is that they can literally lead to regulations being written into medicine that treat populations differently just based on race,' Bervell said. 'It can actually change the care that people receive.' While it's easy to look at a particular viewpoint as a one-off, medical racism has real-world consequences that irresponsible comments can make worse. Promoting debunked beliefs 'distracts us from really doing the work that we need to do, which is dismantling systemic racism in health care and ensuring that everyone has equitable access to preventive care and treatments that they need,' Blackstock added. 'One thing that is also kind of strange about him [Kennedy] is he's someone who for a long time has said that he doesn't support vaccines,' Bervell said. 'Apparently, now he's changed his mind, but for a long time he said he hasn't supported vaccines, and then he's also saying that Black people should get a different vaccine schedule. So you have to wonder, what is your goal in saying that if you don't even believe in vaccines?' Bervell said comments like those from Kennedy can sow vaccine hesitancy in the Black population, which is dangerous and can erode trust in evidence-based medicine. It's not the first time that this has happened, either, Blackstock added. In 2021, Kennedy produced a documentary called 'Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,' which Blackstock said promoted misinformation about health and vaccines to the Black community, along with other marginalized groups. 'It's interesting how some of his efforts have been focused on taking advantage of [and] exploiting the mistrust that some in the Black community have around vaccines and the health care system because of structural racism and medical racism,' Blackstock said. With misinformation and scare tactics rampant on social media, misinformation from government leaders will only make it harder to tell what's real and what's fake in medicine. Trust needs to be paramount for health care as an institution, Bervell said. 'The trust is already eroded in health care,' Bervell explained. 'We need to have someone that is going to work with scientists, researchers, doctors that are on the ground seeing these problems every day, not someone that's in an ivory tower watching from above without understanding of what's actually happening on the ground.' Blackstock stressed that while such false beliefs are very problematic, they track with much of the messaging from Donald Trump and his new presidential administration. 'It echoes some of the rhetoric that [Trump] has shared around eugenics and immigrants,' Blackstock said. 'He's talked about immigrants having 'bad genes' or 'poisoning the blood of our country.' It just speaks to this idea of racial purity or genetic purity, and this false idea that certain groups of people are inherently inferior or predisposed to certain behaviors because of their genetics.' And, again, race is a social construct and does not equal genetic differences. 'It's just really shocking that in the year 2025 we are still dealing with these beliefs being propagated that have been around for several centuries that have been used to justify slavery, used to justify inequitable treatment, used to justify forced sterilization,' Blackstock said. Blackstock added that she thinks individuals get away with this kind of rhetoric because people become accustomed to outlandish comments and bad behavior. 'But we need to really flag this and say this is really dangerous and really concerning rhetoric that can have real health implications,' Blackstock said. White House Press Secretary's Puzzling Remark About Black History Month Spurs Questions Experts Share What Another Trump Presidency Could Mean For Your Health 109 Ways To Fight Back Against What's Happening In The U.S. Right Now
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Trump's anti-diversity executive orders threaten Americans' health, experts say
After Donald Trump signed executive orders ordering for mentions of race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and other terms to be scrubbed from US health agency websites, experts say the implications for health and scientific research are vast. All pages at US health agencies were told to take down these mentions after Trump signed certain executive orders on his first day in office. The orders were couched in terms of women's safety and DEI (or diversity, equity and inclusion) policies, but in fact they work to undermine broad swathes of the American public: trans and intersex people, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, disabled people and more. The deletions needed to happen on Friday 31 January, employees learned. In response, thousands of webpages were taken down entirely. Some have come back online, but they have been scoured of the terms. A note at the top of all webpages for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now reads: 'CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders.' 'This absence or erasure of really vital information is going to have a really harmful effect on many of these communities,' said Oni Blackstock, a primary care and HIV doctor and the founder and executive director of Health Justice. 'It's really devastating.' Decades-worth of health data is vanishing overnight – and there are questions about whether data collection on these issues will continue. Researchers receiving federal funding have been ordered to remove words such as 'woman', 'disability', and 'LGBT' from their proposals and studies. The US Food and Drug Administration removed its guidelines for recruiting diverse participants into research, which makes it more difficult to discern a medication's effects, both good and bad, on patients who are not white men. The gag order even extends to internal communications. Employees at the CDC and the US Department of Health and Human Services have been told multiple times to remove their pronouns from email signatures. 'The public deserves to understand what's happening, whether it's bird flu or maternal mortality,' said Rachel Hardeman, a professor and director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota. 'Not having that knowledge is a disservice to all of us.' The Social Vulnerability Index, which tracks how disasters affect health down to the local level, is still offline. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which has tracked high school students' behaviors since 1990, has been reinstated, but key parts are still down. The website for the Office of Research on Women's Health at the US National Institutes of Health is a shade of what it once was. CDC pages that once referred to 'pregnant people' now talk about 'pregnant women' only. Nearly all information about HIV for health providers and the public temporarily vanished in the purge. 'There was only one page that was up, a few days ago, that was about HIV. Every single [other] HIV page was down,' said Blackstock. For the pages that have come back up, there are columns of information that have been removed, she said. Target HIV, part of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, is still unavailable, for instance. Guidelines for healthcare providers providing PrEP, the medication to prevent contracting HIV, are still gone, Blackstock said, adding: 'Providers can't reference it so that we can take evidence-based, informed care of our patients.' There were also many public materials taken down of pertinent information about, for instance, health disparities for trans people, she said, which creates 'a vacuum of information' with direct effects on individuals' health behaviors. Without this information, researchers and policymakers will struggle to make informed decisions around public health and healthcare, she said. The CDC did publish annual data on maternal mortality on Wednesday. Black women are three times more likely than white women to die in childbirth – a rate that has not fallen over time, even as white, Hispanic, and Asian mortality has fallen slightly, the data shows. Soon, the CDC is due to release data about these causes of death, but it is not clear if that publication will move forward given the new restrictions – or if the data will even be collected in the future. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 'It's a lot of question marks at this point,' said Hardeman. 'Even as an adviser to the director of the CDC, we've received zero information about what's coming … That's actually part of the concern. The silence is quite loud.' The uncertainty is particularly alarming because experts expect mortality rates to increase after the Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization decision reversed federal access to abortion. More people are now staying pregnant, which increases the chances of dying during pregnancy or childbirth. 'Understanding that landscape is incredibly important for how we proceed,' Hardeman said. Hard data on maternal mortality has been 'instrumental' for forming policies to prevent deaths, 80% of which are preventable, Hardeman said. 'How do we honor the lives lost if we're just going to move on and not even collect that data?' she asked. Blackstock noted: 'If you're removing information about the groups at highest risk, then that information is incomplete. It's actually potentially misinformation.' Removing information could also diminish trust in science and scientific agencies. 'Is this still accurate? Is there data missing that's going to prevent us from drawing valid conclusions?' Blackstock asked. These gaps will make existing disparities worse, the experts said. 'If people are not able to get information in order to be able to protect themselves, it's just going to make matters even worse,' Blackstock said. Omissions in research and data mean that it could be harder to spot – and respond to – new patterns, which is a particular concern given outbreaks of bird flu, tuberculosis, measles, mpox and more. 'We don't really have a map or situational awareness of what is going on, and so that would potentially delay responses to any emerging health issues,' Blackstock said. 'We then don't know how to allocate healthcare and public health resources in the way that we need to.' The approach harks back to Trump's Covid response in 2020, when he said that cases would go away if no one was tested. 'It's the issue of 'no data, no problem,'' Blackstock said. 'It almost allows the government to abdicate any responsibility, because they don't have to act on anything – because there's nothing to act on.'
