Global Public Health
The Washington Post: U.S. Weighs Costly Alternative To World Health Organization After pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration is proposing spending $2 billion a year to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak functions the United States once helped build and accessed at a fraction of the cost, according to three administration officials briefed on the proposal. The effort to build a U.S.-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems the U.S. abandoned when it announced its withdrawal from the WHO last year and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. (Sun and Bogage, 2/19)
MAHA
CNBC: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Backs Donald Trump’s Glyphosate Order; MAHA Backlash Erupts Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Donald Trump’s executive order spurring the domestic production of the weed killer glyphosate, as his Make America Healthy Again movement reels from the president’s embrace of the chemical they despise. (Downs, 2/19)
Climate and Health
Associated Press: Donald Trump’s Climate Health Rollbacks Expected To Disproportionately Impact Vulnerable Communities, Experts Say In a stretch of Louisiana with about 170 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, premature death is a fact of life for people living nearby. The air is so polluted and the cancer rates so high it is known as Cancer Alley. “Most adults in the area are attending two to three funerals per month,” said Gary C. Watson Jr., who was born and raised in St. John the Baptist Parish, a majority Black community in Cancer Alley about 30 miles outside of New Orleans. His father survived cancer, but in recent years, at least five relatives have died from it. (Pineda and Borenstein, 2/20)
Children’s Health
The 19th: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Continues Using Tear Gas Near Children—What Are the Health Impacts? From the roof of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Portland, Oregon, federal agents late last month watched as thousands of people marched past the processing center in protest. Families and children were among the daytime crowd, which had gathered for an event advertised as family friendly. (Rodriguez, 2/19)
ProPublica: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Food and Drug Administration No Longer Warns Against Ineffective, Potentially Risky Autism Treatments The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk. Now that advisory is gone. (O’Matz, 2/18)
Bloomberg: California’s TikTok Child Addiction Lawsuit Gains Support From Judge A judge said TikTok Inc. should have to face California’s claims that the platform’s features are addictive and harmful to kids. In a tentative ruling Wednesday, the judge said the company isn’t immune from the state’s allegations that the platform preys on young people through algorithms that keep them scrolling to maximize profits. (Burnson, 2/19)
CIDRAP: Children With Sleep Apnea May Have Elevated Risk of Influenza and COVID-19 Children and adolescents with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) were twice as likely to be diagnosed as having influenza or COVID-19 in the five years following diagnosis than those without the condition, according to a large study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. (Bergeson, 2/18)
Bloomberg: Vitamin K Shot Deemed Safe, Yet More Parents Are Skipping The Newborn Injection—Though It Isn’t A Vaccine The 2-month-old baby arrived at the hospital with the type of bleeding in and around his brain that was so unusual Miami neurosurgeon Heather McCrea had only read about it in textbooks. The pooling blood indicated that the baby had a severe vitamin K deficiency — something usually prevented by a shot at birth. But his parents, like a growing number of Americans skeptical of injections, had declined to get the shot for their baby. (Nix, 2/17)
Bloomberg: Nestlé CEO Faces Mounting Pressure As Infant Formula Crisis Deepens Challenges For Nestlé SA, the baby-formula crisis that has sparked the largest recall in its history is a scandal it could have done without. The tainted infant-milk mess, triggered by a contaminated ingredient, came as the world’s biggest food company was already struggling to revive its shares from their multi-year lows, adding further pressure on its new Chief Executive Officer Philipp Navratil and his management team to present a turnaround plan when the Swiss giant unveils full-year results on Thursday. (Stamm and Kinzelmann, 2/18)
LGBTQ+ Health
The New York Times: Their Transgender Child’s Care Was Cut Off—What Comes Next? In phone call after call, doctors and nurses from NYU Langone Health delivered the news to the parents: The hospital was no longer providing gender-related care to transgender adolescents. That meant no more prescriptions for hormones or for puberty blockers. Their children needed to find new doctors. (Goldstein, 2/19)
CBS News: NYU Langone Health To End Transgender Youth Program, Sparking Backlash From Advocacy Groups NYU Langone announced Tuesday it is discontinuing its Transgender Youth Health Program, leaving families frustrated and advocates fighting back. There's outrage in New York City's LGBTQ+community over the decision to end that treatment at NYU Langone. The move comes in the wake of President Trump's Jan. 2025 executive order banning gender-affirming health care, and a December Trump administration proposal to withdraw federal funds from hospitals providing gender transition treatments to young people. (Zanger and DeAngelis, 2/18)
The Unregulated Policy Experiment Affecting Trans Children and Youth
Arjee Javellana Restar et al.
Health Care Workforce
Modern Healthcare: St. Jude Children's Research Hospital CEO James R. Downing To Step Down Dr. James Downing will step down this year as president and CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the nonprofit hospital announced Thursday. Downing, who has led the hospital for more than 12 years, will move into a faculty role in its global pediatric medicine department. The St. Jude board plans to announce his successor this summer and complete the leadership transition by the end of the year. (Kacik, 2/19)
The 19th: New Student Loan Caps For Nursing Degrees Could Expand Racial Inequities, Report Warns Shawnie Allen traces her choice to study
public health to a moment inside a hospital room in 2023. At 20 years old, she was a junior at Nova Southeastern University when she found out she was six weeks pregnant. Abortion was still legal until 15 weeks of pregnancy, and Allen asked her presiding nurse about options for termination. The nurse’s expression, Allen noted, shifted. (Nutall, 2/17)
Research Funding
STAT: As National Institutes Of Health Funding Shifts, States Begin Experimenting With New Research Models On paper, little appears to have changed for UMass Chan Medical School over the past year, despite the cascade of paused and terminated grants and swift, unpredictable policy shifts that followed President Trump’s return to office. The amount of bread-and-butter RO1 awards it received from the National Institutes of Health in the 2025 fiscal year dropped only 1.6% from 2024. (Oza, 2/20)
The New York Times: Capturing A Rapidly Evolving Scientific Landscape Since the Trump administration unfurled some of the deepest cuts to U.S. science funding in decades, thousands of jobs have been terminated or frozen at federal agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. Proposed budgets for this year include major cuts to organizations like NASA and the National Science Foundation. These cuts, some of them seemingly indiscriminate, have led to chaos and demoralization across the scientific community. (Otis, 2/17)
Women’s Health
Associated Press: Report Finds Early Prenatal Care In The U.S. Is Declining Early prenatal care improves the chances of having a healthy pregnancy and baby. But a new federal report shows it’s been on the decline. The share of U.S. births to women who began prenatal care in the first trimester dropped from 78.3% in 2021 to 75.5% in 2024, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday. Meanwhile, starting care later in pregnancy or getting no care at all has been on the rise. Prenatal care beginning in the second trimester rose from 15.4% to 17.3%, and starting care in the third trimester or getting no care went from 6.3% to 7.3%. (Ungar, 2/19)
Health Insurance
Fierce Healthcare: Study Finds Family Insurance Premiums Consume 10% Of Income Across 19 States Middle-income workers and their families are spending an average of 10.1% of the median income on their health premiums and deductibles, according to a new report. The Commonwealth Fund analyzed national data from 2024 on the employer-sponsored insurance market and found that the premium contributions for family coverage ranged from an average of $5,584 in Oregon to $9,148 in California. In 19 states, the average premium and deductible contribution topped 10% of that state's median income. (Minemyer, 2/18)
Vaccines
Bloomberg: Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services Chief Oz Pledges Ongoing Vaccine Coverage, Urges Measles Vaccinations Mehmet Oz, head of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, pledged continued insurance coverage for all recommended vaccinations in the country and urged people to get the measles shot as infections skyrocket. His comments come as the Trump administration remakes the nation’s approach to immunizations by promoting personal choice and backing away from once-universal endorsements of shots that have controlled deadly disease outbreaks. Changes to the vaccine schedule have added to mounting confusion over which vaccines will be covered by government programs that often pay for childhood shots. (Nix and Muller, 2/17)
The New York Times: Vaccine Manufacturers Scale Back Research Efforts And Reduce Workforce Through Job Cuts In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development. (Robbins, 2/16)
The New York Times: Allies Of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Push Efforts Across States To Roll Back School Vaccine Mandates Longtime allies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, have launched a new effort to repeal laws that for decades have required children to be vaccinated against measles, polio and other diseases before they enter day care or kindergarten. A newly formed coalition of vaccine activists is targeting laws that are considered the linchpin of protection from deadly diseases. States have long mandated childhood immunizations before children can start day care or school, though some exemptions are available. (Jewett, 2/13)
Politico: Allies Of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Seek To Loosen Restrictions On Anti-Vaccine Doctors Speaking Out Doctors who give health advice to their patients or community that runs counter to the medical establishment face a rare but very real risk of state sanctions, including losing their license to practice. That could soon change if anti-vaccine activists succeed in getting the Supreme Court to weigh in on how broadly the First Amendment protects doctors’ rights to free speech — an issue that is central to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. (Gardner, 2/15)
LA County Public Health
CBS News: Los Angeles County Public Health To Shut Down 7 Clinics Amid Major Funding Cuts The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced it will be closing seven clinics due to significant cuts in funding. The department said it has faced more than $50 million in federal, state and local funding cuts. A statement from the department said the cuts, along with the increase in operational costs, have led to the consolidation and reduction of services. "While public health clinics offer important services and the closures are deeply upsetting, underscoring the real consequences of disinvestment in public health, clinic patients will be connected to appropriate services that meet their needs," said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Director of the LA County Department of Public Health. (Hylton, 2/13)