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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s chances of confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary appeared to hinge Thursday on convincing a handful of Senate Republicans that he would adhere to accepted science when it comes to vaccines. During a hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Kennedy faced tough questioning from Democrats and a few Republicans about his long history advocating against vaccinations and disseminating misinformation about the disproved link between vaccines and autism. In contrast, several Republicans expressed support for Kennedy's stance on vaccines. (McAuliff, 1/30)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to confirm to senators that he believes vaccines do not cause autism during his confirmation hearing Thursday, appearing to jeopardize support in his effort to become health secretary with at least one key Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy. (Zhang and Herper, 1/30)

The man who hopes to be President Donald Trump’s health secretary repeatedly asked to see “data” or “science” showing vaccines are safe – but when an influential Republican senator did so, he dismissed it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two days this week insisting to senators that he’s not anti-vaccine. He said that he instead supports vaccinations and will follow the science in overseeing the $1.7 trillion Department of Health and Human Services, which, among other duties, oversees vaccine research, approval and recommendations. (Neergaard and Stobbe, 1/31)

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) on Thursday grilled Department of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s history of claiming Black Americans have a better immune system than white people. Alsobrooks, one of only two Black women serving in the Senate, questioned Kennedy on what he meant regarding a 2021 claim that “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.” (Daniels, 1/30)

During intense questioning Thursday by members of the Senate health committee about his plan to keep a financial stake in major vaccine litigation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he would give away his rights to fees that might flow from it. It appears to be a reversal from the details of the government ethics agreement that he filed for his Senate confirmation hearings to become the nation’s health secretary. (Jewett and Craig, 1/30)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has treated the U.S. drug epidemic as a priority, both in his independent bid for president and now as President Trump’s nominee for health secretary. But for all his advocacy surrounding the addiction crisis, Kennedy has never made clear his views on methadone and buprenorphine, the highly effective medications most commonly used to treat opioid use disorder. (Facher, 1/30)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is bullish on health tech. Kennedy, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the federal government’s health agencies, wants to use artificial intelligence and telehealth to increase the quality of care for Medicare and Medicaid recipients while reducing costs, he told the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. (Reader and Paun, 1/30)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Recapping The RFK Jr. Hearings: A Live Discussion With �������ýҕ�l Health News Journalists
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings for secretary of Health and Human Services took place Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, and �������ýҕ�l Health News reporters watched as the Senate Committee on Finance and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions asked Kennedy about everything from vaccines to abortion to Medicaid. (Norman, 1/30)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: �������ýҕ�l Health News' 'What The Health?': RFK Jr. In The Hot Seat
President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the vast Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., faced sharp questioning from senators this week, particularly over his history of vaccine denialism. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s second week has been even more disruptive than its first, with an on-again, off-again funding freeze that left many around the country scrambling to understand what was going on. (Rovner, 1/30)

The Pentagon has struck a Biden administration policy of covering travel costs for service members and their dependents who must cross state lines to receive abortions and other reproductive care, according to a new memo. The change, which took effect Tuesday, was announced in a memo posted by the Defense Travel Management Office on Wednesday. (Mitchell, 1/30)

Infant mortality in the U.S. has increased by 7% since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, according to an October 2024 study. Those findings followed another study that reported a 12.7% rise in infant mortality in Texas after the implementation of Senate Bill 8, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. ... Both studies noted larger increases in deaths among infants born with birth defects. This suggests women are delivering more babies with severe congenital malformations who have no hope of survival beyond a few hours, days or, at most, a few weeks. (Winterstein and Rasmussen, 1/30)

Over the last week, the accounts of some major organizations that help Americans find abortion pills had their Instagram posts censored or removed, and at least one group said its account became difficult to find through searching – a practice known as “shadow-banning”. Since last week, an Instagram search for the words “hey jane” will not surface the organization’s account. Instead, users can only find it if they type in the word “hey jane health” – the account’s full name. This, Davis said, constitutes a shadow ban. “For someone who’s not following us but is seeking out care, there’s really no way for them to be able to know that the only way to find us is to type ‘hey jane health’,” Davis said. (Sherman, 1/29)

A cadre of red and purple states is introducing bills this week to impose restrictions on abortion pills over claims that the drugs could be contaminating drinking water. The new legislation in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, West Virginia and Wyoming — which would require doctors who prescribe abortion pills to make their patients collect and return their expelled fetuses in medical waste bags for disposal — is the latest development in anti-abortion groups’ yearslong campaign to wield environmental laws to cut off access to the drugs. (Wittenberg and Ollstein, 1/30)

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication Thursday to treat pain from an injury or surgery. It is expensive, with a list price of $15.50 per pill. But unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive. That is because the drug, suzetrigine, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and to be sold as Journavx, works only on nerves outside the brain, blocking pain signals. It cannot get into the brain. (Kolata, 1/30)

Suzetrigine is the first new painkiller approved in the US since Celebrex, a type of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug called a Cox-2 inhibitor, which was approved in 1998. ... The medication was discovered after researchers learned about a family of fire walkers in Pakistan and discovered that they lacked a gene allowing pain signals to fire in their skin. Members of this family could walk over hot coals without flinching. “They knew that they were on something hot; they knew they could feel the coals. So it’s not impacting the nerves that do heat and touch and stuff like that. It is just these pain-conducting nerves,” said Stuart Arbuckle, chief operating officer of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. “They were, in every other way, normal.” Still, it took scientists 25 years to figure out how to exploit that pain-conducting mechanism to develop a medication. (Goodman, 1/30)

Also —

Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18 to 45. It's a crisis that has impacted so many lives and families, but a new way of fighting fentanyl overdoses could be coming out of Stockton. In one of the labs inside the School of Pharmacy at the University of the Pacific is where a team discovered a new way to deliver naloxone, the chemical in Narcan that is used to combat overdoses, that they say will save even more lives. (Reynoso, 1/30)

The Cigna Group will spend up to $150 million to reform its prior authorization, patient advocacy and provider services this year, CEO David Cordani said Thursday. The commitment comes a month after the assassination of a high-profile industry executive sparked loud, public conversations about the worsening value of health insurance. (Tepper, 1/30)

Local police conducted security checks and stood guard at the homes of health-care executives dozens of times in the weeks after UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was killed on Dec. 4 — a sign of the heightened concerns that security professionals say persist after the targeted shooting. In suburban Texas, police arrived at the home of David Joyner, chief executive of CVS, for a “special watch” in the shooting’s immediate aftermath. Later that day, police in Connecticut patrolled the secluded home of Cigna CEO David Cordani. And over the next few days, police officers in Missouri were hired to sit overnight in an unmarked car outside the home of Centene CEO Sarah London. (1/29)

More health industry updates —

CommonSpirit Health plans to expand its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts despite employers across the country and in all industries backing away from the programs and the Trump administration taking aim at them. The 137-hospital system seeks to bolster its partnership with Morehouse School of Medicine, a historically Black medical school, in part by creating 10 new residency training sites at CommonSpirit hospitals. It also is seeking a chief health equity officer to help lead those efforts, said Dr. Veronica Mallett, chief administrative officer of the More in Common Alliance, a partnership formed by the health system and Morehouse. (DeSilva, 1/30)

Steward Health Care is threatening to cut off critical medical record and billing services it continues to provide to its six former Massachusetts hospitals unless it receives millions of dollars more each month, a move the hospitals say could create wide-scale disruptions and potentially even force some to close. The new owners of those hospitals have been scrambling for nearly a month as a result of the demands, and this week filed motions in Steward’s bankruptcy case demanding the chain adhere to the contract, which covers a range of software and technology services including digital patient records for radiology, laboratory, pathology, microbiology, and pharmacy. (Bartlett, 1/31)

Cardinal Health warned Thursday that if President Donald Trump follows through with threatened tariffs next month, higher prices for some of the company's products will follow. Trump is set to impose a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on goods from China starting Saturday. (Dubinsky, 1/30)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Most Insurance Covers IUDs. Hers Cost More Than $14,000. 
During her annual OB-GYN visit, Callie Anderson asked about getting off the birth control pill. “We decided the best option for me was an IUD,” she said, referring to an intrauterine device, a long-acting, reversible type of birth control. Anderson, 25, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, asked her doctor how much it might cost. At the time, she was working in a U.S. senator’s local office and was covered under her father’s insurance through a plan offered to retired state police. “She told me that IUDs are almost universally covered under insurance but she would send out the prior authorization anyway,” Anderson said. She said she heard nothing more and assumed that meant it was covered. (Appleby, 1/31)

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday ruled against a federal law requiring young adults to be 21 to buy handguns, finding it violated the Second Amendment. The ruling, handed down by a panel of three judges on the conservative U.S. 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, comes amid major shifts in the national firearm legal landscape following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights in 2022. The court found that people aged 18-to-20 should not be prohibited from buying guns. (Cline and Whitehurst, 1/30)

For decades, researchers, physicians, and epidemiologists were stymied in their efforts to study gun violence as a public health issue, a link that was first made in the late 1970s. The CDC began funding gun violence research in the 1990s, as the rates of firearm homicide and suicide spiked, but lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively halted federal dollars for the research. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress struck a bipartisan deal jointly awarding the NIH and CDC an annual $25 million to study gun violence. (Magee, 1/30)

Baltimore is cautiously celebrating a sharp downward trend of ghost guns and what could be a harbinger of progress in the fight against gun violence across the country. (Dwyer and See, 1/30)

Students gathered to protest at Antioch High School less than one week after a deadly shooting on campus. Just before the school reopened Tuesday, students lined up along Hobson Pike holding signs protesting gun violence. Signs reading, “Safety and peace should not be privileges” and “I want to attend graduation not funerals” were on display as students echoed chants of, “Kids over guns!” ... The protest follows a rally Monday at the Capitol, where dozens of students and people affected by gun violence gathered as lawmakers met for the first day of a special legislative session. (Jackson, 1/28)

Hospitals in Colorado, Virginia and the nation’s capital said Thursday they have paused gender-affirming care for young people as they evaluate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at cutting federal support for such care. Denver Health in Colorado has stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for people under age 19, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday, in order to comply with the executive order and continue receiving federal funding. (Johnson, Bose and Bargfeld, 1/31)

More on gender-affirming care in Colorado —

A Colorado representative introduced a bill Wednesday that would make bringing a minor from another state to Colorado for abortion or gender-affirming care a crime. Introduced by Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, House Bill 25-1145 would add a provision in Colorado statute that says a person, corporation, or government agency commits felony human trafficking if they bring a minor to Colorado to receive an abortion or gender-affirming care. (Toomer, 1/30)

A nationwide movement brought people together in Denver Thursday at a rally to empower transgender voices, unite allies and advocate for equality and justice. The effort is part of a push to unite as concerns grow in the transgender community following President Trump's efforts to roll back protections for transgender people across the country. That includes an executive order threatening funding for schools supporting transgender rights. (Arenas, 1/30)

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�������ýҕ�l Health News: Trump’s Order On Gender-Affirming Care Escalates Reversal Of Trans Rights
President Donald Trump ratcheted up his administration’s reversal of transgender rights on Tuesday with an executive order that seeks to intervene in parents’ medical decisions by prohibiting government-funded insurance coverage of puberty blockers or surgery for people under 19. Trump’s order, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” is certain to face legal challenges and would require congressional or regulatory actions to be fully enacted. But transgender people and their advocates are concerned it will nonetheless discourage prescriptions and medical procedures they consider to be lifesaving in some cases, while complicating insurance coverage for gender-affirming care. (Appleby, 1/31)

The Conversation U.S. interviewed Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute, an independent research center at the UCLA School of Law dedicated to studying sexual orientation and gender identity law. She describes the aims of the executive order, how much weight it carries, and how it should be understood in the broader context of legal battles over access to gender-affirming care. (Redfield, 1/30)

Before leaving office, President Biden’s health secretary approved the appointments of eight new candidates to a critical committee that helps set U.S. vaccination policy — a burst of activity within a matter of a few months that could, in theory, make it more difficult for the Trump administration to shape the panel with its own appointees, several sources have told STAT. (Branswell and Owermohle, 1/31)

In related news —

One scientist texted his landlord to say February rent would be late. Another wasn’t able to pay her credit card bill. Yet another wondered how much longer he could afford his mortgage. These were some of the effects of President Trump’s federal funding freeze on the postdoctoral researchers who rely on grants from the National Science Foundation. (Boodman, 1/30)

The start of a Trump administration. The prospect of political appointees that eschew scientific consensus. Renewed attacks on institutions of science. To many scientists, 2025 is shaping up like 2017. The same ingredients that were in the pressure cooker that led to the historic March for Science are present. But at the moment, there seem to be no cooks in the kitchen. There are no plans for another march. (Oza, 1/31)

In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down. In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers. In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter. Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced. (Wee, Walsh and Fassihi, 1/31)

Also —

On Thursday morning, President Trump addressed the nation, expressing his condolences to the families of those killed in the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C. He also blamed the Federal Aviation Administration for the crash, pointing to the FAA's diversity, equity and inclusion hiring efforts during the Biden administration. He did so without presenting or citing any evidence. The American Association of People with Disabilities calls the president's comments inappropriate, saying they push an anti-diversity agenda that will make America less safe. (Stahl, 1/30)

Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, a Democrat, just became the 13th voting member of Congress to give birth in office. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, was the 12th when she welcomed her first child last year. And under current House rules, neither was able to vote while on leave, recovering from giving birth. Now, they’re teaming up on a resolution to allow new parents to represent their constituents by designating another member to vote for them, commonly known as proxy voting, for 12 weeks after welcoming a child. (Panetta, 1/30)

As the strike by nearly 5,000 healthcare workers from Providence Health in Oregon reaches the 3-week mark, representatives from the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) union, which is representing the workers, and the health system are in mediation at the request of Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D). (Henderson, 1/30)

Endeavor Health, a network of hospitals and medical clinics in the Chicago area, is shutting down inpatient psychiatric care later this year at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights. Inpatient psychiatric services at the hospital will be discontinued starting on April 11. The move will affect about 100 employees at the hospital, who will be offered other positions across the system, Endeavor Health confirmed on Thursday. (Feurer, 1/30)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Drawn-Out Overhaul Of Troubled Montana Hospital Leaves Lawmakers In Limbo
Montana lawmakers are grappling with what they can do to improve patient care and operations at the state’s psychiatric hospital since realizing that the efforts underway to restore the troubled facility’s good standing could take more time. The nearly 150-year-old Montana State Hospital has recently struggled to care for patients and retain staff. The problems came to a head in 2022, when federal investigators yanked the hospital’s federal certification — and funding — from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services because of a pattern of patient deaths found to be preventable, as well as injuries and falls. (Silvers, 1/31)

Wheelchair-bound Terie Gelberg has lived at the Harborside, a retirement community on Long Island’s North Shore, for almost two decades. It was supposed to be the last home for the 99-year-old with memory issues, but plans to sell the bankrupt facility to a private equity firm threaten to upend her care. She, alongside other residents of Harborside’s Port Washington nursing home, memory-care and assisted-living units will be forced to relocate if a bankruptcy court judge approves Focus Healthcare Partners’ $80 million deal to buy the complex in February. (Braun, 1/30)

San Francisco must rehire two city employees who left their jobs after refusing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus for religious reasons, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The Selina Keene and Melody Fountila were longtime employees of San Francisco’s Human Resources Agency, where they worked on job training and employment plans for low-income residents. They retired from their jobs after the city required all 35,000 of its employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by Nov. 29, 2021. (Egelko, 1/30)

At least four cases of measles, including two involving school-aged children, have been reported in Texas in less than two weeks, putting state health agencies on alert. For some communities, this is the first case of measles in more than 20 years. (Simpson and Carver, 1/30)

'Clinic in a box' helps homeless patients —

A Florida-based technology company is delivering health care solutions to people living without housing in Tampa — and it's coming in the shape of a box. The OnMed CareStation is an 8-by-11-foot self-enclosed pod that plugs into the wall and resembles an exam room. It's equipped with thermal imaging, medical devices to take vital signs like blood pressure and a high-definition camera for real-time video chats with teleheath providers. (Paul, 1/30)

One cold morning in Baltimore last October, a 26-year-old named Alexander Laurenson strode into a small white room to have his arm preyed upon by mosquitoes. As requested, he had not showered the night before to make his skin more attractive to the pests, which are drawn to body odor. The mosquitoes, for their part, had been infected with malaria, a disease that kills over 600,000 people every year. Mr. Laurenson was part of a study to test the effectiveness of a new monoclonal antibody designed to prevent malaria transmission. (Crane, 1/28)

A diagnosis is more than words on a page. It’s everything that comes with it: the doctor’s tone of voice, a gentle touch of the hand, the pauses left so the patient can digest the news. All of these details subtly impart how you should think about the label that you’ve just been given. But one diagnostic word in particular threatens to derail any rational discussion of its meaning: cancer. (Gross, 1/28)

Over a decade ago, a smattering of studies suggested that early cousins of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro could prevent, or even reverse, signs of Alzheimer’s disease in mice. Now, as the next generation of these medications has soared in popularity, and scientists discover they may have wide-ranging health benefits, research is revving up to investigate whether the drugs that upended diabetes and obesity care could also revolutionize Alzheimer’s treatment. Emerging evidence seems encouraging — but questions and caveats abound. (Smith and Blum, 1/31)

Tucked away in a tangle of streets around Rome’s Termini station is a clinic that sharply contrasts with the hardline, anti-migrant stance of Italian politicians. The Samifo Centre is described by the people behind it as Europe’s – and perhaps the world’s – only publicly funded service aimed at treating post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma among asylum seekers and refugees. (Kassam, 1/27)

White fur, blubbery skin, sharp claws. Polar bears seem perfectly adapted to their frigid habitat up north. Now, researchers have discovered the bears have another unexpected Arctic adaptation: greasy fur. It’s a trait that, surprisingly, might help us find alternatives to “forever chemicals,” a class of widely used compounds that are linked to a range of health problems in people. ... By re-creating the bears’ ability to resist icing, researchers hope to develop healthier alternatives to these toxic chemicals. (Grandoni, 1/29)

Physicians received unexpected news recently when a a small study published in JAMA Network Open found that ChatGPT-4 had outdone us at our own craft: diagnosis, what some have called the physician’s “most important procedure.” The study’s large language model (LLM) outperformed doctors, achieving a 90% diagnostic reasoning score on challenging cases while physicians — even those working with the chatbot — reached only 76%. (Lakshmi Krishnan, 1/31)

If and when the full Senate votes on whether to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the federal government’s top health agency, it will say as much about the senators who are voting as about Kennedy himself. The central question is this: Are Senate Republicans willing to put their duty to the nation above their fealty to a president whose appointment in this case is so intentionally irresponsible as to barely rise above the level of a fraternity prank? The indications aren’t good. (1/30)

In his first days in office, Trump hasn’t made curtailing abortion a major priority. His Justice Department has not, so far, acceded to requests from the anti-abortion movement to declare the mailing of abortion pills illegal under the 19th-century Comstock Act, though that could easily change. (Michelle Goldberg, 1/31)

Compared with President Donald Trump’s many attacks on science so far in his second term, his affront to climate science feels like a mere flesh wound at the moment. Delaying cancer research, depriving HIV and AIDS patients of life-saving medicine and divorcing from the World Health Organization in the middle of a bird-flu outbreak all feel like more urgent emergencies. (Mark Gongloff, 1/31)

After watching Donald Trump try to pin Wednesday’s awful air collision over the Potomac on the diversity of our air traffic controllers, I am going to retire the word “unbelievable” from my vocabulary. We do not know what caused this national tragedy, and Trump said that. But he also suggested that 67 people lost their lives because Joe Biden lowered the standards for air traffic controllers, though there is not even a wisp of evidence behind that claim. (Melinda Henneberger, 1/30)

In the fall of 2020, even as scientists raced to develop Covid-19 vaccines, Americans’ trust in these lifesaving shots plummeted. Many became more skeptical because of the behavior of U.S. leaders. Our recent study, published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, tracks how the Trump administration applied public pressure on the FDA during the 2020 election season, sparking a crisis of vaccine confidence. (Anushka Bhaskar, Aaron S. Kesselheim and Daniel Carpenter, 1/31)