Federal judge rolls back landmark disability protections
The STAT Morning Rounds newsletter leads with a federal judge rolling back landmark disability protections; the provided excerpt does not include further details on that ruling.
At a Senate committee hearing, Heidi Overton, the Trump administration's pick to lead the FDA, faced tough questions about how she would help the agency get back on track after a turbulent 18 months. She defended a White House plan to split the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine into several parts. She refused to explain why she did not push back on President Trump's comments that the MMR shot is 'lethal,' but told lawmakers the shot is safe and effective. Overton said her priorities if confirmed would be to boost U.S. drug development and manufacturing, expand inspections of clinical trial data from China, and expedite rare disease drug reviews. Asked about the abortion pill mifepristone as the FDA undertakes a new safety review, she avoided directly saying the drug was safe, but said it 'has met the safety and efficacy standard according to the FDA review.' Overton had previously published a paper questioning the drug's safety.
Senior health policy adviser Chris Klomp is poised to become health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s second-in-command after clearing a key Senate committee. The Senate Committee on Finance voted Thursday 15-12, with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) joining Republicans, to approve Klomp as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. His nomination now heads to the full Senate, where it is likely to succeed. Klomp has already had substantial power as a liaison between the White House and HHS, where he brokered deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices and took part in key hiring decisions.
Earlier this week, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya held his first media briefing since the start of his tenure. The news was an update to PubMed, the NIH-run repository of biomedical research papers: a new button called 'Linked Discoveries' will show the constellation of research surrounding a paper, what the NIH refers to as research 'neighborhoods.' Bhattacharya hopes it will provide a better sense of how a paper has held up since it was published. He pitched this as part of an effort to improve the rigor and reproducibility of the work his agency funds, something he has referred to as a potential 'second scientific revolution.' He has also weighed creating a journal to publish, though the excerpt is truncated at that point.