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Good morning. Chelsea Cirruzzo filling in here today from D.C., where another fox has been spotted out and about around Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, I’m old enough to remember the last time a fox galavanted around the neighborhood. Let’s hope this one is not rabid.
Heidi Overton makes her case
Heidi Overton, the Trump administration’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, faced tough questions at a Senate committee hearing yesterday about how she would help the agency get back on track after a turbulent 18 months, my colleague Margaret Manto reports.
During the hearing, Overton 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 that the shot is safe and effective. Overton also signaled that her priorities, if confirmed, would be to boost U.S. drug development and manufacturing and expand inspections of clinical trial data from China. She also said expediting rare disease drug reviews is a key priority.
Overton was also asked about the abortion pill mifepristone as the FDA undertakes a new safety review of the drug. She avoided directly saying the drug was safe, but did say it “has met the safety and efficacy standard according to the FDA review.” Overton had previously published a paper questioning the safety of the drug.
Klomp clears Senate hurdle
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 in a 15-12 vote, with Sen. Sheldon Whithouse (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’s likely to succeed.
Klomp has already enjoyed a great deal of power as a liaison between the White House and HHS, where he’s brokered deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices and taken part in key hiring decisions.
Bhattacharya’s second ‘scientific revolution’
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 now 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.
Bhattacharya pitched this as part of an effort to improve the rigor and reproducibility of the work his agency funds, something he’s referred to as a potential “second scientific revolution.” He has also weighed creating a journal to publish negative results, funding teams to do replications, and creating new metrics of scientific success that reward collaboration and rigor.
This announcement comes on the heels of a difficult weekend for Bhattacharya, who was “called into the principal’s office” and faced a contentious meeting with the White House over a potential executive order to enact more political control on the agency. You can read more about “Linked Discoveries” directly from Bhattacharya, in a piece he published in the journal Science. — Anil Oza
‘Healthy’ on the package may not mean more nutritious
When a label says “less sugar” or “lower in sodium” or “natural,” you might think that food or beverage is more healthy. If you did, you would be wrong half the time. A new Nature Food study, prompted by Cornell researcher Miguel Gomez’s puzzlement over a package at his supermarket promising lower-fat cream cheese, found that single-ingredient claims are often trade-offs for lower nutritious quality overall.
To see if products marketed as healthy (there’s an FDA definition) are better than those making no such claims, Gomez aimed the U.K.’s Nutrient Profiling Model at 10 years of new products launched in the U.S. market. The tool gives demerits for excess sugar, sodium, saturated fat, and calories but credits for fiber, protein, and fruit and vegetable content.
Two-thirds of the products were rated less than healthy, even though half boasted health claims on their packages. Beverages were the worst. Products labeled “natural” (there’s no FDA definition) had only a halo of health.
Back to the cream cheese: The maker cut fat but added more sugar and sodium compared to the original flavor. The lesson here is to read the nutrition facts labels on the back, not the claims on the front. And hope the U.S. will embrace the traffic signals used in Chile and Mexico. – Elizabeth Cooney
Judge rolls back disability protections
The Justice Department said in June that it would no longer enforce laws that prioritized people with disabilities living and receiving services in their communities, rather than in nursing homes or facilities. It is making good on that promise.
A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that the Department of Health and Human Services must remove every mention of community integration from a landmark disability rule, a significant reversal for a federal government that has prioritized this right for decades.
The decision arrives just a few weeks after the Justice Department joined the lawsuit, Texas vs. Kennedy, which started in 2024 after 17 states sued the Biden administration over their update to section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. That part of the law prohibits disability-based discrimination by recipients of federal funds. The decision does not change the community protections ingrained in other laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.
While the lawsuit has always targeted Section 504 disability protections, the case started with a much different target in mind. Texas and 16 other states initially sued the federal government because the Biden administration added gender dysphoria as a protected disability in their 2024 update to the law. Disability advocates publicly worried that the case would eventually dismantle other disability protections. They were right. — O. Rose Broderick
What we’re reading
- First Opinion: RFK Jr.’s use of the National Center for Health Statistics will add confusion to the measles death count, STAT
- First Opinion: The ‘died with’ vs. ‘died of’ measles discussion misses something very important, STAT
- Deaths of students at University of Mississippi casts spotlight on kratom, The Associated Press
- Taylor Swift named her new song ‘Patient Zero.’ Where does the term originate? The New York Times