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Good morning. There’s a lot of great reporting to share today, so be sure to read all the way through the newsletter. We won’t have a newsletter tomorrow, Juneteenth, so I’ll talk to you again on Monday.
New announcement, old funds
The Trump administration announced yesterday it will spend $700 million in what Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called new investments for mental health and addiction programs. But behavioral health experts told STAT’s Lev Facher that the funds are actually long-awaited, existing grants that Congress had previously authorized and the federal government already planned to spend.
“We have a huge drug problem here in our country,” Kennedy said. “$700 million is not going to solve that problem. But the good news is, there’s about $50 billion that have been put aside during the litigation by the states against the opioid companies, and that money is now going to be available to the states over the next 20 years.” Read more from Lev.
Senate Dems demand federal vaccine records
In separate news on another classic Kennedy topic: Senate Democrats are opening an inquiry into the Trump administration’s remaking of federal vaccine policy, demanding officials produce records by next week. STAT’s Daniel Payne viewed a letter that senators sent to Kennedy, denouncing his changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in particular.
Democrats in Congress have regularly complained that HHS leaders aren’t compliant with their requests for information, and it’s hard to see how this inquiry would be different. Still, the letter offers clues about the direction of future oversight efforts by Democratic senators, especially if they’ve got a majority after the midterms. Read more on what that could look like.
FTC and state AGs sue trans health group
The Federal Trade Commission and four state attorneys general have sued the main professional organization for gender-affirming care clinicians, alleging it made false claims to sell medical services to kids.
The lawsuit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health was filed in the Northern District of Texas, a federal court with a conservative reputation where the Trump administration has recently centralized its legal efforts around gender-affirming care. Read more from Bob Herman and me.
Fancy baby formulas under scrutiny
Here in the U.S., infant formula has a good overall safety record. But the stakes are incredibly high if something goes wrong. In the past year, it’s gone wrong twice. Dozens of babies became sick with botulism last year after drinking contaminated formula from ByHeart. Last weekend, the brand Nara Organics was linked to three new cases.
“You buy a product that you think is going to be safe for them, and it ends up putting them in the hospital,” said Katie Connolly, a mother whose daughter got sick. A lot of parents may assume that more money can buy a better product, but it turns out that baby formula is a unique exception to that otherwise reliable American measure. STAT’s Sarah Todd spoke with food safety and regulatory experts about what’s going on with the infant formula supply and what action is needed. Read more.
How super-potent synthetic opioids spread
You might not have heard about a class of drugs called nitazenes, but they’re worth knowing: Nitazenes can be up to 40 times more potent than fentanyl and 500 times stronger than heroin. CDC data show that overdose deaths involving these drugs, which are almost always mixed with several other drugs to increase potency, have skyrocketed in recent years.
In a monthslong open source investigation, independent reporter Jonathan Moens combed through criminal court proceedings, filed national, state, and county-level freedom of information requests, and obtained scores of medical examiner reports to produce the most detailed account yet of how these drugs are infiltrating U.S. borders and destroying lives. Read more about what this deadly and highly profitable supply chain looks like, including how some synthetic opioid manufacturers are already adapting to new regulations.
These terminated diversity programs were working
Two diversity-oriented programs supported by the National Institutes of Health doubled the odds that an undergraduate student would earn a Ph.D., a new study found. Over the past year, both programs were terminated by the Trump administration — as was the funding for the study analyzing them.
“The word that comes to mind is heartbreaking,” Anna Woodcock, an author on the study, said about the termination of the research. It’s “just absolutely crushing to spend 20 years of a career doing this work to find it cut so abruptly.” Read more from STAT’s Anil Oza on what else the existing data show about diversity in academia.
What we’re reading
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Luigi Mangione will assert psychiatric defense in murder case in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s killing, AP
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The billion-dollar peptides gold rush, Bloomberg
- DOJ’s swift win in OhioHealth case should have hospitals studying their contracts, experts say, STAT
- AI is taking over hospitals, Atlantic
- Opinion: AI’s growing appetite for power is a public health issue. Here’s a fix, STAT