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      Dr Martin Makary Chosen to Head the FDA

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said: “F.D.A. has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator.” He said that Dr. Makary would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president-elect’s choice for the cabinet-level role as health secretary, to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs.”“I am confident that Dr. Makary, having dedicated his career to high-quality, lower-cost care will restore the F.D.A. to the gold standard of scientific research and cut the bureaucratic red tape at the agency to make sure Americans get the medical cures and treatments they deserve,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies

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      It’s such a bother when politicians have to go and complicate your clean narrative about why they’re succeeding.Last week, I spoke to Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Polis’s state was, if not a bright spot for Democrats, a less-dark one. In New York, Democrats lost 11 points off their 2020 margin; in New Jersey, 10 points; in Massachusetts, nine and a half points; in California, nine points (though votes are still being counted); in Illinois, seven points. In Colorado, the difference was two and a half points. What is Polis, who won re-election in 2022 by a 19-point margin, doing right?One answer — and this, to be honest, was the answer I’d gone looking for — is focusing relentlessly on the cost of living. “You can’t just do one policy and expect, somehow, people will know it,” Polis told me. “But they generally understand the drumbeat of 30, 40 things you’re doing, each of which reduces costs in a different way. And so that’s been our strategy: to flood the zone with this work to reduce costs.”Polis points with pride to his successful efforts to expand pre-K and kindergarten and get a public insurance option onto the Colorado health exchanges — but also to his rejection of proposals to add benefits that would drive up costs. He’s happy to brag about reducing the tax rate for both businesses and individuals, walking me through every decimal-point reduction he achieved, and the many bills he’s signed to make it easier to build homes.“When you say something a lot, it means you generally believe it,” Polis said. “So here’s a line I often use: We want the best solutions from the left and the right to save people money.”But during our conversation, and in the days after, another answer emerged — and for Democrats this one is a little more challenging. Polis is a dissenter from the trends that swept through Democratic governance during the pandemic. He was unusual among Democratic governors for the emphasis he put on both personal responsibility and personal liberty. Colorado opened early, sparking a tourism boom, and Polis tried to rely more on information than compulsion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Destroy One of Civilization’s Best Achievements

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      Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.His opposition to vaccines has attracted the most attention. He doesn’t say just that they merit closer scrutiny, as some “vaccine skeptics” claim. Last year he told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” When it later became expedient, he denied that he had ever said such a thing. The truth is that he has long promoted the lie that vaccines cause autism, and the extravagantly false claim that “researchers have done very little to study the health” of children after they get shots for once-common diseases.Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Considered ‘Moderate Drinking’?

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      That depends on whom you ask, and what country you live in. Here’s what the research suggests and how to think about it.Over the past several years, there has been a rise in alcohol-related deaths and a steady wave of news about the health risks of drinking. Calls for people to drink only in moderation have become more urgent. But what, exactly, does that mean?“Tongue in cheek, people have defined it as not drinking more than your doctor,” said Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.More officially, in the United States, moderate drinking is defined as one drink or less per day for women and two drinks or less per day for men. But other countries define moderate drinking, also called low-risk drinking, differently, and recent research around alcohol’s health harms has raised questions about current guidelines.How are the guidelines set?Experts used to think that low or moderate amounts of alcohol were good for you. That assumption was based on research showing that people who drank in moderation lived longer than those who abstained or drank excessively. The longevity benefit disappeared around two drinks a day for women and three drinks a day for men, Dr. Stockwell said.But many researchers now think that those conclusions were based on data analyses that had “all kinds of methodological problems,” said Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, a professor of nutrition and medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.For example, one issue was that many people who abstained from alcohol did so because they had existing health problems, while people who drank moderately were more likely to have healthy lifestyle habits. It created “really what was an illusion of health benefits with low to moderate amounts of drinking,” Dr. Mayer-Davis said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Sues for Access to Records of Women Seeking Out-of-State Abortions

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      The lawsuit takes aim at federal privacy rules, including one enacted this year that Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, called “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.”Texas has sued to block federal rules that prohibit investigators from viewing the medical records of women who travel out of state to seek abortions where the procedure is legal.The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Lubbock, targets medical privacy regulations that were issued in 2000, and takes aim at a rule issued in April that specifically bans disclosing medical records for criminal or civil investigations into “the mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing or facilitating reproductive health care.”Texas bans abortions in almost all circumstances. Women are not subject to criminal prosecution for obtaining abortions, but state law imposes penalties of as much as life in prison for those who aid in obtaining abortions.The lawsuit claims that the privacy rules ignore federal law that lets states view medical records “for law enforcement purposes.”In a statement on Wednesday, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, called the April rule “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.” He added: “The Biden administration’s motive is clear: to subvert lawful state investigations on issues that the courts have said the states may investigate.”Officials with the federal Health and Human Services Department did not comment on the lawsuit, but told The Associated Press that the Biden administration “remains committed to protecting reproductive health privacy and ensuring that no woman’s medical records are used against her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Health Secretary Goes West With a Focus on Reproductive Rights

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      Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, said on Friday that he would begin a national tour next week to promote the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve and expand access to abortion.The tour, which Mr. Becerra will begin on Tuesday in Washington, will take him to states across the West, including Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico. Mr. Becerra plans to attend round-table discussions with health care providers, family-planning groups and families who have been affected by restrictive state abortion laws.In an interview, Mr. Becerra said he would be traveling with good news after the Supreme Court this week unanimously rejected a bid to sharply curtail access to mifepristone, a widely available abortion pill. But, he added, his message would be no less urgent.“A lot of women are still confused — can they get an abortion?” he said, describing the tour as way to ensure that people have clear and accurate information. “How long are they able to do so? Who can provide it? We want women to know that women still have a lot of rights.”Mr. Becerra’s tour is not on behalf of President Biden’s re-election campaign. But he will be talking about reproductive rights in states with key races on the ballot in November.Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the issue has become central to elections, and Democrats are betting abortion rights will help them drive voters to the polls. In Southwestern swing states with large Latino populations, like Arizona and Nevada, they are looking to motivate Latina voters in particular.Former President Donald J. Trump has said abortion access should be left to the states, and several Republican candidates in swing-state races have aligned himself with him, avoiding mention of a national ban and laying bare the party’s rift over the issue.The White House has given Mr. Becerra the task of helping to protect access to reproductive care since Democrats and reproductive rights advocates first pressured Mr. Biden to act in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. In 2022, his agency pledged to work with the Justice Department to ensure access to abortion pills. He has been meeting with patients and providers across the country since then, including stops at Planned Parenthood clinics in St. Louis and Minneapolis.In the interview on Friday, Mr. Becerra said that many women across the country were still being turned away from emergency rooms, had been forced to go to court to plead for care or had needed to travel hundreds of miles for treatment. Antiabortion activists are still seeking to curb access to contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.“So many people are confused or afraid right now, and it is tough to make good decisions when you are confused or afraid,” he said. More

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      U.S. Failed to Safeguard Many Migrant Children, Review Finds

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      Many sponsors were inadequately vetted and safety checks went unfulfilled, an independent watchdog found. Children ended up in dangerous jobs across the country.An independent government watchdog found serious lapses at the Department of Health and Human Services in its protection of children who migrate to the United States on their own, according to a report released Thursday.H.H.S., the federal agency responsible for sheltering migrant children when they arrive by themselves, repeatedly handed them over to adult sponsors in the United States without thorough vetting and sometimes failed to conduct timely safety checks on children once they were released, said the report by the department’s inspector general.“I would define these gaps as very serious,” said Haley Lubeck, the project leader for the review. “We know that these children are especially vulnerable to exploitation.”The findings echoed New York Times reporting that the screening of sponsors and other safeguards for migrant children broke down during the first years of the Biden administration as hundreds of thousands of children crossed the border amid a pandemic-era economic collapse in parts of Central America. Migrant children have ended up working dangerous industrial jobs in violation of child labor laws across the country — in slaughterhouses, factories, construction sites and elsewhere, The Times found. Some have been gravely injured or killed.The report follows a June audit that H.H.S. conducted in response to Times reporting that found that many children were living with strangers who expected or even forced them to work. That audit revealed that government case workers had released more than 340 migrant children to adults who were sponsoring three or more children who were not family members.In early 2021, record numbers of children started crossing the border faster than H.H.S. could process them. With no room left in shelters, many children stayed on cots in crowded tents, sparking public outrage. The Biden administration pressured staff members to move the children out of shelters more quickly, and government workers said they saw children being sent to adults who clearly intended to put them to work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Begins a Reproductive Rights Tour on 51st Anniversary of Roe

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      The administration’s task force on reproductive rights also announced what officials said were new steps to help Americans get contraceptives and abortions under an emergency care law.Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Wisconsin on Monday morning to host an event in support of abortion rights while President Biden brings together a task force on reproductive health care in Washington.Both events are designed to call attention to the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, and to announce new steps that Mr. Biden’s administration has taken to support abortion access since the court struck it down in 2022.“Even as Americans — from Ohio to Kentucky to Michigan to Kansas to California — have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “On this day and every day, Vice President Harris and I are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom.”Ms. Harris, who has become the administration’s most vocal defender of abortion rights, chose Wisconsin as the backdrop for the first in a series of abortion rights events her office has planned around the country through the spring. Kirsten Allen, the vice president’s press secretary, said that Ms. Harris’s office had planned several more stops, over the next two to three months, in “states that have enshrined protections, restricted access and states that continue to threaten access, causing chaos and confusion.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More