fda
Clamping down on drug ads with fewer regulators
Kennedy and Makary have expressed an interest in clamping down on drug ads. Too bad most of the FDA staff who would do that are gone, according to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
Ed Silverman writes about a May 27 letter that Durbin sent to Makary, in which Durbin noted that four key leaders of the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion recently departed the agency, and the entire Division of Promotion Policy, Research, and Operations — a unit that developed guidance on pharmaceutical advertising — also was reportedly laid off.
Read more from Ed on the long-running debate over drug ads and new concerns over telehealth companies advertising GLP-1s. Although not strictly related, Makary was an executive of the telehealth company Sesame, which connects consumers to physicians who can prescribe compounded weight loss drugs.
tobacco regulation
Will kids warm to heated tobacco?
Tobacco companies have sparked yet another debate with a new type of product that's probably less harmful than cigarettes but worse than vapes, Sarah Todd reports from STAT's commercial determinants of health beat.
Philip Morris International's new device, which extracts nicotine by warming tobacco, is branded as IQOS (pronounced "eye koss"). It's not clear that IQOS could reach the level of popularity that Juul achieved prior to FDA actions and legal challenges – Juuling became a verb, but "eye kossing" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Still, anti-tobacco advocates worry that the products will result in more people, including kids, getting hooked on tobacco products, and they say there is no need for a safer cigarette substitute if it's more dangerous to health than the existing alternative.
Read more for Sarah's description of the marketing tactics that Philip Morris International is using to get people to try IQOS.
research grants
When the guy tracking grant terminations loses funding himself
STAT's Anil Oza has an interesting interview with Scott Delaney, who along with Noam Ross set up Grant Watch database to offer the most detailed, public accounting of projects halted by the NIH.
Delaney is well suited to the task. He's trained as both an epidemiologist and a lawyer. In addition to documenting the extent of NIH grant terminations, the database has been helpful in legal challenges to NIH grant cancellations.
Delaney has now been hit by grant cancellations himself as a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Read Anil's story to see what Delaney has to say about that.
taxes
Taxing a university while it's down
The House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill would hit rich universities, including Harvard, with a 21% tax on income generated by their endowments, according to The Harvard Crimson. Research is on the list of activities that would be especially hurt.
The point of the bill is to cut taxes, and it does so to the tune of $3.8 trillion in lost government revenue over the next decade, according to nonpartisan congressional scorekeepers.
Unless you're a prestigious university. The bill escalates Republican attacks on the ivory towers of academia. The Trump administration in April froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard in an effort to force the university to dramatically change how it admits and disciplines students and how it hires, fires and promotes professors. Harvard is suing the federal government over the action.
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