nih
Bhattacharya wants to have it both ways
Jay Bhattacharya used to tout his research on racial disparities in health care before he joined the Trump administration's assault on DEI research, according to a story by Anil Oza, Usha Lee McFarling and Eric Boodman.
The announcement of Bhattacharya's appointment and his public profile at Stanford University both state that his work has focused on vulnerable populations. He has published at least five papers on racial health disparities. In June, he lauded NIH sickle cell research as the kind of work "that advances the health and well-being of minority populations," and that the NIH should continue supporting.
But Bhattacharya's tenure has also seen such science swept up in the Trump administration's attack on DEI. Read more about how Bhattacharya seems to toe the line on Trump's anti-DEI agenda while saying positive-sounding things about health disparities research.
lobbying
Singing from the same hymn sheet
Casey Ross, with some help from me, writes about how MAGA social media influencers seemed to have joined forces with a dark money group to defeat legislation aimed at ending a business practice that large private Medicare Advantage insurers use to get the federal government to pay them more for covering seniors.
When Republicans were debating how to pay for Trump's tax cuts, they briefly considered cracking down on upcoding in Medicare Advantage.
A MAGA social media influencer with nearly a million followers on X took a sudden interest in that news, attacking Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) who was pushing those MA reforms.
In addition to calling Cassidy names and accusing him of undermining President Trump, the influencer praised Medicare Advantage in nearly identical language to that found on the website of the dark money group Medicare Advantage Majority.
Other MAGA influencers piled on, and the proposal was quickly dropped. Read more about how Republican lawmakers feel about this phenomenon.
drug pricing
The PR of drug price transparency reports
Drugmakers are hardly raising prices and giving much of their hard-earned money to greedy middlemen. That, at least, is the takeaway from the drug price transparency reports that pharma releases.
But there's a lot missing from those reports, including pricing information about specific drugs and how much Americans spend on them, Bob Herman reports. They serve to advance pharma's political talking points by blaming others for high prices and masking the industry's opposition to full, mandated price transparency, health economists and other experts in the field tell Bob.
Read more for the backstory on the reports, what they say, and what they don't say.
fda
You got the wrong guy
When the FDA rejected a skin cancer therapy from the Replimune Group, several news outlets, including STAT, tied that decision to Vinay Prasad, the former head of the agency's biologics center who was ousted under criticism from conservative commentators.
Replimune's skin cancer therapy was among the products Prasad was criticized for blocking. There's just one problem: Prasad played no substantive role in the Replimune decision, according to Adam Feuerstein, who spoke to three FDA officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
Read on to find out who blocked Replimune's product and how it all went down.
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