In other news:
Pro-RFK Jr. letter to the Senate includes names of doctors whose licenses were revoked or suspended “The AP found that in addition to the physicians who had faced disciplinary action, many of the nearly 800 signers are not doctors. The letter with the names of those who signed was provided to the AP by Sen. Ron Johnson’s office after he entered it into the Congressional Record on Wednesday during the first of Kennedy’s two confirmation hearings…
Over 20 were chiropractors, representing an industry that has funded Kennedy’s work. An AP investigation found that donations from a chiropractic group represented one-sixth of the revenues collected by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit in 2019.”
Trump administration indefinitely suspends meetings of HHS' health IT advisory committee “The Trump administration indefinitely canceled meetings of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC), an advisory panel that helps the federal government establish rules and standards for the use of healthcare data and technologies.
The HITAC was established by the 21st Century Cures Act, was enacted in 2016 and began having its first public meetings in 2018.”
Trump tariffs threaten US drug supplies and risk higher prices, trade groups warn Comment: As of this writing, the Mexican and Canadian tarrifs have been suspended for a month pending further talks.
Bipartisan lawmakers introduce bill boosting physician pay by 6.6% from April through December “The proposed adjustment would take effect April 1 and run through the rest of 2025, thereby leaving the year’s 2.83% Medicare pay cut in place for services furnished from January to March. Services furnished after the cutoff, however, would see a 6.62% increase—offsetting the pay cut, adjusting for inflation and prorating the first three months of pay cuts.”
In a first, scientists find microplastics are building up deep in our brains “A paper published Monday in Nature Medicine found that the tiny fragments of plastic are passing the blood-brain barrier and into human brains, and the amount of microplastics in the brain appears to be increasing over time. There were 50 percent more fragments in brains analyzed in 2024 than in 2016.
The scientists also examined the brains of 12 deceased patients diagnosed with dementia, and found that they had three to five times more microplastics than normal brains.”