What to Know About Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s Potential NIH Pick
Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University in California, has emerged as President-elect Donald Trump’s top pick to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to reporting from the Washington Post. Amid Trump’s stated plans to “restructure federal agencies,” Bhattacharya would indeed be an outsider coming in to lead the NIH. And Bhattacharya has previously said he believes top officials there hold too much influence.
Notably, Bhattacharya garnered attention during the pandemic for a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. Written by Bhattacharya and two other public health experts from Harvard and Oxford, the declaration encouraged governments to lift lockdown restrictions on young and healthy people and to focus protection measures on the elderly. The purported aim was to allow COVID-19 to spread in a population in which it was less likely to be deadly, thereby encouraging widespread immunity that was not dependent on a vaccine, according to the authors.
Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.
Trinian Taylor, a 52-year-old car dealer, pushed his cart through the aisles of a supermarket as I pretended not to follow him. It was a bright August day in Northern California, and I had come to the store to meet Emily Auerbach, a relationship manager at Mattson, a food-innovation firm that creates products for the country’s largest food and beverage companies: McDonald’s and White Castle, PepsiCo and Hostess.
Auerbach was trying to understand the shopping behavior of Ozempic users, and Taylor was one of her case studies. She instructed me to stay as close as I could without influencing his route around the store. In her experience of shop-alongs, too much space, or taking photos, would be a red flag for the supermarket higher-ups, who might figure out we were not here to shop. “They’d be like, ‘You need to exit,’” she said.
Auerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $150 in exchange for being tailed, propelled his cart through snack aisles scattered with products from Mattson’s clients. He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess HoHos, without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos. We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey’s Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lay’s — they all barely registered.
Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor’s happy place: the produce section. He inspected the goods. “I’m on all of these,” he told us. “I eat a lot of pineapple. A lot of pineapple, cucumber, ginger. Oh, a lot of ginger.”
Promethazine for Children Under 6 Is Now Banned in Australia Due to Hallucination Fears.
Australia’s drug regulator has issued a safety warning over the medicine Phenergan and related products containing the antihistamine drug promethazine. The Therapeutic Goods Administration, or TGA, said the over-the-counter products should not be given to children under six due to concerns of serious side effects including hyperactivity, aggression and hallucination. Breathing can also become slow or shallow, which can be fatal.
When high doses are given, young children may also experience difficulties in learning and understanding, including reversible cognitive deficit and intellectual disability, the TGA said.
The latest alert follows international and Australian concerns about the medicine in young children, which is commonly used to manage conditions such as hay fever and allergies, travel sickness and for short-term sedation.
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Trump Leans Toward Selecting Surgeon and COVID Mandate Critic Martin Makary for Top FDA Job: Reports
While President-elect Donald Trump has already made his leadership picks for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a crucial spot for the biopharma industry remains open at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The name on the top of the list for the next administration’s FDA commissioner is Johns Hopkins surgeon and author Martin Makary, Reuters and Bloomberg reported this week, citing sources familiar with the matter. England-born Makary, current chief of Inlet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins, has received worldwide recognition for his achievements in novel surgeries and widely-used research, including a World Health Organization-sponsored checklist on surgical safety.
On the drug policy front, Makary has previously raised concerns about pharmaceutical companies “gaming the system” of the Orphan Drug Act, a pathway used to usher in treatments for rare diseases.
More recently, Makary has been an outspoken critic of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, which “ignored natural immunity,” he argued in 2023 remarks to the Senate’s COVID subcommittee. During the pandemic, natural immunity and herd immunity were topics often addressed by Makary, who expected the concepts to help COVID-19 be “mostly gone” by April 2021.
