| | | | |  | | By Daniel Payne, Erin Schumaker and Carmen Paun | | | | 
There are more health policy questions than answers after President Donald Trump's first week back in office. | Mark Schiefelbein/AP | The health industry isn’t sure what to make of the first days of the Trump administration. Despite some discussion of health care on the campaign trail, the incoming administration has yet to release many details about its approach to top health policy concerns in its opening moves last week. “We don’t really have a clear sense of direction,” Beth Halpern, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells, who works with clients in the health industry, told Daniel on Friday. Trump’s orders to stop diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, for example, have left “way more questions than answers” for health clients, Halpern said. The Biden administration looked to use reimbursement policy for providers to boost health equity, but some health leaders worry that last week’s moves could jeopardize those programs. Then there’s the DOGE factor. President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a task force focused on reducing government spending led by health tech billionaire Elon Musk, could look to health programs for budget cuts. “It’s very much a day-to-day, if not hour-to-hour, situation,” she said. Some have looked for clues among the nominees Trump has chosen to oversee health policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s choice to lead HHS, has said he wants to reform regulatory agencies and the food system overall in service of public health. Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick for CMS head, has argued for the privatization of Medicare through Medicare Advantage plans. At times, nominees’ records and past plans appear to contradict one another. But details will likely become clearer in the coming weeks, she said. Nominees will speak more openly at their confirmation hearings. The Trump administration’s pause on all external communications from HHS has also made predicting future policies difficult. When the pause ends, industry leaders think they will get a clearer picture of what to expect from the administration, from public health to payment policy. Until then? “There’s a lot of clicking refresh these days.”
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Croagh Patrick, Ireland | Richard Schumaker | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Scientists discovered a previously unknown dinosaur species, which they’ve proposed calling Tameryraptor markgrafi, using photos of fossils that were destroyed during World World II bombings, The Washington Post reports. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
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Dr. Matthew Memoli, an NIH researcher who questioned Covid-19 vaccine mandates, has been tapped as NIH acting director. | Charles Dharapak/AP | The Trump administration has tapped Dr. Matthew Memoli, a Covid-19 vaccine mandate skeptic, to serve as acting director of the National Institutes of Health. In a July 2021 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Memoli wrote that mandated vaccination was “extraordinarily problematic,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Memoli spoke the following month at an agency roundtable on the ethics of vaccine mandates. An outbreak of Covid among vaccinated people in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the same month Memoli contacted Fauci showed that the virus could evade the protections provided by the vaccines. But in September 2021, Biden issued an order requiring federal employees and federal contractors to be vaccinated and also mandated that private-sector employers with more than 100 workers require vaccination or weekly testing. Memoli told the Journal he thought high-risk people should be vaccinated, but others could develop stronger immunity to the disease through infection, a stance similar to the one taken by President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead NIH, Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, during the pandemic. Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter signed by thousands of scientists, in which he argued for working to protect high-risk people from Covid while allowing others to develop immunity through infection. He issued the declaration in October 2020 before vaccines were approved. What’s next: Memoli, a longtime NIH researcher, whose work focuses on respiratory disease, including influenza, will serve as acting director during the confirmation process for Bhattacharya. It’s not clear how long Memoli will hold the position. The NIH director is a Senate-confirmed role, and Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing date hasn’t been announced.
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The WHO is freezing recruitment and pausing travel, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told staff. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images | The World Health Organization is freezing recruitment and slashing travel in response to the U.S. withdrawing from the organization, POLITICO's Rory O’Neill reports. “As you know, the United States of America has announced that it intends to withdraw from WHO. We regret this decision and hope the new administration will reconsider it,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told staff Thursday in an internal email seen by POLITICO. “This announcement has made our financial situation more acute, and we know it has created significant concern and uncertainty for the WHO workforce,” he added. As Carmen has reported, the withdrawal will generate a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for the WHO’s core budget. The U.S. is the group’s largest funder, providing about a quarter of the core budget as a mandatory membership fee but often gives more — from $163 million to $816 million in recent years, according to health policy think tank KFF. In response, the WHO is “freezing recruitment, except in the most critical areas” and “significantly reducing travel expenditure.” All meetings must now be virtual unless in exceptional circumstances, and missions to provide technical support to countries should be “limited to the most essential.” Additional measures include limits on replacing IT equipment and suspending office refurbishments and capital investments unless they’re needed for security or cost-cutting. “This set of measures is not comprehensive, and more will be announced in due course,” the email said. Executive order fallout: The changes came after President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO on the day he took office. The U.S. will leave the global health body within a year from the official notification to the United Nations and the WHO. The loss could hinder the WHO’s ability to swiftly and effectively respond to infectious disease outbreaks and other emergencies worldwide. In exchange, the U.S. is expected to lose access to the global network that sets the flu vaccine’s composition every year. It will also weaken the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ability to surveil and contain health threats abroad, according to global health experts. What’s next: The WHO and many global health advocates hope Trump will reconsider withdrawing, a possibility the president left open during a speech in Las Vegas on Saturday. "Maybe we would consider doing it again. I don't know. Maybe we would have to clean it up a little bit," Trump said, adding that the U.S. pays more into the global health organization than China, which has a much bigger population. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
