By The Defender Staff

Former Tobacco Executive Takes CDC Role

U.S. News & World Report reported:

A new hire at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is drawing backlash from public health experts who worry about his influence in the industry.

Stephen Sayle, named last month as the CDC’s deputy director for legislative affairs, previously worked for Fontem Ventures, a British tobacco company subsidiary.

The company focuses on products like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches. In an editorial published in the journal Tobacco Control, Dr. Timothy McAfee, a former head of the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health, called the appointment “unprecedented.” “It should be 100% clear that we don’t want former tobacco industry executives working inside the nation’s public health agencies helping influence policy adoption,” McAfee told STAT News in an email.

Others also said Sayle’s employment breaks earlier promises from U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “shut the revolving door” between industry and government, STAT said. Federal officials defended the appointment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told STAT that Sayle brings “more than 25 years of experience working at senior levels of the federal government and will be a valuable asset at the CDC to ensure effective coordination with Congress.”

HHS Halts CDC Vaccine Study Publication

EMS1 reported:

U.S. health officials stopped the publication of a study on whether the COVID-19 vaccine was keeping adults from becoming sick enough to have to go to the hospital.

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman on Wednesday confirmed the decision to halt publication, citing a dispute about the study’s methodology. The research paper was to appear in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s flagship publication.

One way scientists have studied COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness is by focusing on sick people who were admitted to hospitals or visited emergency rooms. The researchers check whether patients were vaccinated and then calculate the odds of a positive COVID-19 test among vaccinated patients vs. those who were unvaccinated. Papers using that methodology have been published — after review by experts in the field — in a number of esteemed journals, including Pediatrics and the New England Journal of Medicine.

FDA Scores Win in Health Group’s Lawsuit Over Homeopathic Drugs

Bloomberg Law reported:

A health group focused on natural medications failed to convince a federal court that the FDA unlawfully altered a policy to treat homeopathic drugs the same way as conventional drugs.

Judge Christopher Cooper for the US District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the FDA that the Alliance for Natural Health couldn’t prove that the government’s action is traceable to the group’s alleged injuries in the case.

The group and a homeopathic drug company, Meditrend Inc., filed a lawsuit in October 2024 challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s determination that homeopathic drugs are subject to the agency’s premarket …

​​How Some Food Additives Bypass the FDA Review Process

AGDAILY reported:

Nearly 70 years ago, Congress amended the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prohibit companies from using food additives before they have been rigorously vetted for safety. This change in the law, however, did not play out as the legislators intended.

The Food Additives Amendment, passed in 1958, created two pathways.

One was for food additives, which would undergo a safety review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration. The other pathway was created to enable common ingredients already in the food supply — think vinegar, or baking soda — to bypass the review because those ingredients were “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. And yet today, the vast majority of new ingredients, most of them industrially produced, make it to market via the GRAS pathway, said Jennifer Pomeranz, an associate professor of public health policy and management at the NYU School of Global Public Health.

Researchers like Pomeranz, along with some physicians, nonprofits, and the Government Accountability Office, have argued that these ingredients are not, in fact, generally recognized as safe. Instead, they say, food companies have learned to exploit what’s become known as the “GRAS loophole.”

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