The STAT health newsletter tries to discredit the current administration every which way, from measles to mental health to dissing the candidate for CDC Director
First STAT story: “I believe in my gut not all measles cases are being reported.” And as Senator Cassidy noted, some people believe Elvis is still alive. Really, who cares how many there are? Maybe some people don’t want to be catalogued, categorized and used by a government they no longer trust.
Why health experts fear the West Texas measles outbreak may be much larger than reported
The growing measles outbreak centered in West Texas, with cases reaching into New Mexico and now Oklahoma, is the country’s largest in six years. But experts say that even with more than 250 cases reported across the three states, the outbreak is likely much larger.
“My gut tells me there are cases that are unreported — you don’t have to come in and get tested for measles,” said Katherine Wells, the director of public health in Lubbock, a Texas city on the edge of the outbreak where some sick children have been taken to be hospitalized. “It’s going to be a long process to get everything measles-free again in this area, but I can’t tell you if that’s 500 cases or a thousand.”
Second STAT story: People will die!
The new administration’s decision to fire a tenth of the workers at the federal government agency that oversees mental and behavioral health will imperil efforts to curb suicides and drug overdose deaths, according to current and former employees.
Roughly 100 employees of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were let go according to insiders’ estimates.
Note: the Biden Administration increased the federal workforce by 10% overall and increased HHS (under which this agency falls) by 20%. So probably SAMHSA still has more employees than it did 4 years ago. Mostly SAMHSA gives out grants. Can’t 90% staffing prevent any emergencies? Or are they seeking to create them?
How well has SAMHSA saved lives so far? I’m not impressed:
Third trashy STAT propaganda piece today: Oh No, the proposed CDC Director is a doctor who cares about vaccine safety. Can we cut him off at the knees?
MELBOURNE, Fla. — Unlike President Trump’s picks to lead other health agencies who established their conservative bona fides during the Covid-19 pandemic, his choice to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dave Weldon, was virtually invisible during that period.
But an examination by STAT of thousands of pages of documents from Weldon’s 14 years in Congress, part of his archives housed here at the Florida Institute of Technology, and interviews with a half-dozen former health officials, found that his support for anti-vaccine theories runs long and deep. His advocacy of these views goes back decades, even longer than those of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services….