HHS shakes ups key advisers

STAT News · Feb 13, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. Happy Friday. What are people reading to escape the February doldrums? I just started Samuel Delany’s “Babel-17.” Pediatricians face off against the government The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for kids, and the nation’s federal health agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, are at war. It’s a strange place to be. Both groups have a stated interest in fighting chronic disease in children, but are increasingly at loggerheads over what that means. AAP has taken on new roles in the second Trump administration, fighting to roll back vaccine policy changes and positioning itself as the de facto replacement for government vaccine advice. Later today, they will ask a federal judge to overturn Kennedy’s latest reforms. How is AAP changing its public strategy and internal structures to meet this political moment? STAT’s Daniel Payne has the scoop. The fallout from the FDA’s snub of the Moderna vaccine Will Trump administration policies paralyze the vaccine industry? The Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to review Moderna’s flu vaccine this week has sparked fears that companies could be dissuaded from developing new shots in the U.S., leaving the country flat-footed in future pandemics. Executives at large vaccine developers have dealt with tremendous uncertainty as health secretary and longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has removed shots from the childhood vaccination schedule and replaced members of a key immunization advisory board. The letter sent to Moderna on Tuesday by a top FDA official, Vinay Prasad, could spur companies to look overseas for vaccine development. It’s also another blow in a string of setbacks to Moderna. Read more from STAT’s Jason Mast. Want Moderna’s take on all this? Listen to an interview between Moderna President Stephen Hoge and my colleagues on STAT’s “The Readout LOUD” podcast. HHS shakes ups key advisers Four HHS political appointees have been elevated into more senior roles, the department announced Thursday, saying the restructuring is key to accelerating health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Chris Klomp, a former health IT CEO, will become chief counselor at HHS, overseeing “all operations of the department.” Klomp was previously the head of the Centers for Medicare and has also played a large role in the department’s push to lower drug prices. He joined a delegation of HHS officials, including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz, last week in meeting with key Senate Republicans on drug pricing legislation, STAT reported. Kyle Diamantas and Grace Graham have also been named senior counselors for the Food and Drug Administration. Graham was most recently the FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy. Diamantas, an attorney with ties to Donald Trump Jr., was deputy commissioner for human foods. John Brooks will also be senior counselor at CMS. Brooks, who was recently CMS’s chief policy and regulatory officer, worked on drug reform at HHS during Trump’s first term before moving into health policy consulting. — Chelsea Cirruzzo New menopause product labels unlocked The FDA has approved new labels for six menopause hormone therapies, the agency announced yesterday. The move comes three months after the FDA lifted a decades-old requirement that these products carry a strict black box warning label for cardiovascular, dementia, and breast cancer risks. Nearly 30 companies submitted proposed label changes at the FDA’s request, an agency press release noted. The first batch of approvals includes both systemic and vaginal products. Experts had mixed reactions to the change — both because of the atypical process that led to the decision and because it applied broadly to vaginal and systemic products, which carry different levels of risk. (Also contributing to the weird vibes, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary repeatedly referred to divorce and death as a consequence of untreated symptoms.) Read more in our November report on what made the process atypical and what information will stay on the labels. And I wrote in 2024 about the evidence for these products. — Theresa Gaffney Department of Labor reaches settlement on ghost networks The Department of Labor has reached a $28 million settlement with the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to resolve multiple investigations into the company’s failure to provide access to mental health and substance use disorder care. The decision arrives after years of lawsuits against insurance companies for failing to provide accurate provider lists despite a legal requirement to do so, creating so-called ghost networks. A 2017 study found that patients were unable to make appointments with more than 80% of providers listed as in-network. This situation forces people to seek care outside of their network, often at higher out-of-pocket costs. The settlement will affect millions of people in California who receive Kaiser insurance through their jobs, and includes the creation of a claims process for members to seek reimbursement for certain out-of-network expenses. Read the full statement here. As U.S. retreats from global health, new disease surveillance systems are emerging Two final items about disease surveillance systems: Pandemic preparedness: As global health funding shrinks, especially from the United States, other groups are stepping up to prepare for new and dangerous infectious diseases. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is launching its next five-year strategy, aimed at raising $2.5 billion to strengthen global disease defenses and lay enough groundwork to help the world develop vaccines against a new pandemic threat within 100 days. It’s no small challenge: The first Covid-19 vaccines first became available 11 months after the virus’ genetic code was shared with scientists around the world. — Helen Branswell Lessons from the AIDS epidemic: Many of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s regularly updated surveillance databases have gone dark, including key vaccination-related systems. We need to find replacements, writes Robert B. Shpiner, a clinical professor of medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.Shpiner proposes a new network of databases housed by state-level consortiums and medical centers. They would integrate electronic health records from Epic and others. We must set up these systems now, he writes: “Waiting for Washington to do the right thing can mean watching people die while politicians debate.” Read more. What we’re reading This is how a child dies of measles, The Atlantic More than 50 conservative leaders sign letter against Trump drug pricing policy codification, The Hill Trump administration targets major LGBTQ+ health care centers in latest legal attack, Erin in the Morning NIH redefines ‘clinical trials,’ dividing researchers, STAT I’m not done with you, The Baffler