TV News LIES

President-elect Donald Trump's choice to run the sprawling government agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — may have significant conflicts of interest.

Oz recently held investments, some shared with family, in health care, pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the health care sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz's holdings totalled tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat. This includes a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000.

Trump said Tuesday he would nominate Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency's scope is huge: CMS oversees coverage for more than 155 million Americans, nearly half the population. Medicare alone accounts for approximately $1 trillion in annual spending, with over 67 million enrollees.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.

Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.

Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.

Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.

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One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.

Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.

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Antibiotics cannot cure COVID. They don’t help a bit. And yet, new data shows that, during the pandemic, COVID patients were given antibiotics – a lot of antibiotics.

That’s bad because the overuse of antibiotics can breed superbugs that are resistant to medications. The impact of this pandemic overuse has lingered even as the pandemic has faded.

So how did this unfortunate turn of events come to be? A series of new reports and papers shed light.

Globally, about 75% of patients hospitalized with COVID were given antibiotics, despite only 8% having a bacterial coinfection where antibiotics would be medically useful. This comes from new data published in late April that was collected through the World Health Organization’s Global Clinical Platform in 65 countries between January 2020 and March 2023.

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When dermatologist Adewole "Ade" Adamson sees people spritzing sunscreen as if it's cologne at the pool where he lives in Austin, Texas, he wants to intervene. "My wife says I shouldn't," he said, "even though most people rarely use enough sunscreen."

At issue is not just whether people are using enough sunscreen, but what ingredients are in it.

In countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France, sunscreens include newer chemical filters, some of which have been shown to provide broader protection against UV rays than those used in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration's ability to approve such ingredients is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that has required sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world.

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