| Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced eight new members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force on Thursday, filling out a federal panel whose recommendations can influence what preventive services insurers cover without cost-sharing. It’s a reshaping of the 16-person panel, which has only met once since President Donald Trump took office last year. (It has historically met in March, July and November.) Earlier this year, Kennedy told lawmakers at a congressional budget hearing that the task force has been “lackadaisical and negligent” for the last two decades. He’s now trying to shake things up, bringing in specialist providers when the panel has largely consisted of primary care clinicians, nurses, and researchers focused on topics including epidemiology and clinical decision science. “We are strengthening the task force to ensure it asks hard questions, follows the evidence wherever it leads, and maintains the highest standards of scientific integrity,” Kennedy said in a statement announcing the picks. The eight new names include Seth Corey, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist and the panel’s new chair, in addition to cardiologists and a radiologist. New additions also include a pediatrician, a family medicine doctor, an internist and a researcher focused on the cost of care. The reaction: Willie Underwood III, president of the American Medical Association, said the new members are a “significant departure” from the task force’s usual membership. The task force’s “credibility has been built on a membership grounded in prevention and primary care — the physicians who routinely deliver preventive services and understand how recommendations translate into clinical practice,” Underwood said. The panel’s recommendations “must continue to be based on a transparent, rigorous, independent scientific process” in order to ensure that they’re “trusted by clinicians and followed by patients,” he added. Why it matters: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) assigns letter grades to dozens of preventive services based on the evidence of their benefits and harms. Most private insurance plans must cover — at no cost to the patient — services that receive an “A” or a “B” grade, such as annual physicals and PrEP medications to prevent HIV. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy wanted to replace the entire panel, spurring concern among some health experts following his overhaul of the federal advisory panel focused on vaccine policy recommendations. “Despite claims last year that I planned to dismiss every member of the Task Force, eight members appointed during the Biden administration will continue to serve,” Kennedy wrote in an op-ed Thursday posted on the Fox News website. “We chose reform over wholesale replacement, preserving institutional knowledge while adding clinical and scientific expertise.” In May, Kennedy fired John Wong and Esa Davis, who had served as vice chairs of the task force, and said he wanted to review the panel’s membership — while encouraging them to reapply. They wrote about their firing in an op-ed published in JAMA last month that predicted specialists would likely be added to the task force —and warning about the impact it could have. “The primary care focus of the task force is critical. USPSTF recommendations apply to patients without signs or symptoms of disease and without preexisting diagnoses,” Wong and Davis wrote, along with Michael Silverstein, who had previously been chair of the task force. “Subspecialists are trained to diagnose and treat within their given subspecialty. It is vital that any subspecialist members consciously adapt to the differences between primary care and their secondary care populations, have expertise in critical review of literature, and adhere to the existing conflict of interest disclosure requirements,” the JAMA op-ed continues. Emily Hilliard, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, said in a statement that the new members bolster the panel “with extensive clinical experience and expertise in generating, analyzing, and assessing medical evidence.” “HHS is responsibly reforming the USPSTF to increase transparency and improve health outcomes for the American people,” Hilliard added in the emailed statement in response to an inquiry about the JAMA op-ed. Mark your calendars: Heidi Overton, the Trump administration’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, will face the Senate committee responsible for advancing her nomination next Thursday. If confirmed, she would take over an agency dealing with major questions around vaccines, drug approvals, food policy and clinical research — as well as significant staff turnover, and, as STAT reports, an uphill battle in bringing on new staff. Overton, a physician who has been a top aide on the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, could face a chilly reception from some lawmakers regarding the administration’s changes to vaccine policy and her own views on abortion medication. She played a role in a recent executive order that called for a reduction in the number of shots children receive, and has advocated for restrictions on mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions. - Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a physician who leads the Senate health panel, has been critical of the moves to overhaul childhood vaccine policy, and on Wednesday said that the measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania are “going to be a terrible legacy for this administration.”
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has been a holdout on GOP efforts to get regulators to roll back access to mifepristone, has met with Overton ahead of her confirmation hearing but declined to comment on the nomination. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who is also on the Senate health panel, also did not sign onto the GOP anti-mifepristone effort — and has defended the medication as “safe and effective.”
Why it matters: Overton isn’t likely to pick up support from Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which means securing Republican votes to advance her nomination is crucial. There could also be tensions between Overton and allies of the Make America Healthy Again movement who are critical of the White House’s executive actions to expand production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in weed killer Round Up. ICYMI from The Post: “A rift over a weed killer is dividing a pro-Trump alliance.” Amid the scrutiny swirling about the Trump administration’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and rising measles cases, Kennedy on Thursday doubled down on prompting questions about vaccine safety during a speech at a conference hosted by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group he led before entering government. “Let me be clear,” Kennedy told the audience, “you have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House.” He lamented that the number of vaccines given to children has increased over the years. “We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products, and that means we can’t really [complete] the kind of risk-benefit analysis that my agency is supposed to do,” Kennedy said, linking several chronic diseases with the rise of shots. Public health experts and scientific researchers have pushed back on these claims for years. While some vaccines can prompt adverse effects, researchers view them as uncommon and say vaccines are safe and effective. And although the number of shots has increased, experts say the amount of antigens (which prompt the immune response) within them have actually decreased as advances in science have come about. Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience are likely “frustrated” that he couldn’t “bring changes immediately” upon taking the helm of HHS. “Government moves slowly,” he said, emphasizing that agencies have to operate in a certain bureaucratic way. In March, a federal court temporarily put much of the Trump administration’s vaccine policy changes on hold, saying it improperly bypassed multiple required processes. “We are doing this one day at a time, and we’re putting the science before any changes that the science dictates that we should make,” Kennedy said. “Unfortunately, we’ve had a dearth of science for 30 years, and that is regulatory malpractice.” → The Post’s Rachel Roubein, Daniel Wu and Caitlin Gilbert are covering the conference, and provided great color about both Kennedy’s appearance and the context surrounding it. Kennedy, who spoke for more than an hour, also touted his efforts to revamp federal f | 
