Tag: Hyde Amendment

$6·5 billion proposed for new US health research agency

Volume 397, Issue 10288
22 May 2021

WORLD REPORT The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health would fund high-risk, high-reward medical research, but its short-term planning could stymie basic research. Susan Jaffe reports.

During his first address to a joint session of Congress last month, US President Joe Biden drew little applause from Republicans in the physically distanced, masked audience. A rare exception to their steadfast silence came when he unveiled an ambitious plan to eradicate cancer.

To help reach this goal, Biden would establish a new biomedical research agency within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The agency would provide a fast track for transforming basic science into real-world applications. [Continued here.]

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Legal battles over abortion heat up in the USA

Volume 393    Number 10184               11 May 2019               
WORLD REPORT   Changes to Title X, several legal challenges, and a change to the Supreme Court composition could mean drastic changes for access to abortion in the USA. Susan Jaffe reports.

“We are the department of life…from conception until natural death, through all of our programmes”, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar said earlier this year…. The government’s anti-abortion efforts have ignited lawsuits from Maine to California. Eventually, one or more of these cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court. With its newest arrival—Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination by Trump was championed by abortion opponents—the Supreme Court’s ideological balance has now shifted towards a conservative majority [raising] opponents’ hopes that a sympathetic court will diminish, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade...

Late last week, lawyers for the HHS appealed decisions by two federal court  judges in Oregon and Washington state to temporarily halt new administration rules that would limit the information about abortion services that federally funded health-care providers can tell their patients.    

“We are fighting back in the courts, we are fighting back in Congress and in state legislatures all across the country”, said Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen, noting that one in four women in the USA will have an abortion in their lifetime. “The public is with us when it comes to defending access to safe legal abortion, which people understand is part of the full spectrum of reproductive health care, which is health care.” [Continued here.]…