Tevi Troy

The United States is rushing toward a health and economic catastrophe, with significant repercussions on our global competitiveness and national security. The emerging obesity epidemic has no real parallel with any other health crisis in our history. In the past, we have met the challenges of epidemics and other serious diseases and emerged with new knowledge, new technologies and superior tools to better our nation’s health. We need to take the same approach with obesity, coming up with tested and reasonable programs that both address the problem and help inspire new life-saving and wealth-creating technologies. (more)

President Obama’s recent troubles with the visit of the controversial rapper Common to the White House may demonstrate bad judgment on the part of the White House, but Obama is hardly the first president to have to navigate the difficult waters of dealing with notorious and mercurial entertainers. (more)

The National Institutes of Health recently announced that it would be engaging in a billion-dollar effort to encourage the development of new pharmaceutical therapies. The New York Times headline for this story sounded innocuous: “Federal Research Center Will Help Develop Medicines.” But not everyone is so sanguine about this effort. Fox News, for example, re-ran the Times story under the header: “Obama Creating Billion Dollar Gov’t-Run Drug Company.” (more)

The following article originally appeared in City Journal. (more)

The Obama administration’s premature recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head CMS is further evidence that the process for selecting and confirming senior administration appointees is broken.  In trying to defend the move, White House adviser David Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week” that the CMS job is “too important” to wait for Dr. Berwick to have his hearing. (more)

After the recent period of [intlink id="694653" type="post"]cool treatment of Israel by the Obama administration[/intlink], the New York Times reported that there will be a Seder in the White House this year to commemorate Passover. One wonders if the well-timed and prominently placed piece is supposed to cause American Jews to forget the substantive activity of the past few weeks and suddenly celebrate this new symbolic gesture. (more)

A just-released Polish study has dealt another blow to the idea that childhood immunizations are linked to autism. This new study, which found no evidence that children who received measles vaccinations are more likely to contract autism, comes on the heels of the recent revelation that the British health paper, The Lancet, has officially retracted a 1998 article it had published that purported to link autism to childhood vaccines. While hundreds of articles have now reported on The Lancet’s retraction and the anti-vaccine movement’s dangerous impact on childhood diseases, there has been precious little discussion of the threat that anti-vaccine fears pose to our ability to fight bioterrorism. In fact, the dangers in this area may be even greater, and our responsiveness to potential acts of bioterror will depend in part on the ability of homeland security officials to address the challenges posed by the vaccine-autism link. (more)