Chinese spies breached hundreds of public, private networks, security firm says

BY FRANK BAJAK, ASSOCIATED PRESS - 06/15/23

Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.

“This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in a emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.

In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activivity began as early as October.

The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from Asia Pacific and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia, foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said.

Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base.

Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.

After discovering it in mid-May, Barracuda released containment and remediation patches but the hacking group, which Mandiant identifies as UNC4841, altered their malware to try to maintain access, Mandiant said. The group then “countered with high frequency operations targeting a number of victims located in at least 16 different countries.”

Word of the breach arrived with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departing for China this weekend as part of the Biden administration’s push to repair deteriorating ties between Washington and Beijing.

His visit had initially been planned for early this year but was postponed indefinitely after the discovery and shootdown of what the U.S. said was a Chinese spy balloon over the United States.

Mandiant said the targeting at both the organizational and individual account levels, focused on issues that are high policy priorities for China, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. It said the hackers searched for email accounts of people working for governments of political or strategic interest to China at the time they were participating in diplomatic meetings with other countries.

In a emailed statement Thursday, Barracuda said about 5% of its active Email Security Gateway appliances worldwide showed evidence of potential compromise. It said it was providing replacement appliances to affected customers at no cost.

The U.S. government has accused Beijing of being its principal cyberespionage threat, with state-backed Chinese hackers stealing data from both the private and public sector.

In terms of raw intelligence affecting the U.S., China’s largest electronic infiltrations have targeted OPM, Anthem, Equifax and Marriott.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said state-backed Chinese hackers have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and could be laying the technical groundwork for the potential disruption of critical communications between the U.S. and Asia during future crises.


China says the U.S. also engages in cyberespionage against it, hacking into computers of its universities and companies.

——

AP Business Writer Zen Soo contributed from Hong Kong.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
JPMorgan says former Virgin Islands first lady aided Epstein

BY JULIA SHAPERO - 06/16/23 11:47 AM ET


JPMorgan Chase is accusing the former first lady of the U.S. Virgin Islands of aiding Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.

In a filing submitted Wednesday in the ongoing lawsuit between the bank and the territory, the company alleged that former Virgin Islands first lady Cecile de Jongh, who managed Epstein’s companies based in the U.S. territory, helped facilitate visas and employment for several of his victims and, more generally, served as his “primary conduit for spreading money and influence” in the Virgin Islands.

De Jongh also allegedly consulted Epstein on legislation related to sex offenders in the territory, and Epstein reportedly paid for the tuition of her and former Virgin Islands Gov. John de Jongh Jr.’s children, the court filing claimed. De Jongh served as governor of the territory from 2007 to 2015.

The filing comes in the Virgin Islands’ lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, which accused the company of facilitating the convicted sex offender’s crimes by continuing to provide him access to his bank accounts despite “obvious red flags.”

JPMorgan settled a separate case with Epstein’s victims for $290 million Monday, noting in a statement that the company regrets its association with him.

“We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous, and we believe this settlement is in the best interest of all parties, especially the survivors, who suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of this man,” the company said.

However, JPMorgan has denied wrongdoing with respect to Epstein. In Wednesday’s filing, the company turned the accusations back on the government of the Virgin Islands, claiming it facilitated Epstein’s crimes.

“For two decades, and for long after [JPMorgan Chase] exited Epstein as a client, the entity that most directly failed to protect public safety and most actively facilitated and benefited from Epstein’s continued criminal activity was the plaintiff in this case—the [U.S. Virgin Islands] government itself,” the company said.

Cecile de Jongh allegedly arranged for three women to obtain student visas by helping enroll them at the University of the Virgin Islands, which would ultimately receive a $20,000 donation from one of Epstein’s companies that year, JPMorgan said in the filing.

The company also accused the former first lady of sending Epstein draft language for an updated sex offender monitoring law in the territory and asking for his input.

“This is the suggested language; will it work for you?” de Jongh said in a message to Epstein in May 2011, according to the filing.

Epstein, who had previously been designated a registered sex offender, was eventually arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges and died by suicide in his jail cell several months later.

A spokesperson for the Virgin Islands attorney general responded to the allegations, claiming that JPMorgan “cherry-picked and mischaracterized” Epstein’s interactions with officials in an effort to “distract and shift blame away” from its own role in Epstein’s crimes.

“JPMorgan Chase seeks to attack the people of the Virgin Islands for not discovering the very information that bank executives refused to share,” spokesperson Venetia Velazquez said in a statement. “JPMorgan Chase had a legal responsibility to report the evidence in its possession of Epstein’s human trafficking, it failed to do so, and it should be held accountable for violating the law.”

The US needs a truth commission to heal unresolved COVID trauma

BY MONICA SCHOCH-SPANA AND SANJANA RAVI, 

OPINION CONTRIBUTORS 

THE HILL - 06/16/23 

Unlike pandemics, catastrophic hurricanes, earthquakes and other environmental disasters leave obvious traces of devastation: flattened neighborhoods, power outages and collapsed highways. Recovering from a natural disaster is also readily discernible. Debris is removed. Electricity is restored. Infrastructure and home repairs proceed.

Equally complex and painful, recovery from a calamitous epidemic happens mostly out of sight. What epidemics and disasters do share are invisible wounds that neither hammer and nail, nor vaccines and antivirals, can close.

On alert for so long, exhausted Americans can easily spot signs that the health crisis is over. Having pandemic experts point to future catastrophic outbreaks and next-generation medical interventions implies the current one has passed. Similar cues come from economists reporting low unemployment and a rebound in gross domestic product (GDP) growth, federal leaders winding down the nation’s emergency response infrastructure and epidemiologists charting the fall in COVID-19 cases and deaths nationwide.

Other trends are not as encouraging. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, U.S. residents lost 14.8 million years of life due to excess deaths from March 2020 to December 2022, with people of color bearing the lost potential disproportionately. Black and Hispanic children are missing their primary caregivers at twice the rate of white children. The guardians left behind are emotionally depleted. While 4 in 10 adults overall experienced high levels of psychological distress during COVID-19, Black and Hispanic adults reported greater levels of anxiety, depression, substance abuse and suicidal ideation compared to their white peers.

Humans being human, how we make and interpret signals is a random process that society and culture ultimately shape. That includes indicators of the nation’s recovery from COVID-19.

Indicators of skewed pandemic impacts — ones spilling into the next generation — are deeply unsettling. Yet, recent developments threaten to pull our eyes away and see it’s time to move on. The federal government is rolling up the pandemic-era safety net of the Medicaid continuous enrollment option, the increased, refundable Child Tax Credit and free diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccinations. Benefitting many Americans, these interventions were especially important to the persons most at risk of viral and fiscal casualty.

By limiting signs of recovery to epidemiological and economic trends, decisionmakers risk dismissing the nation’s mass trauma and severely tattered social fabric. We will be even more vulnerable to a global epidemic today than in 2020 if we fail to process the collective grief, loss and — for communities of color, people with disabilities, low-income and unemployed individuals and other vulnerable groups — the sting of neglect. Emotional repair efforts are crucial to reinstate the trust in public institutions and one another that an effective pandemic response requires.

A genuine “build back better” policy for COVID-19 includes tending to the nation’s damaged psyche, lest unresolved trauma stunt the flourishing of both individuals and nations. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has underscored that traumatic events can permanently alter a person’s biological stress responses, memory and behavior long after they pass. Philosophers, political scientists and health experts have embraced the metaphor of “the body politic,” prescribing corrective statecraft or public interventions as proper “treatment” for societal ills and large-scale health crises.


Research affirms that addressing the psychosocial needs of disaster-affected communities hastens individual recovery and community resilience. Building resilient health systems is a common slogan among public health experts urging greater pandemic protections. But as some scholars point out, resilience can be maladaptive if people must harbor the scar tissue of unresolved trauma without having the chance to remove the wounding shard at the center.

Individual healing from trauma may take place in the privacy of a clinic, but we require a public setting for collective trauma recovery. Practices like truth-seeking and reconciliation could guide the body politic toward post-COVID-19 recovery. Truth commissions, for instance, have been formed to facilitate healing after major crises and prolonged historical trauma, such as the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and Canada’s reckoning with its residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their families and culture.

Public acknowledgment of mass suffering, its unequal distribution and needed system repairs is the pandemic recovery sign that is now lacking. Reticence toward a national, bipartisan COVID-19 commission suggests even less federal appetite for truth and reconciliation.

Forward-looking state and local authorities and community partners, however, can implement critical, participatory reviews of jurisdictional pandemic experiences. Peers show the way. Greensboro, N.C., courageously self-examined a 1979 racially motivated massacre. Maine held a truth, healing and change commission to grapple with the state’s child welfare system treatment of the Wakanabi people.

As the adage goes, “What gets measured gets done.” But relying solely on metrics like unemployment, GDP, infections and deaths to denote recovery obscures the pain of surviving a pandemic. Applying metrics that reflect the values of truth, reconciliation and transformation would bring us closer to genuine readiness for the next health crisis.

Monia Schoch-Spana, Ph.D., and Sanjana Ravi, Ph.D., MPH, are senior scholars at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and co-direct PanREMEDY, an initiative to develop pandemic recovery metrics that drive equity in the U.S.

College Board says it won’t alter AP courses to comply with Florida’s laws

BY LEXI LONAS 

THE HILL

- 06/15/23 

The College Board released a letter Thursday putting its foot down on further demands from Florida to change any of its Advanced Placement (AP) classes, the latest development in the ongoing feud between the company and the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“[College Board] will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics,” the company told the Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation.

“Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline,” it added.

The College Board says the Florida office recently asked it to modify any courses that conflict with the new Florida rule restricting teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom through 12th grade.

In a May 19 letter to College Board, Florida demanded the company do an audit of its courses and relay which ones would need to be modified to comply with the new rule by June 16.

DeSantis, a 2024 presidential candidate, had said in January that the AP African American Studies course would not be allowed in his state. Although the company says changes were in the works before the governor’s comment on the class, the course was regardless amended, causing outrage from those who believe the College Board bowed to DeSantis’s demands.

“We have learned from our mistakes in the recent rollout of AP African American Studies and know that we must be clear from the outset where we stand,” the College Board said.

Although Florida did not directly mention the AP Psychology course, that is the one the company focused on in its rebuttal Thursday.

 
It noted the American Psychological Association says college-level courses need to have a foundation on topics such as sexual orientation and gender identity.

“We don’t know if the state of Florida will ban this course. To AP teachers in Florida, we are heartbroken by the possibility of Florida students being denied the opportunity to participate in this or any AP course. To AP teachers everywhere, please know we will not modify any of the 40 AP courses—from art to history to science—in response to regulations that would censor college-level standards for credit, placement, and career readiness,” the College Board said.

The Hill has reached out to the Florida Department of Education for a response.

U$ Federal government to give states $930M in grants to expand high-speed internet

BY ALEX GANGITANO 

THE HILL

- 06/16/23 

The Biden administration on Friday announced it will give just over $930 million in grants to expand high-speed internet infrastructure across 35 states and Puerto Rico.

The effort, part of a program under the Department of Commerce, aims to give communities infrastructure to carry large amounts of data over long distances and increase capacity to local networks, according to the administration.

Officials say the infrastructure also boosts network resiliency, lowers the cost of bringing high-speed internet service to unconnected households and helps connect unserved regions.

Funding through the Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program comes from the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed in November 2021.

The law provided $65 billion to expand affordable and reliable high-speed Internet access and $1 billion on that funds the Middle Mile program.

The program was created to bring high-speed internet to unserved and underserved communities, military bases and Tribal lands.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is spearheading the effort, which officials say will reach 350 counties.

There were more than 260 applications for a Middle Mile grant, which were due last fall. NTIA will give out additional grants “on a rolling basis,” it announced.

The states getting the most out of the nearly $1 billion in grants announced Friday include Alaska with a nearly $89 million grant, California with a $73 million grant and Michigan with a more than $61 million grant.

UPS Teamsters vote to authorize strike if no deal reached by Aug. 1

BY SARAH FORTINSKY

THE HILL

06/16/23 

UPS Teamsters voted overwhelmingly to authorize their union to call a strike if no deal is reached by the current contract’s expiration date of Aug. 1, the union announced Friday.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union which represents more than 340,000 UPS workers, said 97 percent of participants voted in favor of authorizing a strike. Such a strike would have significant repercussions on the economy.


The vote’s result, which was expected, does not guarantee a strike will be called. The Teamsters said the vote gives the union “maximum leverage to win demands at the bargaining table.”

Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien celebrated the vote as a win for union members.

“This vote shows that hundreds of thousands of Teamsters are united and determined to get the best contract in our history at UPS. If this multibillion-dollar corporation fails to deliver on the contract that our hardworking members deserve, UPS will be striking itself,” O’Brien said in a press release.

“The strongest leverage our members have is their labor and they are prepared to withhold it to ensure UPS acts accordingly,” he added.

The Teamsters and UPS officials have been in negotiations for months over a new contract, which would set pay and working conditions for the union’s UPS workers. Recently, the Teamsters secured a win when the union and UPS reached a tentative agreement to install air conditioning in vehicles, as many drivers face heat-related health problems. Other issues were resolved this past week as well. 

Still, union members say key issues remain, including raising pay and eliminating reliance on lower-paid drivers.

UPS officials issued a statement saying “approval votes are normal steps in labor union negotiations” and they were confident there would not be a strike.

“The results do not mean a strike is imminent and do not impact our current business operations in any way. Authorization votes and approvals are normal steps in labor union negotiations. We continue to make progress on key issues and remain confident that we will reach an agreement that provides wins for our employees, the Teamsters, our company and our customers,” the UPS statement read.

New theory of Earth’s rapid creation makes alien life more likely: study

BY SAUL ELBEIN - 

THE HILL

06/15/23

The formation of the Earth may have looked more like a fast, inevitable landslide than like a slow series of occasional cataclysms, as scientists have long theorized, according to findings published Wednesday in Nature.

If it did, Earth-like planets could be far more common than previously thought, the findings suggest.

The paper represents a groundbreaking revision of the conventional understanding of how the Earth was created — and a new theory about the origin of the planet’s life-giving water.

The appearance of that water, its authors wrote, “might not have happened entirely by chance.”

That would represent very good news for the search for Earth-like planets — not to mention alien life.

The findings put forward a radically revised model of how planets like ours — small, rocky and wet — tend to form across the galaxy, under which a very different vision of life in the universe emerges.

“With this new planet formation mechanism, the chance of having habitable planets in the galaxy is much higher than we previously thought,” said coauthor Martin Bizzarro of Denmark’s Globe Institute.

Wednesday’s study revises two pieces of conventional understanding, which can be reduced to one idea: The Earth is the way it is because of a long history of titanic collisions between celestial objects.


In the conventional account, the Earth — and all rocky planets — formed from the infrequent and cataclysmic series of “giant impacts” between embryonic proto-planets.

Because these are very uncommon occurrences, even in the crowded terrain of the early solar system, that would mean that it took a very long time for Earth to form: a period of more than a hundred million years, which is about the amount of time that separates us from the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex.

“If that is how Earth was formed, then it is pretty lucky that we have water on Earth,” said study coauthor Martin Schiller, also of the Globe Institute.

That’s because in the long term, repeated-smashing model of Earth’s creation, any water on those colliding planetoids would be destroyed — so “the presence of water on Earth would need a sort of chance event,” Schiller added.

Specifically, the current presence of water would require an unlikely series of large-scale collisions — in this case, between water-bearing comets or asteroids and the smoldering infant Earth.

By extension, “this makes the chances that there is water on planets outside our Solar System very low,” Schiller said.

But by comparing rocky samples from Earth and Mars with a survey of dozens of meteorites from the early years of the solar system, the Nature team found evidence for an alternate model: one in which the Earth formed by the equivalent of a sudden rockslide.

To get a glimpse of what this might have looked like, let’s travel back 4.5 billion years to the early days after the formation of the solar system.

During this period, the sun drifted alone amid an orbiting cloud of celestial dust left over from the ruins of a previous supernova — similar to the dust which had gradually fused in earlier ages to make the sun itself.

That dust contained millimeter-sized pebbles covered in tiny ice particles — pebbles that began to fall into each other, forming a clump that grew faster and faster as its growing gravity allowed it to draw in ever more dust. Eventually, those clumps reached the status of planets.

“Once a planet reaches a certain size, it sorts of act like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all that dust very quickly,” first author Isaac Onyett said in a statement.

In such a dynamic, a planet the size of the Earth can form in less than 5 million years — still a very long time, but more than 20 times faster than in the conventional understanding. For comparison, 5 million years is the approximate amount of time that separates contemporary society from the first proto-hominids to walk on two legs.

Such a process also allows water to accrete gradually onto a growing planet throughout its formation — rather than in a lucky strike long after the process has ended.

Such a finding would indicate that Earth’s temperate, habitable state is less a freak chance than a natural consequence of its orbital position in the size of our sun.

“This theory would predict that whenever you form a planet like Earth, you will have water on it,” Bizarro said.

“If you go to another planetary system where there is a planet orbiting a star the size of the sun, then the planet should have water if it is in the right distance,” he added.

Wildfire smoke makes weekend comeback as Canadian fires rage

'EVIL COMES FROM THE NORTH' TWIN PEAKS

 BY ZACK BUDRYK

THE HILL

- 06/16/23 


Parts of the U.S. are likely to see a resurgence of the wildfire smoke that blanketed the East Coast last week, with New York projected to see further haze Friday and parts of the upper Midwest already having major issues with air quality.

New York is not expected to see a full resurgence of the sepia-toned cloud of smoke that rendered it barely visible last week; the National Weather Service says the smoke is likely to remain far above the ground. Meteorologists say a smoky smell may be noticeable as well.

Minneapolis, however, saw air quality levels Thursday morning deemed “very unhealthy” by air quality company Plume Labs.

As of Friday morning, levels in the city have returned to “excellent.” Around the same time, Chicago saw an Air Quality Index of 137, which is unhealthy for some vulnerable populations, and eastern Iowa issued an air quality alert effective through 10 p.m. Friday.

Experts say the recurring danger is partially due to both the intensity and the early onset of Canada’s wildfire season.

“Overall we’ve seen a historic wildfire season in Canada right now,” said Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Science Office. “We’re talking about 13 million acres burned at this point, which is far above the average we would expect to see at this point in June.”

ALBERTA WILDFIRE

There are now 446 fires burning across Canada, including two that started Friday. Just under half of the fires are classified as “out of control,” according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

The nation’s national fire preparedness level sits at 5, indicating the country has committed all available national resources against the blaze. The plurality of active fires — 127 of them — are located in Quebec, the source of last week’s smoke.

As to the rapid shifts back and forth in air quality south of the border, Limaye said, “we’re sort of at the mercy of the winds — the fires continue to burn and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see intense smoke exposures return to the East Coast over the summer.”

Future episodes of wildfire smoke reaching the U.S. may not all be as visually dramatic as last week’s clouds, but “in terms of these fine particles and the other air pollutants involved in wildfire smoke, there’s really no safe exposure level,” he noted.

FireSmoke Canada, which maps forecasted smoke coverage across the U.S.-Canada border, indicated as of Friday morning that smoke from Canadian fires was detectable over a broad swath of the U.S. at certain times Friday, affecting states including Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana.

“Some of the fires are dying down, smoke’s clearing, [but] there are still going to be increased particles in the air that are residual,” said Afif El-Hasan, a spokesperson and physician volunteer for the American Lung Association. “Wildfire areas, even when the fire is gone, still have a lot of soot, a lot of ash and other chemicals that are lingering and … can still cause issues.”

Going forward, he added, “it would be really important for people to still monitor government websites, air quality websites to see what the air quality is outside.”

El-Hasan noted that people with respiratory conditions like asthma in particular should remain vigilant and consider wearing high-quality masks outdoors if those sources indicate a higher risk.


“Even if you think it’s clearing, people could still be in danger, it could still hurt people’s health, and they need to be mindful of it,” he said. Wide-ranging report warns of shark extinction riskVeterans Affairs police to start using body, dash cams

While last week was many on the East Coast’s first experience with air pollution from fires on this level, it should function as “a bit of a wake-up call” for the region, Limaye said.

“In terms of the distribution of wildfire smoke-related health impacts, a lot of the smoke tends to come from the western U.S., but a study from 2021 indicates about a third occurs outside of the west,” he said, citing the far greater population density on the other side of the country.

“This is something now becoming an international public health crisis,” he said. “All the science is pointing toward intensifying health hazards.”

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE U$A

The fight against cancer faces daunting new challenge: debt politics

BY NATHANIEL WEIXEL 

THE HILL

- 06/16/23 6:00 AM ET

Even in times of federal budget tightening, cancer research has garnered bipartisan congressional backing, combining that with private-sector funding to fuel significant scientific progress in tackling the killer disease.

“Cancer’s escaped the political gravitational pull,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University Law School.


But this year could be different because Democratic lawmakers and research advocates are raising the alarm that the new debt ceiling deal could dramatically curb future NIH spending growth.

The legislation, which President Biden recently signed into law, keeps nondefense discretionary spending kept roughly flat for 2024 and gives only a 1 percent increase in 2025. Health agencies could see cuts to keep the government’s nondefense budget under $652 billion.

Special Report: Curing Cancer

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee in charge of funding the Department of Health and Human Services, said she has concerns the new budget constraints will have a negative impact on funding cancer research.

“The deal that was passed would lead to flat funding” for arguably the next two years, Baldwin told The Hill, adding that she anticipates putting together an appropriations bill will be challenging because of the caps.

In the House, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), noted the level of nondefense spending in the cap is about $9 billion below current levels, so the money is going to have to come from somewhere.

“Nine billion dollars is a cut. And so where does it come from? Twelve appropriations bills,” DeLauro said.

But Republicans are playing down those concerns.

“I don’t see any reason why [the spending caps] would jeopardize that at all,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), co-chairman of the House Cancer Caucus, said during an event on cancer care sponsored by The Hill. “You can’t outlaw cancer. … But what you can do is, you can guarantee funding.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of the Appropriations Committee who previously backed NIH as the leading Republican on the Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee, claimed that because Republicans have fewer spending priorities than Democrats, the NIH legislation won’t get bogged down with other issues.

Still, he said he anticipates a tough appropriations process.

“I don’t think it’ll [NIH] be shortchanged, but I would expect the entire Labor-H [Labor, Health and Human Services] budget to be under a lot of pressure,” Cole said.

President Biden has said he wants to build on the bipartisan progress in the fight against America’s No. 2 killer, and he has made fighting cancer a priority of his administration by relaunching the “cancer moonshot.”

The first iteration of the moonshot was created in 2016, at the tail end of the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president.

“We had a broad goal of speeding impact, speeding progress in anything that impacted patients. And a lot was done in that time. But it was the final year of an administration. And so we were in a sprint,” said Danielle Carnival, the White House moonshot coordinator.

Carnival said it helps to have a president who wants to prioritize cancer research, but changing administrations didn’t slow the work being done. The National Cancer Institute (NCI), which oversees the initiative, says it has already spent $1 billion on more than 240 research projects.

“It was important to have that carved out sustained funding, specifically for cancer moonshot initiatives,” Carnival said.

“We worked really hard with agencies and departments to make sure that even if there wasn’t a central White House office like there was in 2016, and there is now, focused on this effort, that the work continued and that collaboration continued” across the government, Carnival added.

Carnival said funding cancer research has always been a bipartisan effort, and she was not concerned Congress would shortchange it moving forward.

Last year, Biden announced his intent to “supercharge” the moonshot with a plan to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years.

Biden also asked Congress to reauthorize the National Cancer Act, which officials said would help build new clinical trial networks and modernize data collection to improve detection and treatment.

The moonshot provides a significant injection of funding, but it also aims to go beyond the research of treatments and drugs.

Carnival said the new plan emphasizes the role the public can play by getting back to cancer screenings missed during the pandemic, quitting smoking and participating in trials.

The administration in April released its National Cancer Plan to “end cancer as we know it,” a roadmap for the moonshot and a call to action to improve all facets of cancer care.

The plan emphasized eight goals, including eliminating inequities in prevention, treatment and even research.

Cancer is extremely well funded, especially compared to other diseases and public health threats. The federal government, drug companies and nonprofits have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort.

But there’s concern about how it is being spent. Some of the most well-funded cancers are the most survivable, while cancers that are the most lethal receive the least amount of research money.

“You will have certain cancers that have extraordinarily high profiles, and there’s a lot of public support to amply fund them. And I think Congress and even the NIH is sensitive to that. So there’s a real correlation between advocacy, public clamoring for a particular disease and Congress’s and NIH’s support,” said Gostin, who is also a member of the National Cancer Institute’s National Cancer Advisory Board.

“All things being equal, funding should reflect the actual burden of disease. And that funding should go to things that cause the most harm to the most people, rather than any political calculation or things that tear [at] the heartstrings,” Gostin said.

Cervical, ovarian, and uterine cancers have consistently ranked near the bottom in funding from the National Cancer Institute. Experts have said the impact of that can be seen in fewer clinical trials available to patients and decreased trial enrollment in the ones that are available, resulting in a lower number of high-level treatment options.

For example, NCI funded just less than $121 million in ovarian cancer studies in fiscal 2018, the most recent data available. Breast cancer meanwhile received nearly $575 million. The disparities in money will make it difficult, if not impossible, for research into those underfunded cancers to catch up.

Suneel Kamath, a GI medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic who has researched funding disparities in cancer, said the federal government, and the cancer moonshot specifically, can step in to try to reverse the longstanding inequities.

“Your research into difficult-to-treat diseases is not going to be a five-year plan, you know, it’s going to be 20- and 30-year investment, and I think that’s something that a federal agency can do, whereas private entities, if they’re not getting enough return on investment in a certain period of time, that money might dry out for them,” Kamath said.

The federal government supplies much of the money for basic, early-stage research, and then usually hands it off to the private sector to fund the development of treatments, take them through late-stage clinical trials and eventually submit them to the Food and Drug Administration.

The pharmaceutical industry has an incentive to put money into lucrative therapies and treatments, which can skew investments into specific cancers.

A study from last year found that among 10 of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, revenues generated from the sale of cancer drugs increased by 70 percent from 2010 to 2019, to $95.1 billion.

Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former White House adviser, said industry has a bias, but he doesn’t necessarily see an overreliance on industry money in research.

The government can shape research priorities with incentives like orphan drug designation and pediatric exclusivity. Agencies just have to make sure companies don’t exploit them.

“Drug companies do something really important. I don’t want to minimize what they do. That doesn’t mean you pay a king’s ransom for what they do,” Emanuel said.

Research funding is well aligned with incidence rates — how commonly a disease affects people — but it’s very poorly aligned with mortality rate, Kamath said.

A more significant factor is the success of early research and trials. “If the win is going to be, you know, very delayed or may not occur at all, that does detract funding and then it becomes this kind of feed-forward cycle unfortunately,” Kamath said.

If initial outcomes are poor, that particular disease won’t get the money needed to better understand it and develop something that will make an impact and reverse the cycle.

“From a federal and governmental perspective, that’s an opportunity to plug that hole. We don’t have to have the same ROI in a short period of time,” Kamath said.

“We can choose to say, this matters to the people in our society and our community. We’re going to keep funding this even though you know, we’re not getting the dividends yet. Because it matters.”

Nursing home residents reluctant to voice concerns, report abuse or neglect for fear of retaliation: survey

BY JULIA SHAPERO 

THE HILL;

- 06/16/23 


Nursing home residents are often reluctant to voice concerns about their care or report abuse or neglect for fear of retaliation by staff, according to a new survey.

The survey from the Long Term Care Community Coalition, which was released for World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, highlights residents’ individual experiences with fear of retaliation “in their own words.”

In one case, a staff member at a nursing home reportedly told a resident that if she didn’t go to bed against her wishes, “I won’t help you during the night shift.” A separate resident’s family was told, “You better not call state (regulatory services) or it will be worse for the residents.”

One resident alleged that reporting a kitchen staff member resulted in them “not putting a food item on your tray or sabotaging your meal,” while another said that an aide placed a towel with feces on their face and nose after asking to be cleaned with towels instead of paper towels.

“Staff acted like we were non-people,” a resident in the survey said. “They don’t even acknowledge that we are human.”Wide-ranging report warns of shark extinction riskVeterans Affairs police to start using body, dash cams

A report released by the Senate Special Committee on Aging last month found that staffing shortages at state survey agencies have led to a lack of proper oversight of nursing homes.

“The system responsible for ensuring that nursing homes meet health and safety standards is in crisis,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), the committee’s chair, said in a statement at the time.

The Long Term Care Community Coalition survey featured complaint investigation reports from 100 nursing homes in 30 states between 2017 and 2022. However, the survey noted that its “sample is small and not intended to be representative of nationwide trends.”