Doctor discusses report detailing drop in breast cancer cases, deaths

(WASHINGTON) — Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is set to publicly testify Tuesday before Congress on his administration’s nursing home policies during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The hearing, before the Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, will see Cuomo defend his decision to allow COVID-19-positive patients back into nursing homes and long-term care facilities while the pandemic was underway.

Cuomo previously testified before the subcommittee during a closed-door hearing in June. Transcripts from that interview, as well as with high-ranking officials during Cuomo’s administration, will be released ahead of the public hearing.

“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said in a statement last week. “On September 10, Americans will have the opportunity to hear directly from the former governor about New York’s potentially fatal nursing home policies.”

In March 2020, as COVID-19 cases were surging, Cuomo issued an order requiring nursing homes to readmit all residents who were “medically stable” and returning after being hospitalized for the virus.

“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19,” the order read. 

It further stated that nursing homes were “prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

At the time, Cuomo explained that the order would help expand hospital capacity to meet the demands of caring for the sickest COVID-19 patients. After facing criticism from nursing home advocates, however, the governor amended the order in May 2020, prohibiting hospitals from discharging patients to nursing homes unless they first tested negative for COVID-19.

Cuomo fought back against criticism of his policies and, in July 2020, a report from the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) stated that COVID-19 was introduced into nursing homes by infected staff, and that peak staff infections correlated with peak nursing home resident deaths. The report also found that “admissions policies were not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities.”

However, in January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report that found the NYSDOH had undercounted the number of nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 by as much as 50%, and failed to count in its official death tally nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 after being admitted to hospitals.

In 2022, Cuomo’s representative said the Manhattan District Attorney’s office would not file criminal charges in connection with the former governor’s handling of nursing home deaths during the pandemic.

Earlier this year, an independent investigation, commissioned by current New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, found that although Cuomo’s nursing home response policy was based on “the best available data at the time,” communication to the public was poor and caused anxiety for family members of nursing home residents.

“Even the most well-intentioned policy had unforeseen consequences in [New York state] nursing homes,” the report read.

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(SILVER SPRING, Md.) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved the first new drug to treat people with schizophrenia in more than 30 years.

Cobenfy, manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb, combines two drugs, xanomeline and trospium chloride, and is taken as a twice-daily pill. In clinical trials, this combination helped manage symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking, which are common in schizophrenia.

“Schizophrenia is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is a severe, chronic mental illness that is often damaging to a person’s quality of life,” Tiffany Farchione, M.D., director of the Division of Psychiatry, Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the approval announcement.

“This drug takes the first new approach to schizophrenia treatment in decades,” Farchione continued. “This approval offers a new alternative to the antipsychotic medications people with schizophrenia have previously been prescribed.”

Cobenfy offers new hope for people with schizophrenia, providing an innovative treatment option that could change how this condition is managed, according to Jelena Kunovac, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the Department of Psychiatry.

“We are overdue for a medication that targets schizophrenia with a different mechanism of action,” Kunovac told ABC News.

The first drugs for schizophrenia, including chlorpromazine and haloperidol – also known by the brand names Thorazine and Haldol, respectively – were introduced in the 1950s and revolutionized treatment of the disease. However, there have been very few new medications since then, with most subsequent FDA approvals being for variations of these older drugs.

Most schizophrenia medications, broadly known as antipsychotics, work by changing dopamine levels, a brain chemical that affects mood, motivation, and thinking, Kunovac explained. Cobenfy takes a different approach by adjusting acetylcholine, another brain chemical that aids memory, learning and attention, she said.

By focusing on acetylcholine instead of dopamine, Cobenfy may reduce schizophrenia symptoms while avoiding common side effects like weight gain, drowsiness and movement disorders, clinical trials suggest. These side effects often become so severe and unpleasant that, in some studies mirroring real-world challenges, many patients stopped treatment within 18 months of starting it.

In clinical trials, only 6% of patients stopped taking Cobenfy due to side effects, noted Dr. Samit Hirawat, chief medical officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. “That’s a significant improvement over the 20-30% seen with older antipsychotic drugs,” he added.

The most common side effects of Cobenfy are nausea, indigestion, constipation, vomiting, hypertension, abdominal pain, diarrhea, increased heart rate, dizziness and gastroesophageal reflux disease, according to the FDA announcement.

“It may prove advantageous to those who don’t tolerate what has been available,” Dr. Leslie Citrome, a clinical professor of psychiatry and expert in psychopharmacology at New York Medical College, told ABC News regarding Cobenfy. “This will provide a new approach that may work out quite nicely.”

Citrome emphasized that patients who have trouble tolerating the side effects of traditional schizophrenia medications may benefit most from Cobenfy, and that a different mechanism of action holds hope for those who have not responded adequately to existing treatments.

Schizophrenia is a mental health disorder that affects about 24 million people worldwide, or roughly one in 300 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It often leads to significant challenges in daily functioning, work, and relationships, impacting both patients and their families.

The disorder typically begins in late adolescence or early adulthood and can lead to lifelong disability if not properly managed, according to the WHO, further highlighting the need for effective treatment options.

Following approval, doctors could start prescribing Cobenfy by the end of October, according to Adam Lenkowsky, executive vice president and chief commercialization officer at Bristol Myers Squibb.

Experts hope that the drug’s unique mechanism and reduced side effects will help set a new standard of care for schizophrenia patients. Studies for additional therapeutic uses, including the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and bipolar disorder, are also underway.

Jake Goodman, MD, MBA is a psychiatry resident physician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.

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(NEW YORK) — With the recent pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the environmental attorney’s views on vaccines have been thrust back into the spotlight.

Kennedy has been a prominent vaccine skeptic, arguing that more research of vaccines is needed, although he has claimed in interviews that he has “never been anti-vaccine.”

Vaccine researchers tell ABC News that his recent comments don’t align with his past campaigns and that, if confirmed, he could convince vaccine-hesitant parents to not vaccinate their children.

“He’s really not a vaccine skeptic; I’m a vaccine skeptic,” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center, an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, told ABC News.

“Everybody who sits around the table at the FDA vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic, right? Show us the data, prove that this vaccine is safe, prove that it’s effective, because then and only then will we authorize it, or recommend authorization or licensure,” he said.

Offit argued that Kennedy is a “vaccine cynic,” adding, “He thinks that we’re not getting the right information, that there’s an unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to hide the real data, and he’s going to find the real data, which is utter nonsense.”

Claims that vaccines cause autism

Kennedy has previously claimed that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine — a myth that was born out of a now-debunked paper from the U.K. in 1998.

The fraudulent paper has since been discredited by health experts, retracted from the journal in which it was published, and its primary author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license. More than a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he’s worried that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has spilled over into hesitancy towards childhood vaccines.

There have been more measles outbreaks this year than last year and a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year from the year before, according to CDC data, which Hotez says is a sign that more parents may be increasingly vaccine-hesitant.

According to the CDC, there have been a total of 277 measles cases reported in 30 states in 2024 — more than four times the amount last year — with 16 outbreaks this year compared to four outbreaks in 2023. An estimated 96% of measles cases this year were not fully vaccinated. Additionally, whooping cough cases are at the highest levels this year since 2014, according to CDC data.

This comes as vaccinations among kindergarteners dipped in the 2023-2024 school year for the fourth year in a row – failing to meet the 95% threshold goal aimed to prevent a single infection from sparking an outbreak. The last time that threshold was met was pre-pandemic, during the 2019-2020 school year.

“Now you put someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent, well-known anti-vaccine activist at the top of the food chain, at the top of Health and Human Services,” Hotez said. “I don’t see how these things improve any. If anything, they could start to decline even further. …So, I worry about further erosion in the number of kids getting vaccinated in the U.S.”

Claims about the COVID-19 vaccine

Kennedy also spread vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic including claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were trying to profit off a COVID-19 vaccine.

During a December 2021 Louisiana House of Representatives meeting discussing a proposal to require schoolchildren to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy falsely called the vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Health officials say COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective following clinical trials that involved tens of thousands of people, and have since helped save millions of lives.

Offit says he is worried that, as the head of the HHS, Kennedy would help select directors of the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes of Health who are not qualified, and could similarly espouse vaccine-skeptic views.

“My worry is that he is not going to pick technically competent people,” he said. “My worry is he’s going to have a role in selecting ideologues who are not well-educated about infectious diseases or vaccines, and maybe who lack government experience as well.”

Both Offit and Hotez said it will be important over the next four years for doctors to have conversations with vaccine-hesitant parents to educate them on the importance of vaccinating their children in case they are swayed by vaccine-skeptic rhetoric from Kennedy.

Offit said he is already getting emails from pediatricians about parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their children because of Kennedy’s past comments.

“Over the last few days, I’ve gotten emails from pediatricians, one particularly in Connecticut that comes to mind, where they’re saying, ‘Parents are coming in, and they’re saying they don’t want to get vaccines, in part because of what [Kennedy] said. What should we do?'” Offit said. “So, I think that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s certainly a lot more work for clinicians than it used to be.”

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