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The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing a contrarian who has pledged to reform scientific funding practices as the leader of the world’s premier medical research agency.Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — by a party-line vote of 53 to 47 — comes as the N.I.H., with a $48 billion budget, has been battered by recent cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those cuts at a confirmation hearing in early March.He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the writers of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence that shows no link between the two.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees the N.I.H.

After the health secretary promoted vitamin A as a cure, parents in West Texas began giving their children high doses, sometimes to prevent infection.Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.One of those supplements is vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.Some of them had received unsafe doses of supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.“I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking it without physician supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A religious organization recruited him to help open New York City’s first independent abortion clinic, though it was unaware that Louisiana had taken away his license.On July 1, 1970, one of the first independent abortion clinics in the country opened on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. New York State had just reformed its laws, allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy in the first trimester — or at any point, if her life was at risk. All of a sudden, the state had the most liberal abortion laws in the country.Women’s Services, as the clinic was first known, was overseen by an unusual team: Horace Hale Harvey III, a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in philosophy who, unbeknown to the clinic, had been performing illegal abortions in New Orleans; Barbara Pyle, a 23-year-old doctoral student in philosophy, who had been researching sex education and abortion practices in Europe; and an organization known as Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of rabbis and Protestant ministers who believed that women deserved access to safe and affordable abortions, and who had created a referral service to find and vet those who would provide them.What distinguished Women’s Services — a nonprofit that first operated out of a series of offices on East 73rd Street and charged on a sliding scale, starting at $200 — was its counselors. They were not medical professionals, but regular women, many of whom had had abortions themselves. Their role was to shepherd patients through the abortion process, using a model of a pelvis to explain the procedure in detail, accompanying the women into the procedure room and sitting with them afterward. They also reported on the doctor’s performance. It was a model that other clinics would adopt in the months and years to come.The clinic’s humane approach was in stark contrast to the attitude of many hospital personnel at the time, Jane Brody of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “Don’t make it too easy for the patient,” one administrator put it, summing up the hospital’s philosophy. “If it’s too easy, she’ll be back here in three months for another abortion.”Women’s Services had some other unique features as well. The waiting areas were cheerfully decorated, with piped-in music, and the operating tables had stirrups cushioned with brightly colored pot holders, a flourish Dr. Harvey, who died on Feb. 14, had brought with him from his days working out of hotel rooms in New Orleans.Unlike many illegal abortion providers in those pre-Roe v. Wade days, who made the process as bare-bones and speedy as possible in anticipation of a police raid, Dr. Harvey had not only softened the atmosphere of his New Orleans procedure room to make it less terrifying; he had also offered the women cookies and Coca-Cola afterward, to help them recuperate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A new assisted dying law for England and Wales could take up to four years to fully implement due to additional safeguards being adopted as the bill goes through Parliament.

The care received by 800 patients at a world-renowned NHS hospital is to be reviewed by expert clinicians after a specialist surgeon was suspended.

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President Trump has selected Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency permanently.The president withdrew his first nominee, Dr. Dave Weldon, just hours before his confirmation hearing. If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Monarez, an infectious-disease researcher, will be the first nonphysician to lead the agency in more than 50 years.“Americans have lost confidence in the C.D.C. due to political bias and disastrous mismanagement,” the president wrote on TruthSocial, adding that Dr. Monarez would work with the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to address the chronic disease epidemic and restore the agency’s accountability.“As an incredible mother and dedicated public servant, Dr. Monarez understands the importance of protecting our children, our communities, and our future,” Mr. Trump wrote.Dr. Monarez assumed the acting director position a few days after Mr. Trump took office in January, leaving her perch as deputy director of a new federal biomedical research agency created during the Biden administration.Dr. Monarez was expected to serve until Mr. Trump’s first choice for the job, Dr. Weldon, could be confirmed. But after Mr. Trump decided to withdraw the nomination, Republican aides in the Senate said that Dr. Weldon had failed to impress them with a plan for the agency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.