Will Stone
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-18-2024 8PM EST
There's no evidence of ongoing human-to-human spread in California or the rest of the country, but scientists warn that uncontrolled spread in dairy cattle heightens the risk of spillover into humans, which could give the virus a chance to acquire dangerous mutations. The state of emergency in California comes on the heels of another worrying development, the first severe illness in a U.S.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-18-2024 8PM EST
resident linked to bird flu. That was reported in a Louisiana resident who tested positive after being exposed to sick birds. Will Stone, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-18-2024 8PM EST
It's not unlike driving on a foggy night or walking into a dark room full of furniture.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-18-2024 8PM EST
More than 300 dairy herds have tested positive in California in the last 30 days alone. The governor said that cases detected in dairy cows on farms in Southern California showed the need for expanded monitoring and a more coordinated statewide response.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-15-2025 3PM EDT
Research on long COVID has settled on a handful of explanations for what could drive the illness, but that hasn't translated into major breakthroughs for those who need care. As many as 18 million adults are estimated to be living with long COVID in the U.S. Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez treats long COVID patients at UT Health Science Center San Antonio.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-15-2025 3PM EDT
There are now dozens of these trials testing drugs, but scientists say there need to be many more. Patient advocates say the federal government needs to make sure the millions of dollars set aside by Congress supports this type of long COVID research. Will Stone, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-08-2025 5PM EST
A source with the Union for National Weather Service employees says more than 10 percent of staff in Alaska has been fired or left their jobs. They requested anonymity because they're not authorized to speak publicly. The cuts include meteorologists and support staff. The agency says it's been forced to stop launching weather balloons from the northwest Arctic community of Kotzebue.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-08-2025 5PM EST
Rick Thoman, a climatologist who worked for the Weather Service for more than 30 years, says the loss of 3D data about the atmosphere has wide-ranging effects.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-08-2025 5PM EST
Tommen worries that with key staff gone, weather station outages will be more frequent and last longer. For NPR News, I'm Eric Stone in Juneau.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-29-2024 7PM EST
The authors conclude that microplastics are suspected to harm reproductive, digestive, and respiratory health, with a possible link to colon and lung cancer. While scientists know these plastic particles are accumulating inside of us, proving a direct link to health conditions remains challenging.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-29-2024 7PM EST
The review did include several studies that showed associations with concentrations of microplastics and birth weight, also chronic sinusitis. Tracy Woodruff, a UCSF researcher, says much of the data in their review came from animal studies, which can be hard to extrapolate from, but... I just want to say in the field of environmental health, when we have concerning signals, we should be concerned.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-29-2024 7PM EST
It's already known that some chemicals in plastic can be hazardous to human health. Will Stone, NPR News.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
It means a life that is a little more stable, a little more comfortable, a little more dignified. And this is incredibly painful and frustrating for a lot of critics to hear because it goes against a lot of values that we're steeped in as Americans. It's saying that there is a limit to how far grit and self-improvement will get you.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And there are a lot of people who just don't want to believe that.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
DESC did open the building in 2005, and they moved in 75 of the most disabled people living on the streets of Seattle with alcoholism. And then an academic study came out a few years later.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
This study showed that the first wave of people who moved into the building stayed housed there and that housing them ended up being cheaper than just letting them cycle through emergency rooms and sobering centers and jails. And it showed that the people who moved in ended up drinking a little less on average once they were inside. Now, these results were pretty modest.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
They went from drinking something like 16 drinks a day to 11 on average. But this fear that people had that this environment was going to enable people and their alcoholism was going to get worse, it just wasn't true. In fact, the opposite was true. These results got a lot of attention and helped build hype for Housing First across America.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And results like this have been replicated again and again for decades now. It's worth saying, too, that 1811 East Lake is still going on here in Seattle. It still has 75 units. And 20 years later, it's still doing essentially the same thing.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
When Housing First was first invented, it was really for families. a subpopulation of the homeless population. It was for the most disabled people living on the streets with serious mental illness, with serious substance use disorders. And those things sort of happen over time, right? When someone becomes homeless and then they stay on the those disabilities tend to compound over time.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
So Housing First is like throwing them a lifesaver and giving them something to grab onto, some foundation upon which to do the really intense, lifelong work of rebuilding. But a little over a decade ago,
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
This definition of housing first started to expand and the federal government started to really incentivize housing first practices for all sorts of organizations that were trying to address homelessness. And so we saw more and more people fall under the Housing First umbrella. And this is where some of the questions start to emerge.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Like, are people getting swept up in Housing First when some of them might actually do better in a more structured setting like sober housing or an addiction treatment center? And when I look at all of this, It's clear that Housing First was only ever meant to be one piece of the solution to homelessness.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
When we look at why Housing First on its own is not going to solve homelessness, one of the reasons is that new people are constantly falling into homelessness. A metaphor that I've heard that's been really helpful is that Housing First is one way of bailing out the bathtub. Meanwhile, the faucet is still on and new people are constantly falling into homelessness.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
So there's been this debate. for decades now about the best way to implement Housing First. Sam Cimberis, who's like the father of the Housing First approach, wanted his clients to be scattered in apartments all across a city, in buildings where they're surrounded by neighbors from like mainstream society.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
But other communities found that it was sometimes cheaper and often just easier to put all of their tenants together in one big building. And of course, concentrating people with a lot of really serious problems in one building like this, that does contribute to some of the issues we see here in Seattle and that we document in the piece.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
When I talked to Sam, he mentioned something else that's important for implementing this approach.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
To be clear, there are plenty of providers who do follow through. Sam cited the Downtown Emergency Service Center here in Seattle as an example of that. They have doctors, nurses, addiction specialists on staff. That's what Housing First can aspire to. But Sam worries that these practices aren't widespread enough.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Across 30 years at the Union Hotel in Seattle, Kenny Taylor has seen all that's good and bad about Housing First. The bad includes a neighbor who bangs on the wall at 3 in the morning and has knocked holes in it.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Kenny says his girlfriend died in her apartment here a few years ago after using heroin, falling, and hitting her head. He wishes there wasn't so much drug use in the building. And he keeps his distance from a lot of his neighbors because he feels like they just want money out of him. But for 30 years, Kenny has chosen to keep living here anyway. This is where Kenny says he got sober.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
He says he quit drugs about 10 years ago and alcohol two years ago. And it wasn't any sort of pressure that got him there. Kenny says recovery just moves at its own pace. In his case, it took decades.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Sometimes he helps out with communal meals here in the dining room.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Kenny's life, in all its messiness, all its ups and downs, is what success looks like under Housing First. You might notice it's not all that different from the stories critics point to as evidence of failure. Kenny's lived some of those same headaches and tragedies here. So is Housing First working for Kenny? He'd say yes.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Having a place has allowed him to adopt his cat, Treasure, which he says has given his life purpose. Kenny spends most of his days lately writing a book about Treasure.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Yeah. The approach in Project 2025 would be to end support for Housing First altogether. and reimpose requirements like entering treatment for addiction and mental illness. And it's worth noting, these are programs that have historically been underfunded and in short supply. And as we saw in the past, like the 1990s and before that, that approach risks condemning a lot of people to the streets.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And if that were to happen, it would happen at a time of record homelessness in America.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Yeah. So there's a piece of this that is political. Housing First was pretty bipartisan under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But over the past few years, activists and think tanks on the political right have been pretty successful at branding this philosophy as left coded or liberal coded. But there's another element to this backlash that's actually much more interesting to me.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
As a reporter covering homelessness here in Seattle, I started hearing doubts about Housing First from people I didn't expect to hear them from, folks who work directly with the homeless population at nonprofits that practice Housing First. sometimes even from people who lived on the streets themselves and moved inside under Housing First.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And this really threw me because as a reporter, I'd been hearing for years that Housing First is the most studied, the most proven, the most cost-effective strategy for getting people off the streets. And at the same time, some of the evidence that these critics were pointing to rang true to me. Like they were pointing to problems that I have witnessed myself in my reporting.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And this is what really made me want to dive into Housing First with this documentary. It was my own genuine confusion about how to reconcile these things.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
So the first observation that critics of Housing First tend to make is since 2013, the U.S. government has really pushed local governments and nonprofits to adopt Housing First practices. And for years, a majority of federal grants for homelessness have gone to Housing First projects, adding up to billions of dollars. But the U.S. homeless population hit a new record in 2024.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And so this has caused some people to wonder whether Housing First, or maybe the way we're practicing Housing First, is not meeting this moment. The second observation that critics make is that Housing First in practice can look very imperfect, to put it mildly. Yes, it offers people an apartment, a bed, a door that locks behind them.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
But the environment in these buildings can be challenging because the chaos of the streets tends to follow people indoors.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Yeah. So we're going to hear from a woman named Maureen Hawley who lives in a building in downtown Seattle. It's this 14-story building that's a century old. And some of the tenants there are just low income, but others come straight off the streets under a Housing First program. There is staff on site to help them with addiction and mental health if the tenants want that.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
But like with every Housing First project, treatment is not a requirement of living here. Maureen's lived here for more than two decades after spending some time homeless herself. Two years ago, Maureen had an encounter with a neighbor that she says almost killed her. Here's Maureen from the documentary.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
The rise of fentanyl has sent a surge of overdose deaths through housing programs across Seattle. These deaths nearly quadrupled between 2020 and 2023. Michelle Huckabee Virick is one of Maureen's neighbors. Michelle has struggled with fentanyl addiction herself and says after a wave of overdose deaths in their building, she started to hoard stuff in her apartment.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Yeah, that's right. And she was there until some outreach workers helped clean out her apartment and then move her back in. This story is just one of a few anecdotes I've heard over the years that have trickled out of buildings like this. These stories have fueled questions about whether Housing First, as we currently practice it, is working like it's supposed to.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
A common perception I've heard from tenants and even occasionally from staffers who work in these buildings is that Housing First is taking people off the streets and sort of hiding their problems behind four walls and not doing enough to address those problems like substance use or mental illness.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Generally speaking, they want to change course and return to a philosophy called treatment first, right? This is the idea that people should follow a series of steps like treatment, sobriety, and employment that eventually end with permanent housing as the last step. And this idea of treatment first goes way back.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Before housing first took off, treatment first was the go-to approach for many, many years.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Yeah, that is a really important question. And I really wanted to understand this. So I dug back into the history of housing first. Back in the 90s, people working in the homelessness field realized that Treatment First wasn't working for a subsection of the homeless population. They called this group the hardest to serve population.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
These were people who were the most disabled by mental illness and addiction and could not abide by the rules of Treatment First. So they always ended up back on the streets. That's when some innovators decided to take a big risk and try just housing them and then bringing the treatment to them in their new apartments. And this was the birth of Housing First.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
And here's where Seattle enters the story in a big way. In 2005, a Seattle nonprofit called the Downtown Emergency Service Center, DESC, planned to open a building with 75 apartments for people who had been homeless for years and addicted to alcohol. At that point, Housing First had mostly been focused on people whose main health problem was mental illness and who often had addiction on the side.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
But DESC's project was gonna test Housing First for people whose main health problem was alcoholism. This blew up into a national news story, and it remains probably the most famous and controversial example of Housing First in US history.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Anyone who moved into 1811 East Lake was not required to participate in any kind of treatment for alcoholism. It was there if they wanted it, but they could also just keep drinking.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Why don't we have call-in shows anymore? This is good radio.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
The person these callers were angry at was Bill Hobson. He ran DESC at the time, and he was one of the country's most enthusiastic adopters of Housing First.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
Daniel Malone runs DESC today, and he worked under Bill back then.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
It was up to Bill, the head of DESC, to explain to the irate public radio listeners of Seattle how all of this would work.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
We do. Bill said, sure. For lots of people with alcoholism, abstinence did work. But what he wanted listeners to understand was that this was not the population he was talking about. He was talking about the hardest to serve. The 1811 Eastlake Project was for people who back then were called chronic public inebriates.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
There were more than a thousand of them in Seattle, according to a state estimate. Their health problems were comparable to people in developing countries, and their average age of death was 42 to 52 years old. In the Seattle area, their emergency room visits alone cost $100,000 per person per year. And on average, they had already tried to stop drinking 16 times, and it didn't work.
Up First from NPR
A Home But Not A Cure
That's right. And that's why this recording from 20 years ago was so eye-opening to me. The proponents of Housing First were always clear-eyed about what their tenants were dealing with. They just have a very different idea of what recovery means for the people they're trying to help. In many cases, recovery for them doesn't mean sobriety.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
Well, his track record on vaccines is the most prominent one. For years, Kennedy led an advocacy group that it's a major player in the anti-vaccine movement. In 2021, he petitioned the government to revoke the authorizations for the COVID vaccines. Kennedy said in 2023 that no vaccine is safe and effective, and he's made other inaccurate claims about infectious diseases.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
Now, recently, Kennedy has softened his tone. After the election, he told NPR he's not going to take anyone's vaccines away. I asked Dr. Brett Giroir about this. He's a former assistant secretary for health in the first Trump administration.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
He isn't taking a position yet, but he says senators need to ask questions because there's a lot an HHS secretary could do to undermine vaccines.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
So many doctors are speaking out on social media and in op-eds in opposition. The biggest organized effort is a campaign that's gathered at least 15,000 signatures from physicians. That's being led by a progressive advocacy group called Committee to Protect Healthcare. Separately, the American Public Health Association has urged the Senate to reject Kennedy.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
But some of the most prominent physician groups like the American Medical Association have not weighed in publicly. I reached out to the AMA about this. They did not respond. Dr. Rob Davidson with Protect Healthcare says he's not sure why they aren't taking a stance.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
Well, that is a big part of his appeal, and many in public health say this is important, but this focus cannot be at the expense of preventing infectious diseases like measles. Dr. Jeffrey Flyer, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, says Kennedy has ascended to this point not in spite of his previous activism, but because of it.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
And I should add that Flyer is a well-known researcher in the field of obesity.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
Yeah, that's right. There's also a petition from a pro-Kennedy group called Maha Action, Maha being short for Make America Healthy Again. And that group says it has over 4,000 verified signatures from physicians and scientists. You see a lot of support for Kennedy online in the wellness and influencer space, physicians who are focused on diet and lifestyle.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
One of them is Dr. Philip Ovedia, a Florida heart surgeon with a telemedicine practice.
Up First from NPR
More Hostages Go Free, Trump Halts Foreign Aid, RFK Jr.'s Confirmation
So it's hard to say. Some Republicans have expressed concern. The former Trump official, Giroir, says it looks like there may be enough support for Kennedy to be confirmed. We reached out to a Kennedy spokesperson for comment. She said Bobby Kennedy has met with over 60 United States senators. He's prepared and excited.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
I was. This was a man in his 30s who'd come back from Wuhan, China. And at the time, the message from public health was that the risk of human-to-human spread was low. It wasn't actually until the next month that it became clear the virus was spreading in the community here in Seattle and elsewhere in the country.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
It's a mixed picture. Certainly, there's a lot of disillusionment in public health and medicine. You'd hope that after a big pandemic, the country would be better off. But Dr. Andrew Pavia at the University of Utah told me it just doesn't look that way to him. We've not done a really good job of changing the things that need to be changed. There's so much fatigue.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
There's so much trauma from the COVID pandemic. The medical profession saw an exodus of nurses and doctors. The same trend is true in the public health workforce. Meanwhile, trust in public health and government agencies has fallen. misinformation, fights over masking, school closures, lots of things could have played a role.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
And a recent survey from Harvard found trust in doctors and hospitals dipped from 70 percent in 2020 to less than 50 percent as of early 2024.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
Yeah, it's hard to overstate the implications, Scott. I spoke to Lauren Sauer about this. She's an expert on pandemic preparedness at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
And along with that, funding is under threat. There was an infusion of money during COVID, but there have been proposals from House Republicans to slash funding for public health programs, including the CDC. And it's possible that it will gain momentum when President-elect Trump is sworn in on Monday.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
Yes, there are some advances. Our ability to do wastewater surveillance to track the spread of disease. That's one example brought up by Caitlin Rivers. She's at Johns Hopkins and recently authored a book on fighting outbreaks called Crisis Averted.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
And public health experts say having vaccines ready to go will be key for bird flu. That's why the government is stockpiling existing vaccines and developing new mRNA shots in case the outbreak escalates.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
Well, it's largely been silent. Certainly, Trump has the experience of Operation Warp Speed that produced the COVID vaccine. But scientists like Andrew Pavia at the University of Utah are concerned based on the track record of some of Trump's health picks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
For years, Kennedy led an advocacy group that's a big player in the anti-vaccine movement. And Scott, yesterday we learned that in the spring of 2021, Kennedy filed a citizen's petition on behalf of that advocacy group to the FDA. And in it, he requested the agency revoke the authorizations for the COVID vaccine for all demographic groups.
Up First from NPR
Ceasefire On Track, Pandemic Preparedness, Pepsi Sued
Of course, the FDA denied this request, but Kennedy has an extensive history of making requests inaccurate and misleading statements on vaccines, and he has already made comments undermining trust in the existing bird flu vaccines. We reached out to the transition team for comment about their plans, but did not hear back.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
Researchers have coalesced around a handful of explanations. There seem to be multiple underlying drivers of the illness, depending on the patient. One big focus has been the idea of viral persistence, that people never fully clear the infection. But there are others related to immune dysfunction, blood clots, the reactivation of other viruses.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
These could ultimately trigger symptoms like brain fog, like fatigue, shortness of breath, something called post-exertional malaise. The challenge here remains translating some of these insights into treatment. There are still no approved drugs for long COVID. The approach is often to manage symptoms and try to improve quality of life. And what are the challenges in coming up with the treatment?
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
It comes down to clinical trials. There just aren't enough of them. A few years ago, there were a handful looking at drugs. Dr. Michael Peluso told me by his count, there are now about 50, including some that Peluso is involved in at the University of California, San Francisco. But he says the reality is we just need a lot more for such a complex condition.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
And Scott, one of the major barriers here is that drug makers are still on the sidelines to some extent. Over and over again, Peluso hears the reason is there's not a reliable biological measurement of the condition, a biomarker that can be tracked across multiple trials in the same way that LDL or bad cholesterol is a biomarker for heart disease risk. Do we know how many people are affected?
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
That's hard to pin down. Research, including CDC data, has found about 18 million adults in the U.S. had long COVID. There are more conservative estimates. All of this depends on how you're defining the condition, who you survey, and people are still getting long COVID. Here's what Hannah Davis told me.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
She has long COVID herself and co-founded an advocacy group called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
And I hear the same message from doctors who are seeing new patients alongside those who got sick two, three, four years ago and have not recovered.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
Yeah, continually. The federal government has funded long COVID research through its recover initiative. Last year, an additional $660 million was appropriated. That's to be spent over the next four years, including on clinical trials. Now, obviously, there's huge uncertainty about federal funding for scientific research in general under the Trump administration. I spoke to Megan Stone about this.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
No relation to me. She's a patient and directs the long COVID campaign. Stone has been in D.C. lobbying senators and the administration to, among other things, protect those funds from any cuts. Actually, this past week, she was at the confirmation hearing for Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and she managed to get a moment with him afterwards.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
He said to me, we're going to do the research to find a solution to this. I hope so. If the administration doesn't meet the patient community in that, then we will keep calling for action the same way that we did under President Biden. Regardless of party or political position, long COVID patients have been failed by our leaders.
Up First from NPR
Limiting Musk's Powers; VA Employees On DOGE Emails; No Cure For Long COVID
To be clear, there's certainly skepticism about whether the administration will take this work seriously, and there are real disagreements between the patient community and those now leading federal health agencies around COVID policies more generally. But Stone says long COVID patients just don't have the luxury to sit this out over the next four years.
Up First from NPR
Justice Department Shakeup, Guantanamo Migrants Lawsuit, Immigration Crackdown Poll
Housing First is for the people who have found themselves really in the worst possible situation. It is getting them back onto some kind of foundation.