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Tourists react to Smithsonian closures amid shutdown

admin - Latest News - October 12, 2025
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Tourists react to Smithsonian closures amid shutdown



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October 5, 2025
Oct. 5, 2025, 5:30 AM EDTBy Alexander SmithLONDON — Despite being headlined by a genuine star and staged at one of London’s premier theaters, a play about the foundation of a sprawling and troubled public service seemed unlikely to provoke night after night of standing ovations.But that’s what happened with “Nye,” an unlikely hit about the creator, and origin story, of Britain’s taxpayer-funded National Health Service.The play, written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, came at an inflection point for the NHS, as it’s known. Almost 80 years after it was founded, the medical service once touted as the envy of the world is “broken” and suffering the “biggest crisis in its history,” the government says. The crisis at this national bedrock is part of a bigger malaise at the heart of British culture: rising prices, stagnant wages and crumbling public services. “I’m terrified, not just for the NHS, but for the whole of our society,” Michael Sheen, who starred as Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the founder of the NHS, told NBC News in an interview. “Once it’s torn down, then I guess people will think about what they’ve lost.”Michael Sheen performing in “Nye” at London’s National Theatre. Johan Persson / National TheatreSheen, 56, better known to international audiences as Tony Blair in “The Queen,” David Frost in “Frost/Nixon” and the angel Aziraphale in the Amazon Prime series “Good Omens,” has spent much of the last two years honing his portrayal of Bevan, the socialist politician who dragged himself out of Wales’ coal mines to will the NHS into existence.Though second nature to Brits, the ideal of the NHS is unfamiliar to many Americans: British people have universally free health care at the point of access — from ambulances attending car accidents to insulin for diabetes to cancer care to childbirth. Though some people do have private insurance, the idea of having to choose between illness and financial ruin is shocking in the U.K.Now the Labour Party, which created the then-radical NHS in 1948, is battling its own economic constraints and record-setting unpopularity. It has a colossal task if it is to fix the crumbling hospitals replete with overworked doctors and bed-lined corridors. Prime Minister Keir Starmer must turn around a behemoth whose budget of 200 billion English pounds ($269 billion) represents some 40% of all government spending, and whose 1.4 million employees are the world’s seventh-largest workforce. In the United States, only the Department of Defense, Walmart and Amazon outnumber it.An ambulance outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London in 2023.Belinda Jiao file / Getty ImagesThrough all this, the core NHS ideal endures. Everyone in the U.K. has a story of a relative, or themselves, receiving the type of world-class care that puts a terrifying financial strain on millions of Americans. (In the past six years, this reporter’s mother has had a single mastectomy and reconstruction, as well as three titanium plates in a shattered ankle, without having to pay a pound for the care.)But just as common are the tales of maddening, hourslong waits in overstretched emergency rooms, or weeklong delays just to see a community general practitioner. Many critics blame the sprawling crisis on years of underfunding by the now-ousted Conservative government of 2010-2024, whose response to the 2008 financial crisis was to make drastic cuts to public services.It’s perhaps unsurprising that a largely liberal London-theatergoing audience responded with applause and tears at the hagiography of Bevan at the National Theater. Though relatively unknown in wider society, admirers see Bevan as a founding father of modern Britain; his ideal of the NHS today is not just popular, it defines the country itself.“It’s far from perfect,” said Alison Ferris, 40, a nurse at a hospital in Canterbury, in southeast England. “But I do the best that I can for anyone that comes in front of me. I treat every patient like I would treat my loved ones.”Though the concept remains revered, public satisfaction in the NHS in practice cratered to 52% in 2023 from a high of 70% in 2010, according to the King’s Fund, a top think tank tracking British health care.Nye Bevan, Britain’s Minister of Health who is credited with spearheading the creation of the National Health Service, meets a patient in 1948. Edward G. Malindine / Getty Images“We have to fight for the NHS, the same as the NHS was fought for when it was created,” said Ferris’ mother, Caroline Heggie, 70, a hospital union representative, who like her daughter had come to see the last night of “Nye” at the National Theater last month. “We can’t go the way of privatization, we can’t go the way of America. That’s what we’re up against.”Like Bevan, Sheen is a Welsh firebrand unafraid to wear his leftist politics. But he also lived for 14 years in Los Angeles, so knows too well what life is like without socialized health care.“The idea of this health care system that we have here, just seemed so alien to them over there,” Sheen, who now lives back in his Welsh hometown of Port Talbot, says of his former American hosts. He says that “seeing people go into hospitals with serious injuries or illnesses, and being asked to produce their check book before they can be treated” would shock most Britons.The crisis at the NHS coincides with an uptick in hostility toward immigrants — even though they are often people’s doctors, nurses and hospital cleaners. Almost 20% of NHS staff have a non-British nationality, with Indians, Filipinos, Nigerians, Irish and Poles making up most of their number. Nigel Farage, the leader of the hard-right Reform U.K. party and an ally and friend of President Donald Trump, is leading some polls to become Britain’s next prime minister. He has become the first prospective leader to question the funding model of using taxes to fund the NHS — historically taboo.‘Britain stands at a fork in the road’: Starmer warns against rise of far-right populism01:40“It doesn’t work — it’s not working,” Farage told NBC News’ British partner Sky News in May. “We’re getting worse bang for the buck than any other country, particularly out of those European neighbours.”Opposing Farage’s proposal, however, leaves open the specter of privatization, which many say has been creeping up even before the Health and Social Care Act 2012 opened up the NHS to bids from private contractors.Farage isn’t the only person dissatisfied. Indeed, the NHS has slipped from being a world-leader on many metrics.“Corridor care” is now a year-round crisis, and the number of people waiting 12 hours or more to be admitted into an emergency room rose from 47 in summer 2015 to 74,150 this summer. Targets have lagged for years in everything from ambulance attendance times to cancer diagnoses. Meanwhile, a 7 million-strong waiting list means many people feel abandoned for months, in pain, before getting hip or knee replacement and other types of surgery.There is ample evidence to suggest that economic austerity policies imposed during 14 years of Conservative Party rule are at least partly to blame, according to Max Warner, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a London research group.“It is true that a lot of NHS performance measures over the 2010s were broadly getting worse having started off relatively well,” he said. “Although it’s worth saying that productivity did grow, so it’s a nuanced picture and causality is difficult.”The Conservatives argued that they kept NHS spending up, protecting it from the brutal cuts that crushed almost every other government department at the time. But this 2% yearly growth still fell well short of the 3.8% yearly average since the 1980s, and according to critics was insufficient to cope with an aging population and the rising prices of cutting-edge drugs.Far from the envy of the world, Britain has been scrimping by spending 37 billion pounds ($53 billion) on the health services each year, well below Germany, France and Australia, a landmark review found last year.The current Labour government has outlined plans to raise spending to around 3% — an improvement but still short of what many advocates had hoped. At his annual Labour Party conference this week, Starmer announced that a digital overhaul named NHS Online would launch in 2027, describing it as “a new chapter in the story of our NHS.”Ultimately, whatever the model, cash is key, according to Roy Lilley, who ran an NHS hospital in the 1990s as chairman of Homewood NHS Trust in Surrey, west of London.Michael Sheen, center, performing in “Nye” at London’s National Theatre. Johan Persson / National Theatre“It doesn’t matter how you pay for your health care,” said Lilley, today a consultant whose newsletter hits 300,000 inboxes. “Whether you take it out of your pocket marked ‘insurance,’ or you take it out of your pocket marked ‘taxes,’ it’s still your trousers.” He remains optimistic, however, pointing to some waiting metrics improving and a general recovery from the hammerblow of the pandemic, which drained resources and mentally scarred doctors.Still, Sheen — never shy to mix acting with activism — believes it’s no coincidence that the NHS is in crisis just when its origin story begins to vanish from living memory.“The crisis that we seem to be experiencing makes it all the more important to go back to the beginning and to look at what was behind the founding of the NHS, and what the principles were,” he said. “It becomes incredibly important to tell the story of it and to remind people of what it was actually like, so that we don’t forget.”Alexander SmithAlexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.
September 21, 2025
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September 22, 2025
By Berkeley Lovelace Jr., Aria Bendix and Erika EdwardsPresident Donald Trump said Monday the Food and Drug Administration approved a chemotherapy drug called leucovorin as a treatment to alleviate symptoms of autism, despite little evidence that the medication works.Trump also said the administration is issuing a warning to doctors not to recommend acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol and other widely used medications — for pregnant women, claiming it may be linked to autism in children. Trump had been teasing the announcement for days, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other health officials have pledged to determine the cause of the developmental disorder by September.The administration had planned to release its long-awaited report on causes of autism around Sept. 29 or Sept. 30, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News. But Trump pre-empted the rollout over the weekend, and details soon appeared in The Washington Post.“We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it,” Trump said from the White House, referring to autism. He spoke alongside Kennedy, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. ”Taking Tylenol is not good,” Trump said. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.”Leucovorin is a drug approved by the FDA to counteract the side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and sometimes used off-label to treat vitamin B9 deficiency. Leucovorin is a form of folinic acid, a B vitamin. It has shown promise in clinical trials with helping some children with autism improve their speech. But the Autism Science Foundation, which funds evidence-based autism research, does not recommend it as a treatment yet and says more studies are needed.Trump said the FDA updated the drug’s label Monday for the treatment of autism symptoms. Oz said Medicaid — in partnership with states — will cover it with a prescription.“We believe insurance companies will rapidly follow our lead,” he said.Kennedy also said the FDA will issue a letter advising health care providers that the over-the-counter medication should be used during pregnancy only in cases of high fever, when the fever itself may pose a health risk to the fetus. The FDA’s notice, sometimes called a “Dear Doctor” letter, is meant to alert physicians and other prescribers about urgent or clinically significant safety issues it has identified with a drug. Kennedy also said the FDA will begin the process to initiate a safety label change for the drug.Bhattacharya said at Monday’s briefing that the NIH will dedicate $50 million to 13 research projects focused on identifying root causes and treatments for autism, an effort known as the “autism data science initiative.” The research will focus on environmental and medical factors, nutrition, events during pregnancy, biology and genetics, he said.“Given this wide range of symptoms across the spectrum, it seems certain that there will be a wide range of biological contributors to explaining the cause,” he said.Researchers who’ve spent decades researching potential causes of autism say the administration hasn’t uncovered any new evidence — and the existing data still doesn’t support its claims.“This is not new,” Dr. Allison Bryant, a high-risk obstetrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an earlier interview. “It has bubbled up every now and again with studies that show maybe some kind of association but not clearly showing any cause and effect.”Experts say autism spectrum disorder, which is characterized by challenges with social and speech skills and by repetitive behaviors, most likely stems from multiple factors rather than a single cause. It affects 1 in 31 children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The bulk of scientific research hasn’t identified a link between acetaminophen and autism.“The science hasn’t changed regardless of what comes out from the report,” said Brian K. Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, referring to the Trump administration’s finding. “I’m not sure what the administration is doing, but it looks like they’re just going back and reviewing the evidence and they’re coming to a different conclusion than many scientists would.”Acetaminophen was introduced in the United States in the 1950s as a prescription alternative to aspirin. By the 1970s, it had been made available over the counter and became one of the most commonly used pain and fever medications in the country. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other major medical groups say acetaminophen is one of the only safe pain relievers for women during pregnancy, and studies have shown no clear evidence that use during pregnancy leads to developmental issues in kids. The drug is also found in name brands like Theraflu and Excedrin.Forty percent to 65% of women use acetaminophen at some point during pregnancy, according to a 2014 study published in the American Family Physician.Earlier Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt touted a “major announcement” from Trump, telling reporters at a briefing to go into the autism announcement with “some critical thinking skills and with some open ears.”“They are paying attention to studies, and the gold standard of science and research, that many in this city for far too long have turned a blind eye to,” she said.Trump administration officials are citing previous research, including a literature review Mount Sinai and Harvard researchers published last month in the journal BMC Environmental Health. The review concluded there was most likely an association between autism and acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy. Outside autism researchers, however, said that the review wasn’t rigorously conducted and that it cherry-picked studies that supported its conclusion. The review’s senior author, Andrea Baccarelli, served in 2023 as a paid expert in a class action lawsuit against acetaminophen manufacturers, in which he testified that there was a link between the medication and autism. A judge ultimately excluded his testimony for being scientifically unsound and last year dismissed the case, which is being appealed.Baccarelli said in a statement that he and his colleagues conducted a rigorous review and that the association with neurodevelopmental disorders was strongest when acetaminophen was taken for four weeks or longer. He said he discussed his findings with Kennedy and Bhattacharya in recent weeks.“Further research is needed to confirm the association and determine causality, but based on existing evidence, I believe that caution about acetaminophen use during pregnancy — especially heavy or prolonged use — is warranted,” Baccarelli said.However, other autism researchers have pointed to a large study last year published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found no link between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism, ADHD or intellectual disability. The study, from Lee and his colleagues in Sweden, analyzed data from more than 2.4 million children. When the researchers looked solely at children with autism, there was a small increased risk possibly associated with acetaminophen. But when the researchers compared siblings within the same families — one exposed during pregnancy, the other not — the link disappeared. The comparison allowed them to control for variables that past studies couldn’t. Siblings share a large part of their genetic background and often have similar environmental exposures in utero and at home.“The biggest elephant in the room here is genetics,” Lee said. “We know that autism, ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders are highly heritable.”In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, said the drug is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women.“Without it, women face dangerous choices: suffer through conditions like fever that are potentially harmful to both mom and baby or use riskier alternatives,” the spokesperson said. “We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism.”Bryant, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said, “The best science that we have available would still suggest that acetaminophen is a safe pain reliever and fever reducer in pregnancy.”Berkeley Lovelace Jr.Berkeley Lovelace Jr. is a health and medical reporter for NBC News. He covers the Food and Drug Administration, with a special focus on Covid vaccines, prescription drug pricing and health care. He previously covered the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with CNBC.Aria BendixAria Bendix is the breaking health reporter for NBC News Digital.Erika EdwardsErika Edwards is a health and medical news writer and reporter for NBC News and “TODAY.”
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