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Trump admin. reverses layoffs for some CDC staff

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Trump admin. reverses layoffs for some CDC staff

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Oct. 12, 2025, 8:00 AM EDTBy Claire WangJean Wang, a Boston-based fashion blogger, was so excited when her daughter said she wanted to dress up as Rumi, the purple-haired protagonist of the Netflix blockbuster “KPop Demon Hunters,” that she decided to go all out with a DIY costume. Wang and her daughter Nori, 7, said they feel proud that such a popular costume — “KPop Demon Hunters” looks are already a top pick this year — is rooted in Asian culture. “I remember, growing up, the struggle at Halloween to find a costume that felt ‘me,’” Wang said. “It’s definitely refreshing and exciting to see the ‘it’ costume of the year, for people of all backgrounds, being a female Asian character.” Due to the film’s late summer release, big retailers have scrambled to mass produce Rumi’s purple wig and gold-black jacket and the black hanbok made iconic by demon heartthrob Jinu.Zoey, Rumi and Mira from Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters.”NetflixFor Asian Americans, the runaway success of “KPop Demon Hunters” is another watershed moment for representation in pop culture, parents and experts say, as children no longer have to look primarily to Pixar or Disney princesses for costume inspiration. But dissatisfied with the costumes she found online, Wang got a cropped jacket from Zara and refashioned it with gold stripes, then bought purple hair extensions and braided them herself — a hair tutorial video she uploaded on Instagram quickly went viral.Nori loved the outfit for the demon-slaying leader of three-member K-pop girl band Huntrix so much she has worn it every weekend, Wang said. “My daughter is definitely aware that the characters ‘look more like her,’” she said. “But at the end of the day, Rumi is a brave, talented and fierce character who also shows vulnerability in a very relatable way.”Ella Pereyra, 11, says she was lucky enough to take representation to the next level — she’s the actual model for Spirit Halloween’s Rumi costume. As a Filipina American girl from New Jersey, Pereyra said she feels proud to see herself on screen and in pop culture. She said she’d already watched the film “KPop Demon Hunters” about “a billion times” when she got the booking call.“I feel very grateful that they made a movie about people that looked like me,” Pereyra said about playing Rumi. “I feel lucky to play Rumi because not a lot of people can do that.Young A Jung, an assistant professor at George Mason University who teaches modern Korean literature and pop culture, said one factor behind the mass appeal of “KPop Demon Hunters” might be the complexity of its central characters, Rumi and Jinu.Jean Wang’s children wear Rumi, right, and Derpy Tiger costumes from Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters.”Jean Wang “Global teens and youth groups with complex everyday lives might no longer want to see clearcut Western-style heroes,” Jung said, adding that the movie’s exploration of the shame that K-pop idols feel, and their efforts to hide their pasts, is particularly resonant with fans. “KPop Demon Hunters” also presents a “remarkably realistic portrayal of contemporary South Korean life and landscape” interwoven with Korean folklore and mythology. “The depiction of shamanism and the grim reaper is very concrete,” she said, “and the everyday life of eating ramen and kimbap is very correct.”The characters and their outfits are themselves rich with symbolism. Jung pointed out the double meaning of “saja,” which signifies both “lion” and “dead people.” In the movie, Jinu’s black hanbok and gat, a wide-brimmed sheer hat, were historically the formal wear of Confucius scholars, she said. Later, the look became incorporated in folktales as the attire of grim reapers. Even the film’s animal characters, the tiger and magpie, are inspired by Korean folk painting.Jinu, center, wears a black hanbok and gat, a wide-brimmed sheer hat, in Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters.”Netflix Since the movie draws so heavily from Korean traditions, marketing the characters’ outfits simply as trendy Halloween costumes can risk diluting their cultural importance, said Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and culture critic. “You don’t want these traditional garbs to become associated with ‘demon wear,’” she said. “You don’t want to see traditional clothing be co-opted and diminished by Hollywood.”Some parents say their children were simply enthralled by the bright, pop aesthetic of the movie and too young to understand its layered cultural references. Jessica Castañeda, 27, began looking for a Rumi costume for her daughter, Kasey, almost as soon as they watched the movie together. Castañeda said Kasey, 5, quickly introduced her friends to the movie, and soon they all wanted to dress up as Rumi, Zoey, Jinu and Abby. Last month, Castañeda planned a “KPop Demon Hunters” themed birthday party for Kasey that featured Shin Ramyun and soda pops.The soundtrack was what hooked her, Castañeda said: “The songs are catchy, and she wanted Rumi’s hair.” Claire WangNBC News freelance reporter and writer

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September 27, 2025

Sept. 27, 2025, 5:30 AM EDTBy Berkeley Lovelace Jr.For people who rely on certain prescription drugs, including weight loss, asthma and cancer medications, President Donald Trump’s post announcing 100% tariffs on foreign brand-name drugs offers little clarity on when — or if — medications might see price hikes. “Starting October 1st, 2025, we will be imposing a 100% Tariff on any branded or patented Pharmaceutical Product, unless a Company IS BUILDING their Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plant in America,” Trump said on Truth Social late Thursday. “‘IS BUILDING’ will be defined as, ‘breaking ground’ and/or ‘under construction.’ There will, therefore, be no Tariff on these Pharmaceutical Products if construction has started.”Experts say Trump’s post raises a lot of questions. Here are five major ones. What drugs will be impacted?Trump’s post doesn’t specify whether brand-name drugmakers with an existing U.S. plant would be exempt, whether that exemption would include all their products, or whether it would only be for the drugs manufactured at the U.S. site. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, makers of the weight loss drugs Wegovy and Zepound, respectively, have announced plans to invest in U.S. manufacturing. But it’s unclear if their intent to invest will warrant an exemption. On Tuesday, Lilly announced plans for a $6.5 billion manufacturing facility in Houston that will produce Zepbound and its other GLP-1 drug, Mounjaro, following a recent commitment to build a $5 billion plant near Richmond, Virginia. Novo Nordisk, a Danish company, said in June it would spend $4.1 billion to construct a second GLP-1 fill-finish plant in Clayton, North Carolina.AstraZeneca, which makes the asthma drug Symbicort, also announced in July that it will invest $50 billion over the next five years to expand its research and development and manufacturing footprint in the U.S. Many other popular brand-name drugs, however, are primarily manufactured overseas, particularly in Europe, said Rena Conti, an associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.Botox, made by Allergen, and the cancer drug Keytruda from drugmaker Merck are made in Ireland. (Keytruda’s manufacturing has increasingly moved to the United States in recent years, but it’s not clear if that would earn an exemption from Trump’s tariffs.)Others, including some for blood and lung cancers, as well as vaccines, are made in places like India and China, Conti said. “I think what’s most at risk here are branded products that come from China and India,” she said. The E.U. and Japan already have trade agreements in place that cover pharmaceuticals, she added, and it’s unclear whether the new tariff will supersede that. Will patients see prices increase?Only 1 in 10 of the prescriptions filled in the U.S. are for brand-name drugs; the vast majority are for generics, which are much cheaper and will not be affected by these tariffs. Whether patients see price increases will depend on how many drugmakers receive exemptions — and on whether companies choose to pass those costs on to patients at the pharmacy counter, said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Ultimately, tariffs are taxes on patients,” Kesselheim said, “and to the extent that drug companies see increases in cost due to tariffs, they will pass those costs on to patients.”Some companies may decide not to pass the costs along. So far, the 15% tariffs on imports from the E.U. haven’t translated into big price hikes for U.S. patients, Conti noted. To be sure, a 100% tariff would be far more costly for a company. Price hikes may not start right away, as drugmakers find out whether they qualify for an exemption. There also might be a lag since U.S. law prevents drugmakers from increasing the price of drugs faster than inflation.“What if you’re doing updates to the plant you currently have? What if you’re planning a facility? Do those count?” Kesselheim said. “It’s all very ambiguous.”Some patients may not notice additional price hikes at all, given how costly brand-name drugs already are in the U.S., said Arthur Caplan, the head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “I can certainly predict that some patients will immediately feel price increases that will shock them on some of these drugs,” Caplan said.Could insurers absorb the costs?Insurers and middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, could try to negotiate drugmakers or absorb some of the tariff-related costs, Caplan said.It’s more likely, however, that they’d pass it on to patients in the short term, potentially in the form of a larger copay, he said.It’s not only patients with private insurance that should be worried about price hikes, Kesselheim said. Those who get their drugs covered through government health programs could also see price increases.“The government is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the market, through Medicare, Medicaid and the VA, so it’s really the government or government payers that are going to see the largest impact on price increases,” he said. Will tariffs spur more U.S. drug manufacturing?It’s unlikely, Kesselheim said. The decision to build a plant “is a complicated and expensive one” that requires several regulatory hurdles and years of planning.Conti noted that by the time new manufacturing plants are completed, Trump would likely be out of office.“It is somewhere between two years and five years to get new production facilities built,” she said, “and it can be in the millions of dollars depending on whether the product that you’re making is a small molecule drug or a biologic.”Even putting money back into an existing plant isn’t quick.“If you want to switch a line or retool a factory to make a product, then we’re talking about somewhere between 18 to 36 months to do that,” Conti said, “because you have to show the U.S. regulator that you can make it at this factory at scale, and the product is what it says it is, or is high quality and meets the quality standards of the U.S.”In a statement, Alex Schriver, a spokesperson for the trade group the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said “most innovative medicines prescribed in America are already made in America” and companies continue to invest in the U.S.“Tariffs risk those plans because every dollar spent on tariffs is a dollar that cannot be invested in American manufacturing or the development of future treatments and cures,” Schriver said. “Medicines have historically been exempt from tariffs because they raise costs and could lead to shortages.”What about shortages?If Trump keeps his focus solely on brand-name drugs, U.S. patients are unlikely to face shortages, Kesselheim said.“Their profits are just so, so far beyond this tariff cost that they could probably be OK or raise the prices of the drugs,” he said. “They would probably not stop production as a result.”But that excludes, he added, some smaller companies who may make niche brand-name products and may not have the resources to take on the extra costs. If tariffs extend to generics, the risk is far greater, Caplan added. Unlike brand-name drugs, generic drugs are typically sold at close to the cost they’re made, he said, which makes it difficult for companies to justify the cost of building a new facility. They’d likely be forced to walk away from production or close their plants altogether.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.

October 30, 2025

Oct. 30, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Rob Wile and Jared PerloSome of the largest companies in America have begun capping or reducing their head counts, blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions.Yet, so far, there is uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it. This leaves some experts questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons, such as financial underperformance or global economic uncertainty.“It’s much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say ‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’” David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in an email to NBC News.“Whether or not AI were the reason, you’d be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI,” wrote Autor, an expert on AI’s impact on workers.Amazon joins other large companies in justifying recent job cuts by pointing to AI.David Ryder / Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThis week, Amazon announced it had begun a reorganization that would result in the elimination of 14,000 roles — and said AI was a leading cause. “The world is changing quickly,” Amazon Senior Vice President Beth Galetti wrote Tuesday. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”Yet a few hours later, a different Amazon representative tried to downplay the role that AI played in the layoff decisions.“AI is not the reason behind the vast majority of reductions,” said the representative, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to give her name. “Last year, we set out to strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers,” among other measures, she said. “The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work.” The representative declined to comment on the apparent mismatch between this second statement about AI and Amazon’s earlier comments.But that disparity — coming from a company as large and disciplined as Amazon — highlights how difficult it can be for the public to verify what companies say about AI and its role in personnel decisions.AI’s elusive returnsAmazon joins plenty of other companies in justifying recent job cuts by pointing to AI.Walmart recently signaled that it intends to keep headcount flat over the next several years, largely as a result of AI. Goldman Sachs announced a fresh round of layoffs this month, saying it planned to reduce human roles that AI could potentially perform.Salesforce recently reduced its workforce by 4,000, citing “the benefits and efficiencies” of AI. One might think that these companies were all seeing huge benefits from AI, the kind of returns that would make these difficult — and expensive — layoffs worthwhile. Indeed, the number of companies that report being focused on AI’s return on investment has surged in recent months, according to data from AlphaSense, an AI research firm.So where, exactly, are all these benefits? That’s where it gets tricky.Recent studies have found significant limits on the productivity of AI, at least in its current manifestation. Out of 1,250 firms surveyed by Boston Consulting Group for a September report, 60% said they had seen “minimal revenue and cost gains despite substantial investment” in AI. Only 10% of the organizations involved in a similar Deloitte survey said they were getting “significant return on investment from agentic AI,” or systems that can make decisions beyond simply following prompts.Nonetheless, more large American companies than ever are using, investing in and measuring the business impact of generative AI, according to a new report from UPenn’s Wharton School and GBK Collective. But like the other surveys, the Wharton report shows mixed results. “It’s great if you can shave 20 minutes off an email or half an hour reading a report. But that’s not going to leapfrog anything,” said Stefano Puntoni, faculty co-director of Human-AI Research at Wharton and an author of the study.More large U.S. companies than ever are using, investing in and measuring the impact of AI.Chona Kasinger / Bloomberg via Getty ImagesPerformance issues? Many of the same companies that are making layoff announcements while touting AI investments have also been under increased financial pressure. Amazon’s layoffs announcement comes ahead of its third quarter earnings results, set to be released Thursday. While analysts expect improvement, there is growing concern about increased competition for Amazon’s AWS cloud platform from AI. After hitting an all-time high in January, shares of Amazon have been largely flat this year and are about 6% below that record.Meanwhile, Salesforce shares are down about 29% from a December 2024 high. Some analysts have questioned whether implementing more AI will be enough to stave off the threat posed by AI to Salesforce’s core product lineup.“No matter what the current state of the company, the narrative is negative and just about impossible to disprove,” wrote Jackson Ader, an analyst with KeyBanc Capital financial group.Some of the companies enacting job cuts are simply looking to rein in spending — including firms at the core of the AI boom. Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced it was cutting 600 roles in its AI unit over concerns that it had become “bloated.” Rival Microsoft has announced three separate rounds of layoffs this year, and says it is looking to cut costs elsewhere in the company in order to pay for its massive AI investments. Yet even firms far from Silicon Valley are getting swept up. UPS said Tuesday it had eliminated 34,000 roles from its operational division, which includes drivers and package handlers — a 70% increase from its previous target. UPS also plans to reduce its reliance on seasonal hires and significantly cut back on vehicle leases. These changes are “powered by automation,” the company said — corporate shorthand for AI. UPS is “freeing up our network to grow in the best parts of the market,” a spokesperson said. “AI and robotics help to make jobs safer, while also reducing repetitive tasks.”Rob WileRob Wile is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covering breaking business stories for NBCNews.com.Jared PerloJared Perlo is a writer and reporter at NBC News covering AI. He is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

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