(NEW YORK) — A new sunscreen contouring “hack” gaining popularity on TikTok has experts warning users to be very cautious about skin damage.
TikTok user Eli Withrow shared a technique that she’s convinced gives your face a chiseled, radiant boost.
She advised that if you use a base sunscreen of SPF 30 and an SPF 90 in all the spots where you would use highlighter (the highest planes of your face), you will be left with a contoured look following sun exposure.
“You’ll be naturally snatched all summer,” said Withrow.
Withrow’s sunscreen contouring hack video has since received more than 12 million views and left many people with questions on how, or if, it works. Others wondered whether it was safe to be doing at all.
NYC-based dermatologist Dr. Michelle Henry told “GMA” it’s “absolutely unsafe.”
“Any excess sun exposure can increase the risk for skin cancer. UV is a known carcinogen and not a natural source of contouring the skin,” she said.
It can possibly lead to skin cancer in the future, burns and accelerated aging from exposed areas, according to Henry.
While these potential skin dangers could be an unwanted result, TikTokers have continued to try out the “hack.”
“It’s definitely not something any dermatologist can recommend,” NYC-based dermatologist Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali told “GMA.”
He continued, “In reality, any kind of tan is usually the result of damage to your skin from UV radiation and, long term, will not only increase your chances of skin cancer, but it will also increase sun damage, including collagen breakdown, pigment issues and increased vascularity.”
Experts recommend that it’s better to use a tinted sunscreen or contouring with regular makeup.
How should you be using sunscreen?
“I love using an elegant lightweight sunscreen over the entire face to both protect the skin and hydrate it,” said Henry. “Olay Regenerist Whip SPF 25 is lightweight, powerfully hydrating thanks to vitamin B3, and has SPF 25 — it’s a must-try.”
She recommends applying sunscreen to your full face — about a nickel-sized amount of product to ensure adequate coverage. Also, be sure to remember your ears and under your chin, and reapply every two hours.
In addition to using a daily SPF, Bhanusali also recommends wearing adequate sun protection such as hats or staying in the shade when possible. He likes sunscreens that absorb easily, such as offerings from EltaMD, Supergoop and Neutrogena.
Bhanusali also advised, “Consistency is key and it’s worth experimenting with a few brands to find the ones that fit your skin best.”
(NEW YORK) — In an effort to meet New Yorkers where they are, the state is offering pop-up COVID-19 vaccination sites at some subway and commuter stations this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday.
The eight sites include Penn Station, Grand Central, Coney Island, Myrtle-Wyckoff in Brooklyn, E.180 St. in the Bronx, 179 St. in Queens, LIRR Hempstead and MetroNorth Ossining. They will be open from May 12 to May 16.
“We’ve made huge progress vaccinating New Yorkers across the state, but vaccination rates are slowing and we have to redouble our efforts,” Cuomo said. “New Yorkers may struggle to take time out of their schedules to get the vaccine, so we’re bringing it directly to them at these new sites in MTA stations.”
The sites will operate on a first-come, first-served, walk-in basis, with each location offering up to 300 single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccines per day. As an additional incentive, vaccine recipients will earn a free seven-day MetroCard or a free roundtrip ticket for the Long Island Rail Road or Metro-North, the city’s commuter rails.
Messages advertising the pop-up site locations and hours of operation will run on the MTA station, train and bus screens, and audio announcements will be played in more than 500 stations.
In New York City, 36% of the population is fully vaccinated and 46% have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the city’s Health Department.
“The vaccination rate has declined,” Cuomo said. “We have to get the numbers up.”
(NEW YORK) — The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for children ages 12 and up, widening the U.S. population that will be protected against the virus and bolstering chances for a safe return to full-time school in the fall, the Food and Drug Administration announced Monday.
“We know this is a big step for our country. Vaccinating a younger population brings us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy and to ending the pandemic,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said at a press briefing on Monday night.
Woodcock said parents and guardians can “rest assured that in making our decision, the agency undertook a rigorous and thorough review of all available scientific data, as we have with all the COVID-19 vaccine authorizations.”
Pfizer vaccines for kids age 12-15 could be administered as soon as Thursday, Woodcock said, so long as all goes well at Wednesday’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting, which is the next step in the vaccine rollout.
Pfizer announced in late March that its clinical trials showed the vaccine was safe and 100% effective in children ages 12-15, similar to the 95% efficacy among adult clinical trial participants.
It was the first vaccine to show data in children as young as 12, a promising first step toward vaccinating younger Americans. The vaccine was the only option for 16- and 17-year-olds in the U.S., with Moderna and Johnson & Johnson authorized for those 18 and older. Now, the FDA authorization means kids throughout middle and high schools will have the opportunity to be vaccinated before the fall, alleviating many of the hurdles schools face in stopping transmission.
Currently, about 115 million Americans are fully immunized — about 35% of the population.
After a trial with over 2,000 children, Pfizer found no cases of infection among the children who had been given the vaccine and 16 cases of infection among the children who received a placebo, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at the press briefing.
No cases of COVID occurred in the 1,005 adolescents that received the vaccine, while there were 16 cases of COVID among the 978 kids who received the placebo, “thus indicating the vaccine was 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 In this trial,” said Marks.
Adolescents experienced a similar range of side effects as seen in older teens and young adults — generally seen as cold-like symptoms in the two to three days after the second dose — and had an “excellent safety profile,” Marks said.
“Based on all this available information, the FDA determined the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has met all of the criteria required to amend the EUA, which concluded that the known and potential benefits of this vaccine in individuals 12 years of age and older outweigh the vaccine’s known and potential risks,” Marks said.
Marks encouraged parents who were hesitant to vaccinate their children to speak with their pediatricians, urging confidence in the trial and data.
“The vaccine had an excellent profile in children, and though one can say that often children don’t get terribly sick from COVID-19, there are kids who do get very sick from it and in addition, they can bring it asymptomatically around to their grandparents and others,” Marks said. “So this is part of the totality of getting our country protected against COVID-19, which is just waiting around the corner to come have another wave if we don’t get to a sufficient degree of vaccination.”
In an interview with ABC News ahead of the authorization, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said getting children the vaccine would be “great news,” not only for the kids, “but also for the parent, grandfathers and therefore the American society in general.”
Bourla acknowledged that some parents might be nervous to vaccinate their young kids, but said Pfizer has been “extremely careful with children” and waited to begin studying the vaccine with anyone 15 or younger until hundreds of millions of doses were studied in adults.
According to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 29% of parents of children under 18 said they’ll get them vaccinated as soon as it’s available for their age group. A third said they’re inclined to wait and see and the rest remained more hesitant.
“What we can promise to our parents is that we have done very thorough examination, more thorough than in any other vaccine, exactly because of the visibility that this vaccination is having,” Bourla told ABC News.
Moderna, the second mRNA vaccine approved for use in the U.S., said it is still studying the results among children ages 12 and up.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on ABC’s Good Morning America recently that getting vaccines to kids “will make an enormous difference for infection numbers in the community and schools for fall as well.”
While children are not considered at high risk of severe illness from the coronavirus, they represent about a quarter of the U.S. population and vaccinating them is critical to stopping the spread of the virus.
Bourla also noted that kids can still spread the virus.
“When the kids are vulnerable, they are also contributing to the pool where the virus can replicate and, of course also, they are contributing to the chain of reinfections to other group ages,” he said.
“In addition to protecting the kids, as I said, the most important thing is that you can contribute to herd immunity in the country,” he added.
Experts predict the U.S. needs anywhere between 70% to 85% of the U.S. population to be vaccinated before it can reach herd immunity, when there is enough of a defense against the virus that it will no longer be able to spread. Specialists said the higher number of people with immunity the more difficult it is for the virus to spread, so every vaccinated person reduces the risk for those around them from getting COVID too.
Both Pfizer and Moderna are continuing to study the vaccines in trials of children ages 6 months to 11 years old. Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, confirmed that the company is expecting to have data on vaccines for elementary school students by the end of the year.
The names were released Friday, two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced U.S. birth and fertility rates have dropped to record lows in 2020.
The number of U.S. births in 2020 fell 4% from 2019, the lowest since 1979. The figure is double the average annual rate of decline of 2% since 2014 and marks the sixth consecutive year that the number of births have dropped, according to provisional data included in the new report.
Here are the top 10 boys and girls names for 2020:
Girl names:
1. Olivia
2. Emma
3. Ava
4. Charlotte
5. Sophia
6. Amelia
7. Isabella 8. Mia
9. Evelyn
10. Harper
Boy names:
1. Liam
2. Noah
3. Oliver
4. Elijah
5. William
6. James
7. Benjamin
8. Lucas
9. Henry
10. Alexander
Parents seemed to stick with the same names from 2019 for both girls and boys, the SSA reported. What’s more, only two names changed out of both top 10 lists with the names Henry and Alexander bumping Mason and Ethan from their spots.
The SSA said the name Henry was last seen in the top 10 over a century ago, in 1910.
The top five fastest rising names in 2020 were also revealed:
Girl names that are growing in popularity:
1. Avayah
2. Denisse
3. Jianna
4. Capri
5. Rosalia
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden Administration announced Monday it will move to protect gay and transgender people against sex discrimination in health care.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it will roll back a Trump administration policy that tried to narrow the legal protections against discrimination in health care by issuing rules defining sex as gender assigned at birth.
“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” HHS Secretary Xavier Beccera said in a statement.
Beccera said this action today puts HHS in line with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision last year, which established that federal laws against sex discrimination on the job also protect gay and transgender people.
(NEW YORK) — A group of moms from across the country celebrated Mother’s Day this year with one wish — to find the bone marrow donors who will save their daughters’ lives.
“If she gets the bone marrow transplant, she’ll be a normal baby,” Anessa Haden said of her 8-month-old daughter, True, who has been told by doctors she likely won’t live past the age of 3 without a matching donor. “A bone marrow transplant is literally her hope to a long life.”
True was diagnosed three months ago with congenital amegakaryocytic thrombocytopenia (CAMT), a rare disease in which bone marrow no longer produces platelets, which are critical to blood clotting and preventing bleeding, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Haden, of Huntsville, Alabama, said True, her first child, was quickly categorized as an “emergency transplant” case because she needs a bone marrow transplant to survive.
The past three months of Haden’s life have, as a result, been a dizzying mix of hospital stays and doctors’ appointments for True, while Haden does everything she can to find a bone marrow match for her daughter.
Making the task more difficult is True’s interracial background — a mix of African American, Indian, Puerto Rican and Caucasian — which makes it harder to find a match because these ethnicity groups are underrepresented in the global donor pool, according to DKMS, an international nonprofit organization that works to find bone marrow matches.
“It’s definitely an isolating experience,” said Haden. “A lot of people hear bone marrow transplant and they don’t really get to see the life and face of a kid who needs a bone marrow transplant.”
After finding each other through both DKMS and social media, Haden has formed a lifelong bond with three other mothers from across the country who are also searching for matching blood marrow donors who could save their daughters’ lives.
Destiny Van Sciver, of California, is looking for a matching donor for her two daughters, Kylie, 9, and Kimora, 13, both of whom were diagnosed with sickle cell disease at 6 weeks old.
Doctors have told Van Sciver that one matching donor could help both of her daughters but they have yet to find that donor. Like True, the girls’ race, Black, has made it harder to find a donor because people of color are underrepresented on the bone marrow registry.
People of color account for 7% of all registrants on the registry, according to DKMS.
“We always fantasize about a day where we won’t have to do all these things,” said Van Sciver, whose oldest daughter, Kimora, recently had to undergo a hip transplant. “It’s so frustrating seeing my daughter trying to learn how to walk every day, knowing that there’s a cure out there that can save her.”
In Louisiana, Jaimie Havard is looking for a bone marrow match for her 16-year-old daughter, Courtlynn, who was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria in October. The high school sophomore went from playing baseball and softball to undergoing weekly blood and platelet transfusions to stay alive, according to Havard.
“Her life is totally different now,” said Havard. “A [bone marrow] transplant is the cure. It’s truly a difference between life and death for these children.”
Just before Mother’s Day, the three moms and one more, Tara Forrest, of Boston, whose 14-year-old daughter Ali Pantoja is battling acute myeloid leukemia, met on Zoom for the first time after spending weeks connecting by phone, texts and social media.
“You instantly have a connection with them because you feel the pain and desperation,” said Havard. “It’s just amazing to be able to talk to somebody who actually knows what you’re feeling on the inside.”
“Other people can be sympathetic but they can’t be empathetic because they’re not quite walking in my shoes,” said Haden. “To have other moms or dads who understand, it’s definitely vital. It means the world to us to be able to connect.”
All four moms are working with DKMS to recruit bone marrow donors for their daughters.
“It truly is all consuming,” Havad said of the search for a donor. “The focus is on your child and their future. Knowing that their future lies in a stranger’s hand, your mindset then goes to what can I do to get this story out, to get people to swab their cheek and get on the donor list to save a life?”
Only around 30% of patients are able to find a compatible bone marrow donor in their family, according to DKMS co-founder and chairwoman Katharina Harf, whose family started the nonprofit when Harf’s mother died of leukemia after not being able to find a bone marrow donor match.
Each year in the United States, around 18,000 people are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses where a bone marrow transplant or umbilical cord blood transplant is their best treatment option, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA).
All it takes to join the bone marrow registry is to request a swab kit, which DKMS offers online, and to swab the inside of your cheeks.
If a person is found to be a match, in most cases, the process of donating their bone marrow or stem cell is an outpatient procedure and one that does not require surgery, according to Harf.
“You’re giving a second chance at life to a person,” said Harf. “A lot of our patients really celebrate the day they receive the stem cells as a second birthday.”
Van Sciver said she and the moms she has met while searching for cures for their daughters may come from different backgrounds and have different stories but they are all just “moms asking for help.”
“I really hope that people hear this message and want to get out and make a difference,” she said. “One person would make a difference.”
(NEW YORK) — While states like Missouri end a second month enduring a surge in COVID-19 cases as the more contagious delta variant spreads, public health officials across the country are hearing the same story from an increasing number of people getting the vaccine: someone they know recently caught the virus and the experience was unsettling.
“We don’t want to see more people getting sick as a driving force to get people vaccinated, but we know the case counts and more people in the hospital will play a role in that conversation,” Dr. Sam Page, St. Louis county executive, told ABC News.
Missouri has seen an increase of nearly 560% in new cases, 205% virus-related hospitalizations since early June — staggering increases, which have been exacerbated by the low number of residents — just over 41% — who are fully vaccinated.
“We really need higher vaccination penetration in our communities to slow this down,” Page said.
However, Missouri is one of the many states in the nation which has experienced a significant, newfound demand for COVID-19 vaccinations in the last several weeks. Vaccinations statewide increased by approximately 100% in the last two weeks of July.
While the uptick in shots has been most notable in the states that have been recently hardest hit by the coronavirus, the entire country is experiencing a rising vaccination rate.
According to an ABC News analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from the last three weeks, every state has reported an increase in its average number of first doses administered, with the national rate of Americans receiving their first dose up by more than 73%.
Similarly, in the last week alone, vaccination rates have increased by nearly 20% in young Americans, ages 12-17, and by more than 25% in adults.
And on Sunday, the White House reported more than 800,000 vaccine doses administered, including first and second doses, marking the fifth consecutive day with more than 700,000 doses were reported administered. The uptick pushed the national vaccination average to more than 637,000 doses administered each day — up by more than 24% in the last two weeks.
There are many factors at play — fear of the delta variant, incentives from the government and the rising popularity of vaccine requirements for school or work — but regardless of why it’s happening, Page said the increase in vaccinations could not come soon enough.
“The delta variant is a whole new virus,” Page said.
Slowly but surely, officials have started to see their public urgings translate into shots in arms, data showed — a sobering silver lining to the immeasurable grief that has accompanied the virus.
But Page urged other states and counties to get ahead of the delta variant while they could, pulling out every stop to increase vaccination rates before the virus hits their community, because when it does, it’s too late.
The uptick in vaccinations in Missouri, for example, will only begin to give ample protection beginning around September, since full vaccination requires two shots and then about two weeks for the antibodies to kick in.
“We just wish that we could get people vaccinated sooner because the illness has an unfortunate loss of life associated with it. And that’s just a terrible thing to watch,” Page said.
In the final weeks of July, 14 states saw an increase of 100% or more in their first-dose average. All of those states have vaccination totals below the national baseline of eligible Americans who have had one at least shot — 67.6%.
The five states which have seen the most significant increases in their vaccination rates — Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma — are also among the states with the current highest seven-day case rates per capita. Louisiana, which currently has the nation’s highest case rate, has experienced a nearly 335% increase in individuals receiving their first vaccine dose. Similarly, Arkansas, which has the nation’s second highest case rate, has seen a 193% increase in recent weeks.
“This increase in vaccination rates in states that have been lagging is a positive trend. Americans are seeing the risk and impact of being unvaccinated and responding with action. And that’s what it’s going to take to get us out of this pandemic,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said Monday at a briefing with reporters.
But experts caution that it will be critical for this trend to see even greater increases for the country to avoid more unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths.
“While the increasing caseload has had an impact on vaccine uptake, it has been minor, relative to the need,” Maureen Miller, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.
“Since the delta variant is so much more contagious, we’ll need to see more people vaccinated to get this pandemic under control — in the range of 85%-90% of the population.”
The introduction of the delta variant, which now results in 8 out of 10 new cases in the U.S., has resulted in a rapid and significant increase in infections across the country.
The United States’ daily case average is now up to more than 72,400 cases a day, a 532% increase since mid-June. On Friday alone, the country recorded more than 100,000 new cases, marking the highest single-day report in nearly six months.
Nationally, as of Friday, nearly 40,000 patients were receiving hospital care across the country, up nearly 190% increase in the last month.
Several states with the lowest vaccination rates are now seeing viral surges equal to or higher than the peaks they experienced last winter and spring.
“The combination of the new, highly transmissible delta variant and the lack of both vaccination and implementing preventive behaviors, such as mask wearing and social distancing, have ensured that the unvaccinated will continue to become infected, hospitalized, and a needless amount will die,” Miller said.
In Louisiana — reporting the nation’s highest case rate — the average number of first doses administered has tripled over the last three weeks.
“My hope and my prayer today, is that that slope — that trajectory of increases in vaccinations — will continue for a long period of time. Because when that happens, you will see that case growth lines start to come down,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said.
Edwards on Monday imposed an indoor mask mandate congruent with case numbers climbing and the CDC’s most recent mask guidance for everyone, including vaccinated people, to mask up if they’re in areas with a lot of transmission.
Health experts like Miller praised the increased restrictions, since mandating vaccines — considered to be the most effective way to reach herd immunity — isn’t currently an option.
“A current stumbling block to mandating vaccines is the (Food and Drug Administration) emergency use authorization status. Once the FDA provides full regulatory status, that will provide strong legal cover to institute mandatory vaccination,” said Miller.
But a piecemeal effort to mandate vaccines is underway, and quickly gaining momentum as the spread of the delta variant grows. The American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Nurses Association (ANA) joined up with over 50 other health care organizations to call for mandatory vaccinations within their industry last week, citing rising COVID cases and the delta variant as reasons.
“Due to the recent COVID-19 surge and the availability of safe and effective vaccines, our health care organizations and societies advocate that all health care and long-term care employers require their workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” the organizations wrote in a joint statement.
And last week, the U.S. government announced that federal workers must receive the COVID-19 vaccine or contend with regular testing. The announcement came as a growing list of companies are requiring shots for employees, including Walmart, Google and Disney, ABC News’ parent company.
Vaccination is the “primary way” to move out of the pandemic, the AMA wrote, without having to revert to state lockdowns and additional mitigation measures.
“This surge was preventable. Unfortunately, it takes dying loved ones begging their family members to get vaccinated. Some people are starting to listen,” Miller said.
(New York) — Boosted by a recent uptake in vaccine administrations, the U.S. crossed a long-awaited milestone Monday in its race to vaccinate the country against the novel coronavirus.
Seventy percent of U.S. adults ages 18 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, Cyrus Shahpar, the White House’s COVID-19 data director, posted in a tweet.
This is nearly a month after the country missed President Joe Biden’s July 4 deadline to meet that threshold.
Although the majority of the country’s adults have one shot, there is a major discrepancy among states, according to the CDC.
Health officials have been urging eligible residents to get their shots, which are free and shown to prevent hospitalization and death from the virus, as soon as possible as the more contagious variants like delta spread.
As of Monday, 22 states and the District of Columbia have 70% of their adult population with one dose, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many of these states are located in the Northeast with Vermont leading the nation with over 86% of its adult residents receiving one shot, according to the health data.
A dozen states, almost all located in the South, haven’t cracked the 60% mark for their adult residents with one shot, CDC data showed. Mississippi has the lowest percentage of adults with one shot, at 50%, according to the data.
Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the country have been on the rise, particularly in locations with low vaccination numbers, health officials said.
Officials in several states, including Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas, are reporting that the majority of their hospitalized patients are unvaccinated people.
The U.S. began vaccinating residents in December, starting with health care workers and the elderly. By mid-April, all residents above 18 were eligible and a month later, the Pfizer vaccine was approved for Americans over the age of 12.
Two of the three approved vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, require two doses and use mRNA technology to protect against the virus. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one dose.
The seven-day average of new daily first shots administered peaked at 3.4 million on April 11 but it has declined to low of 217,884 on July 7, the CDC reported. Several states that had lagging vaccination numbers, however, saw a small jump in shots administered during the final weeks of July.
The seven-day average of first doses administered grew to 367,351 on July 27, the CDC data showed.
On Sunday, White House COVID-19 data director Cyrus Shahpar revealed that over 517,000 people received their first shot.
Anyone who needs help scheduling a free vaccine appointment can log onto vaccines.gov.
(NEW YORK) — For the last five years, Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green, a physicist and cancer researcher, has fought to fund her cancer treatment technology.
Green has peer-reviewed studies on her research, which is still in the early stages, and has also received a $1.1 million grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But that research is now on hold due to a lack of funding. Green said she needs to launch human clinical trials, and to do that, she said, will cost some $90 million.
Some of those heading up Black-led health nonprofits and organizations told ABC News of the constant battle for them as smaller, minority-focused health care nonprofits to get government funding and attention from potential corporate sponsors who typically focus on mammoth nonprofits like Susan G. Komen and the American Cancer Society.
Several studies and data show that systemic racism permeates the health care nonprofit and research world and some say that could stymie lifesaving medical solutions and impede the on-the-ground work nonprofits do for health and wellness in underrepresented communities.
‘Biased against people of color’
Researchers looking at disparities in philanthropic funding in the 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review report revealed that nonprofit foundation leaders of color having inequitable access to social networks is a major barrier in accessing funding. Some 92% of U.S. foundation presidents are white, and some 75% of white people have entirely white social networks, the researchers wrote.
Bias in funding “absolutely” has the potential to keep lifesaving medical solutions from emerging, said Dr. Tshaka Cunningham, a former Department of Veterans Affairs scientific program manager who was instrumental in securing Green’s $1.1 million grant, and sits on the board of her foundation.
“In the whole scientific enterprise it’s difficult to achieve funding and historically found to be biased against people of color. Sometimes when you have data that is really good, the status quo doesn’t believe you,” said Cunningham, a molecular biologist and co-founder of TruGenomix Inc., a biotechnology company.
He said bias also exists in the entire nonprofit grant process as well as with mentorship, which can help form strategic connections to secure funding.
Green’s predicament is shared by other Black scientists and researchers, who are often met with closed wallets, whether they launch a nonprofit or a for-profit startup. Brian Brackeen, founder of Lightship Capital, a venture capital fund serving underrepresented entrepreneurs, and an expert in funding Black startups, discussed the funding woes of yet another Black woman with a health care innovation.
Brackeen said Davielle Jackson, a health care entrepreneur, could not secure funding for her invention, highly absorbent menstrual panties. He said his firm led her first round of funding and that she is now making revenue as a successful business.
But, Brackeen said: “The question is why wasn’t she invested in before?”
He said the funding situation is similar with Black entrepreneurs as with Black-led nonprofits, “[With] women or minority founders, they’re simply told [by potential investors] ‘you don’t fit this exact box, and I’m not going to help you fit it,'” Brackeen said.
Black health care nonprofits are typically entrenched in the communities they serve. They are usually staffed with people from those communities who have long-established relationships with residents. They can often make in-roads into providing health and wellness services in those communities that outside organizations cannot. When these nonprofits are underfunded and strapped for cash, those communities can lack access to vital health care and information.
Green’s struggles mirror other Black-led health organizations
Green set out on a mission to use her Ph.D. in physics from Alabama A&M University, as well as her research with optics and laser technology, to defeat the disease that remains the second-leading cause of death in the U.S. She used the $1.1 million grant to carry out initial research at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
Green describes her research as “laser-activated nanotechnology.”
“It has already demonstrated complete elimination of human cancer in laboratory mice after one 10-minute treatment over the course of 16 days with no observable side effects; no chemo, no radiation, no surgery. It is a game-changer for solid tumors,” she said.
Despite these promising early results, she has not been able to attract corporate or government interest in her research.
Green’s stymied efforts track with long-standing disparities in the research funding system.
In a 2011 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, researchers found that Black applicants are 13% less likely to receive National Institutes of Health research funding compared to white applicants. The study concluded that factors including “perception of scientific merit,” lack of diversity among grant reviewers and where an applicant attended school can influence who receives grants, all of which can place underrepresented groups at a disadvantage.
The NIH set out to make the grant process more equitable in 2014 including appointing its first chief officer of scientific workforce diversity and establishing the NIH Scientific Workforce Diversity Office.
As of 2020, the funding gap has narrowed, but African American/Black applicants are still 7% less likely to receive R01 (or equivalent) grants than white applicants, according to the latest data from NIH. R01 grants are described by NIH as “mature research projects that are hypothesis-driven with strong preliminary data.”
The landmark analysis quantified what many Black scientists already suspected, and sparked calls for policy intervention to address the funding gap. A follow-up study published in the journal Science Advances in 2019 said the funding rate for white scientists remained 1.7 times higher than for Black scientists. The researchers of this study suggested the funding gulf was due to topic choice, saying Black scientists “tend to propose research on topics with lower award rates.”
The flip side: Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos jackpot
The funding obstacles of Black people with health care initiatives stand in stark contrast to the now-infamous Elizabeth Holmes, a young, white woman. Holmes claimed she had developed a revolutionary blood-testing solution that could detect diseases including cancer.
The college dropout had no peer-reviewed publications, advanced degrees or any academic background in cancer research, yet her appeals for funding her health care startup Theranos raked in hundreds of millions from investors, and made her Forbes’ “youngest self-made woman billionaire” in 2015.
She has since faced a litany of fraud charges, to which she and a former partner in the company have pleaded not guilty, and her trial, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, remains ongoing.
Holmes received money from private investors largely through her family’s connections. But her access and influence skyrocketed so that even drugstore chain titan Walgreens considered a partnership with Theranos, although the technology had not been vetted, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
The disparity between Holmes’ ease in gaining investor and corporate trust versus her own experience has caused frustration for Green and other Black health care nonprofit leaders and researchers, who have faced closed door after closed door.
It’s the “the essence of white privilege,” Cunningham said about Holmes’ ability to secure millions for Theranos.
“Who you know” is also a big part of getting dollars for a private company or a nonprofit foundation like Green’s.
“White Americans are very well-networked,” said Vanessa Greene, chief executive officer of the Grand Rapids African American Health Institute. “And a lot of grants are based on relationships … who you know.”
Green’s research is in the fledgling stage, however, which could also explain her obstacles in raising funding, medical experts who ABC News asked to review a peer-reviewed report of Green’s research told ABC News, as well as the fierce competition to fund such initiatives.
“The funding landscape is so competitive even for super-compelling research that could save the lives of many,” said Dr. John Brownstein, a Harvard epidemiologist and ABC News contributor.
It’s “a struggle,” C. Virginia Fields, the founder and CEO of Black Health told ABC News about securing funds for Black-led heath care nonprofits.
“We’ve been able to tap into some of the local funding … COVID funding, but the funding streams for programs, certainly outside of just COVID have basically been brought to a standstill,” said Fields, a former Manhattan borough president and a 2005 New York City mayoral candidate.
Fields said nonprofits such as hers, are often offered things like computers in lieu of money. “We don’t need computers,” she said. “If you got $3 million on this contract let’s talk about some funding so that we can increase staff with people on the ground,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — As COVID-19 surges nationwide, the seriousness of the virus’s latest wave is reflected in newspaper headlines from cities and states across the country.
The number of new COVID-19 cases is reaching levels previously seen in February, as the U.S. was emerging from the winter surge.
The U.S. reported over 100,000 new daily COVID-19 cases for the first time since Feb. 6 on Friday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This latest surge is fueled by the highly contagious delta variant. A new internal CDC report first published by The Washington Post and confirmed by ABC News, said the variant could be more contagious than Ebola, Spanish flu, chickenpox and the common cold. It’s also possible delta leads to more severe illness, though that is not confirmed.
Based on its latest findings on the transmissibility of the delta variant, the CDC revised its mask guidance earlier this week, now recommending that those in areas with substantial or high levels of transmission — vaccinated or not — wear a mask in public, indoor settings.
A sampling of headlines from newspapers across the country Saturday spotlight areas experiencing spikes in cases and overwhelmed hospitals, and how they’re responding.
“Florida is the epicenter,” read the Tampa Bay Times, reporting that the state had the most cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. in the past week. On Saturday, Florida reported its largest single-day increase in cases since pandemic began.
The Honolulu Star Advertiser reported on a spike in cases in Hawaii that accounted for the highest daily case count since the start of the pandemic.
In Louisiana, another hotspot, The Advocate reported that the state’s hospitals are “overwhelmed again,” as it experiences its fourth wave of the virus.
Mississippi is also experiencing overwhelmed hospitals. “State’s largest ICU full,” the Clarion-Ledger reported, referring to the intensive care unit at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
Hospitalizations are climbing at the East Alabama Medical Center, increasing from eight at the start of the month to 34 as of Friday, the Opelika-Auburn News reported.
The Houston Chronicle detailed how Texas surpassed New York in COVID-19 deaths to have the second-highest death toll in the nation, “a feat experts say was driven by an inability to control transmission of the virus here,” the paper reported.
As cases quickly rise, restrictions are returning in some regions. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans reported on the city reissuing an indoor mask mandate due to its surge, with the headline. “Mask mandate back in N.O.” — one of several cities and counties to do so in recent days.
“Mask recommendations rise across Maine,” the Kennebec Journal in Augusta reported.
“State emphasizes need for shots,” read Saturday’s headline in The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as health officials urged residents to get vaccinated and bolster the state’s relatively low vaccination rate.
