TV News LIES

The global consulting firm McKinsey and Company Friday agreed to pay $650 million to settle a federal probe into its role in helping "turbocharge" sales of the highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin for Purdue Pharma, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday.

Federal officials said the influential consulting company - which often advises governments and powerful corporations around the globe - committed crimes while trying to aggressively boost opioid sales.

"It was a strategy, it was executed and it worked," said U.S. attorney Christopher Kavanaugh during a press conference on Friday. "McKinsey's strategy resulted in prescriptions for Oxycontin that were unsafe and medically unnecessary."

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World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.

The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.

Although a viable mirror microbe would probably take at least a decade to build, a new risk assessment raised such serious concerns about the organisms that the 38-strong group urged scientists to stop work towards the goal and asked funders to make clear they will no longer support the research.

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Providence is now home to the country’s first state-sanctioned facility for people to use illegal drugs under medical supervision. The nonprofit Project Weber/RENEW on Tuesday held a ribbon-cutting to celebrate a years-long effort to bring an overdose prevention center to the Ocean State.

Advocates hope that the new facility will lead to fewer overdose-related deaths in Rhode Island, and more people getting connected with drug treatment. Last year, more than 400 people in Rhode Island died of an overdose.

President-elect Donald Trump's choice to run the sprawling government agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — may have significant conflicts of interest.

Oz recently held investments, some shared with family, in health care, pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the health care sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz's holdings totalled tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat. This includes a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000.

Trump said Tuesday he would nominate Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency's scope is huge: CMS oversees coverage for more than 155 million Americans, nearly half the population. Medicare alone accounts for approximately $1 trillion in annual spending, with over 67 million enrollees.

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Street drug deaths in the U.S. are dropping at the fastest rate ever seen, according to a new report issued on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Preliminary data shows roughly 97,000 fatal overdoses over a 12-month period. That's down roughly 14.5% from a year earlier. Public health officials say the drop translates into more than 16,000 lives saved and marks the lowest level of drug deaths in nearly four years.

"The latest data show that our efforts are working," said Dr. Rahul Gupta, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Every life saved means one less grieving family and community."

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.