A renewal of the FDA’s pediatric rare disease voucher program is couched within a massive $1.2 trillion spending bill the House is set to vote on later this week.
There is hope yet for the FDA’s rare pediatric disease priority vouchers as key legislation is set to come before the U.S. House of Representatives later this week and the Senate next week. If passed, it would renew the program and make these expedited review tickets available to drugmakers once again.
The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday released the text of a funding package to keep the government open after a Jan. 30 deadline. That package includes $1.2 trillion in spending across the federal government, including Defense, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services.
The rare pediatric priority review voucher (PRV) program—now up for renewal in the HHS section of the legislation—first came into play in 2012 to encourage drugmakers to develop therapies for rare pediatric diseases. As a reward for developing and securing an approval for such conditions, companies are given a voucher that they can claim to speed up the review of a different drug application.
Companies can also choose to sell their vouchers for some liquidity. Last week, for instance, Jazz Pharmaceuticals offloaded a ticket for $200 million, the highest sale price in nearly 10 years.
In September 2024, Congress failed to authorize the renewal of the program, forcing the FDA in December of that year to wind down the scheme. Review vouchers have become more expensive as the program expired.
Then, in September last year, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce reignited hopes for the program after it advanced a bill that would reauthorize the awards. The proposed legislation was dubbed the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act of 2025 and, if passed, would keep the vouchers going through Sept. 30, 2029.
A vote on the spending proposal is expected to take place later this week, according to reporting from The Washington Post.
Also of interest to the pharma sector is the inclusion in the spending bill of a series of reforms to pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs), including a new HHS review of fees paid to PBMs and a requirement that PBMs submit reports to HHS covering drug pricing and rebate data, as well as written justifications for coverage choices.
The overall funding package is designed to prevent another government shutdown and would keep federal offices running past the Jan. 31 deadline, as per the Post.
The proposal also puts the National Institutes of Health’s budget at $48.7 billion—a $415 million increase from 2025 and in direct contrast with the Trump administration’s thrust to cut the agency’s appropriation by $18 billion.
If the spending bill passes the House vote, it will go on to the Senate next, though no schedule for this deliberation has yet been announced.
Let’s start with the obvious. The Venezuela operation is a win for America and the Venezuelan people. American consumers and businesses will benefit from lower prices while oil companies have a chance for bigger profits.
Venezuelans will benefit from increased investment, jobs, and profits in their country as well. This is why their stock market jumped 50, 60, 70, 80 percent after the U.S. takeover.
And if we recall that economic security is national security, then the new order in South America also simultaneously supports U.S. national security while undermining our greatest rival, China. In war, dependable access to oil is as important as dependable access to kinetic arms.
Access to ample, reliable flows of oil represents a key strategic interest. Removing one such flow from the Chinese sphere of influence and bringing it into our own is tremendous progress toward this goal. But the biggest loser of all isn’t China or Russia, it’s Canada.
Western Canada sends over four million barrels a day of heavy crude to American refiners that are equipped to handle this type of oil. But now, with access to the massive flows of Venezuelan crude, which is similar to the Canadian flavor, the United States no longer needs to rely on Canada to keep the refineries on the Gulf of America running at full capacity.
Instead, the oil shipments that previously went to China are already being redirected to American refiners—tens of millions of barrels worth just days after Maduro’s capture. And while the United States is paying full market price for that oil, don’t be surprised if oil prices start coming down because of this redirection.
After all, increasing supply puts downward pressure on prices. As American investment rebuilds Venezuela’s severely neglected oil infrastructure, we can expect production and exports to the United States to only increase, simultaneously benefiting the American and Venezuelan people.
That’s why this is such a massive economic win for American families and businesses who will benefit from lower prices, courtesy of more energy supplies. And since energy affects the price of everything else in an economy, lower prices for products like gasoline will put downward pressure on countless other prices, providing relief after four years of inflation under the Biden administration.
Consider when you go to a grocery store how much of the price of food you’re buying is dependent on energy prices. First off, farmers and ranchers are fueling their tractors and other vehicles with diesel and gas. They’re also using synthetic fertilizers created with natural gas.
But how did the gallon of milk, the carton of eggs, or the bag of bread get to grocery store in the first place? It got there on a trunk. Fueled by oil. What I’m getting at here is that we seriously underestimate just how much the price of energy affects everything we do and everything we buy.
Bring down energy prices, and you put downward pressure on prices throughout the economy. That’s a win for American consumers and businesses alike.
And U.S. control of Venezuela is also a second chance for jilted American oil companies to again profit from nearly one-fifth of the world’s proven oil reserves.
Years ago, those American companies poured investment into Venezuela to essentially modernize the entire industry there. For their troubles, these oil firms had their physical property confiscated and their intellectual property copied as the communists “nationalized” Venezuelan oil.
Of course, communist rule there was a disaster, as it has been everywhere, and the oil industry languished as infrastructure decayed, investment lagged, and production fell well below its potential. Venezuela pumps much less oil today than they did a quarter century ago. But this is poised to reverse.
Venezuela will now assuredly receive billions of dollars of investment from American oil companies, many of whom are champing at the bit to regain access to the largest reserves in the world. That will mean a windfall of jobs and income for the Venezuelan people, all of which could have been Canada’s, bringing us back to the story of the biggest economic loser here.
It didn’t have to be this way for the fifty-first state. But instead of welcoming oil and gas investment from the United States and building valuable infrastructure like pipelines, Canada has preferred to prioritize far-Left causes and an anti-energy agenda.
After recent events, not only is Canada losing its biggest crude customer, but it’s also losing its only real leverage in trade talks with the United States. This is an economic reality that few professional pundits seem to have grasped.
To be clear, the flood of cheap Venezuelan crude will not arrive in the United States overnight. It will take time, years in fact, to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and really ramp up production to replace most Canadian crude imports. But the writing is on the wall.
The United States, for a change, is firmly in the driver’s seat and master of its own destiny—and hemisphere.
The economic story here also goes well beyond oil too, although that’s what has gotten most of the attention. Venezuela is a veritable goldmine of other natural resources like rare earth minerals, lumber, bauxite (the primary source of aluminum), natural gas, and more. Canada just lost not only its leverage with oil, but just about every other one of its exports too.
Since the Canadian economy is much more dependent on exports than the U.S. economy is, and since nearly all Canadian exports come to the United States while relative few of ours go to Canada, the slowdown in trade between our two countries has very unequal effects.
In short, this has been very harmful to Canada and will be devastating in the long run. But it’s little more than a speedbump here in America.
President Donald Trump has effectively barred the door on Canada, and the latter will have few alternatives to completely opening every one of its markets to free and fair competition.
Of course, Canada can always choose to fall further into irrelevance and economic impoverishment by stubbornly continuing to snub American manufacturers, farmers, and workers.
Let me close by saying that if the Monroe Doctrine warned Europeans to stay out of the Western Hemisphere and the Roosevelt corollary established American intervention therein, then the Trump corollary has put a finer, and more economic, point on the matter that’s best summed up in two words: America first.
The White Coat Waste Project - which you may remember forexposingDr. Anthony Fauci's sick experiments on beagles in 2024 - has obtained a document revealing that the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana reported a biological incident in November 2025.
RML, which operates BSL-2, BSL-3, and BSL-4 'full suit' laboratories notably studies viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa virus, as well as coronaviruses, dangerous bacteria, tuberculosis, tick-borne pathogens (Rocky Mountain spotted fever, for example), West Nile virus, Prion diseases, and others.
According to a November 2025 biosafety report obtained by WCWP, a 'Form 3' was reported to the Federal Select Agent Program on Nov. 13, 2025. Form 3 is a mandatory notification form used to alert the Federal Select Agent Program of any 'theft, loss, or release' involving select agents or toxins, Infowars' Breanna Morello reports after interviewing WCWP's Justin Goodman - who called Rocky Mountain Laboratories 'one of the most dangerous biolabs in the country.'
Morello: "You've recently obtained these documents over at the White Coat Waste Project, which detail specifically the threat that a bio agent, which apparently is classified as potentially posing a severe threat to public health, has been either stolen, lost, or released. What are some of the details behind this concerning story?"
Goodman: "Now, we recently—last week—exposed how Jay Bhattacharya, NIH director, just gave another $2 million to a bat lab being built at Colorado State University to provide animals for infection studies. Both the Colorado State and, as you mentioned, the Rocky Mountain Lab... Now, the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana is run by Fauci's former NIH division, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"It is very infamous. The Rocky Mountain Lab is where ticks were weaponized with NIH and DOD to spread Lyme and other diseases back to the 1960s and '70s. More recently, White Coat Waste exposed how—a couple years prior to the pandemic—the Rocky Mountain Laboratory was cloning coronaviruses that Peter Daszak and the Wuhan lab were finding out in bat caves in Wuhan. They were cloning those viruses at Rocky Mountain Laboratory."
"These are the same viruses that the Wuhan Lab was doing gain-of-function with, putting spike proteins around at around the same time. The Rocky Mountain Lab has a very sordid history doing the most dangerous experiments in this country—Ebola, plague, anthrax, lots of different hemorrhagic fevers that have no cure and 90-95% kill rates in people. So we've been following the money to the Rocky Mountain Lab because this new Colorado State bat lab is going to be supplying bats to these facilities.
"Now, what we just uncovered is that in November 2025—just a couple months ago—quietly, NIH posted a biosafety test to see if there's any from Rocky Mountain Lab, indicating that a select agent... Now, select agents are very deadly pathogens—serious health concerns for both humans and livestock. These are things used as bioweapons, things like ricin, anthrax, Ebola, tularemia. The Rocky Mountain Lab report just has a very benign item—if you didn't know what we were looking for—one of these pathogens was either accidentally released, lost, or stolen from this NIH-funded bioagent lab that participates in dangerous animal experiments with the military.
"So we don't know exactly what that agent was and what happened, but we do know there's a serious biosafety breach at one of the most dangerous biolabs in the country, run by the NIH. And we only know about this because we stumbled upon this document when we were digging into what's currently happening at the Rocky Mountain Lab because of its tie to this very controversial bat lab project at Colorado State, which has gone viral—pun intended—over the last couple weeks."
China slammed the European Union's move to label certain Chinese companies as "high-risk suppliers" and restrict their participation in the bloc's 5G development, the Ministry of Commerce said on Thursday.
"We firmly oppose the EU's discriminatory practices against Chinese enterprises and its misguided approach of politicizing economic and trade issues, and engaging in excessive securitization," ministry spokeswoman He Yongqian told a news conference on Thursday.
He's comments came after the EU's Cybersecurity Act review plans to exclude components and equipment from "high-risk suppliers" in 18 critical sectors, including energy, transport, and information and communication technology service management, a move widely seen as targeting Chinese companies.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told BBC Breakfast on Thursday that the UK will not sign US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace treaty on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later today.
"We won't be one of the signatories today because this is about a legal treaty that raises much broader issues and we do also have concerns about President Putin being part of something which is talking about peace when we have still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine," Cooper said.
The signing ceremony is set for 10:30 am local time.
Anni Kim never thought she’d make the switch from patient bedsides to Botox.
An RN with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, she worked as a surgical trauma ICU and rapid response nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH for over seven years — before switching to become an aesthetic injector for board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Leif Rogers.
Kim initially got into nursing because of a deep desire to help people, she told The Post.
When Anni Kim worked as a surgical trauma ICU and rapid response nurse at Dartmouth, she started to question the hospital’s consistent understaffing.
However, as she developed “more critical thinking skills” over her years in the hospital, the New Englander started to question the institution’s consistent understaffing — especially after the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and a personal re-awakening on the importance of patient dignity, following her grandfather’s cancer diagnoses.
“I was just like, this is not right — they were understaffing us to save money on their end for who knows what,” Kim recalled in an interview. “Every shift, you’re set up to fail, and if you survive that shift, it’s like, ‘Oh great, you survived another day.’…Patients can’t get the care they need, which leads to more problems in the long run.”
At Dartmouth, she was earning $120,000 a year. After quitting, she briefly tried out travel nursing, raking in $4,000 to $5,000 a week. Still, she admitted, “no amount of money” would have kept her working in hospitals. The Post sought comment from Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but did not immediately hear back.
When Kim started out in aesthetics, she took a sharp pay cut — down to $30 an hour, enough that she couldn’t quite leave her old life at first, supplementing her pay with hospital shifts. Now, she’s completely free — and bringing in roughly $130,000 a year, she said.
“There’s this kind of saying in medicine that nothing’s actually done about (an issue) until someone dies,” she continued. “I don’t think we should wait until that point — that’s common sense — but apparently, it’s not. Morally, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
As an aesthetic nurse and injector for a top L.A. plastic surgeon and celebrity clients, Kim now makes approximately $130,000 a year.Sherman Cheung
Roughly 15,000 New York City nurses have expressed similar frustrations over the past week, populating picket lines in what has become the largest nurses’ strike in the city’s history to date. Nurses, primarily from Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian/Columbia and Montefiore Medical Center, are accusing the big-budget institutions of not providing adequate resources for patient safety and basic nurse protections.
The call for significant fixes to staffing issues and pay increases has been addressed with a BandAid of temporary nurses (who the striking nurses say are overworked) and met with a fair amount of resistance by the medical centers, who are saying they’ve already made strides in addressing former versions of these complaints.
Given the stormy waters in New York, it’s perhaps unsurprising that thousands of nurses across the country have been quietly stepping away from their hectic hospital roles altogether — and are now choosing the relative calm of medical spas, where some are making far more, even if the transition can be bumpy, salary-wise.
According to Nurse.org, registered nurses in New York currently have a starting hourly average of $33.70, adding up to an annual salary of $70,087 a year. In California, starting pay is slightly lower, with novice nurses earning an average of $30.18, totaling to an annual salary of $62,776. Union members in cities like NYC can earn far more.
Meanwhile, on average, aesthetic nurses in New York typically make $42.25 an hour, or $87,874 annually, while aesthetic nurses in California on average make $38.11 an hour, or $79,269 salary. As they did for Kim, those numbers can climb significantly with experience.
Kim finds her current role gratifying.Sherman Cheung
Dr. Rose Sherman – an RN and bestselling author with a doctorate in nursing leadership — said she’s seen a recent uptick of medical nurses turning to careers in aesthetics over the past year — forgoing the life-or-death workload of hospitals and medical centers, in favor of administering fillers and facial treatments.
“I started hearing from (hospital managers) about this trend, that they were observing some of their staff — not only the new staff — coming in and saying their ultimate goal was to work in med spas,” Sherman told The Post. “Some of their own staff were already picking up part-time positions and taking coursework on how to give Botox, etc.”
Sherman shared that while the number of registered nurses currently employed in med spas — about 10- to 15,000 — is “not really a huge number” compared to the over 4 million RNs across the nation, it illustrates a growing trend of nurses “actively looking for roles that they think are going to be more fulfilling outside of acute care environments.”
Bea Ohanian muscled through a year of nursing on the COVID floor at L.A.’s Good Samaritan Hospital during the pandemic, but said staffing issues made her feel stressed and burnt out.
“(Medical nursing) doesn’t pay as well and the work is harder, so that’s really the challenge for healthcare,” explained Sherman. “It’s not that these nurses shouldn’t be working in these med spas, or that they don’t have the talent for it…The flip side is it’s just another drain-off from other aspects of nursing where the need is very great.”
Bea Ohanian — previously a COVID-era nurse who now is a board-certified nurse practitioner working in aesthetics and regenerative medicine — is earning more in aesthetics than her previous medical environment, though it took her three years of working in Los Angeles to surpass her hospital pay.
“It’s definitely possible to make more money in aesthetics over time, but it takes about two to four years of consistent hustling to make it out of the trenches and build enough clientele where people are requesting you by name and are loyal to you,” Ohanian told The Post. “Especially in L.A., where it’s super saturated. (In the beginning), you’re a novice nurse all over again.”
Now, Bea Ohanian makes more as an aesthetic nurse, though it took her a few years to achieve this.
Ohanian stated that she made $52 an hour during a stint at L.A.’s PIH Health Good Samaritan hospital. She took a pay cut when she first made the transition to aesthetics — making $30 an hour with no commission, which eventually ramped up to $75 an hour with commission rates varying from 5 to 15 percent, depending on client volume.
She now makes over $100,000 a year, bringing home $8,000 to $10,000 a month after taxes, she said.
Though Ohanian may have started out at a high volume hospital to gain experience, her ultimate goal was a career in aesthetic nursing, she admitted.
“There were no jobs (in aesthetic nursing) at that point,” said Ohanian. “So I thought it would be a good idea to try to be a hospital nurse and get the knowledge from that environment…But I only lasted a year.”
Ohanian enjoys making her clients feel beautiful in a safe way.
As a new grad, Ohanian started out on the COVID-19 floor at Good Samaritan, where protocols were “constantly changing” and there was not always the required ratio of nurses to patients.
“I remember one time, management came to tell us we would be out of ratio for the night — it was my second week on the floor alone, and I started crying,” she recalled. “(They) said, ‘Oh, you’ll be fine.’ He was so robotic in the way he was talking to me. The only way I got through my shift was with the other nurses who pitched in.”
While Ohanian initially had assumed she’d be working in a hospital on a per diem basis for the rest of her career in order to “keep (her) foot in an acute care setting,” the poor effect that work had on her mental health led her to switch to aesthetics altogether.
Not that life in her chosen field doesn’t come with its own unique challenges. Ohanian maintained that while aesthetic nursing may not always deal in the extremes of life versus death, it’s not nearly “as glamorous as it looks on TikTok and social media.”
Ohanian appreciates what her hospital experience taught her, but would not go back.
“When you first start in aesthetics, you think everything seems easy because the nurses make it look so effortless,” she explained. “But once you start actually trying to do good work, you realize that a lot of things can go very wrong when you’re holding a needle to someone’s face. Being able to navigate that properly is super important.”
“To know how to inject properly — not just to make (patients) look good but to stay safe — is something a lot of people don’t realize about aesthetics,” Ohanian continued. “It takes (knowledge of) anatomy and understanding vessels, arteries, muscles and nerves, things you don’t learn in nursing school unless you’re specializing in the field.”
While Ohanian doesn’t miss her days working in an acute care hospital environment, she does credit the experience for helping her become the aesthetic nurse she is today. She also encourages medical nurses who have a true passion for the field to transition, if that’s what they feel called to do.
“There’s a huge pay cut in the beginning and you most likely have to start at a med spa doing things like laser hair removal at first, and spending thousands of dollars of your own money to train…that kind of deters (nurses) from it unless they’re super passionate about aesthetics. It’s not just something to do to get out of the hospital.”
