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From HealthAffairs. By Aaron S. Kesselheim and Jerry Avorn. At a time of rapidly developing new medications and growing public health challenges, there is now no official leadership in place at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Office of the Surgeon General. Marty Makary's legacy will be that he undercut many of the key principles that had made the agency one of the most important public health institutions in the

With Mirko von Hein and The Pharma Perspective. Harvard professor Jerry Avorn and I discuss drug regulation, FDA approval standards, surrogate endpoints, pharmaceutical pricing, public research funding, medical misinformation, and what all of this means for patients, innovation, and health policy.

From the New England Journal of Medicine. By Jerry Avorn, MD. SUMMARY: In this NEJM Perspective, Dr. Avorn reflects on a physician-designed Massachusetts ballot initiative from the year 2000 that sought to transform health care financing and organization. Although the initiative failed at the ballot box, Avorn argues that it represented a significant — if largely unrecognized — turning point in US health policy. The piece examines how even unsuccessful reform efforts can sh

Harlan Krumholz & Howard Forman, Yale Medical School | Health & Veritas Podcast. In a Wide-Ranging Interview, Dr. Jerry Avorn Explains How the Drug Marketing Machine Works — and How to Counter It Source: Health & Veritas, Yale School of Management, Episode 195, November 13, 2025 In a November 2025 episode of Health & Veritas — the Yale School of Management podcast hosted by physicians Howard Forman and Harlan Krumholz — Jerry Avorn, MD, sat down for an extended conversation c

From The National Resource Center on Academic Detailing NaRCAD. In a thought piece published on the NaRCAD blog in October 2025, Jerry Avorn, MD — Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founder of NaRCAD, and author of Rethinking Medications — argues that the concept of "provenance" has become the defining challenge for evidence-based medicine in the current political moment. Dr. Avorn opens by tracing the word itself. "Provenance," he explains, means the source

From STAT News. By Jerry Avorn, MD. SUMMARY: In this STAT News First Opinion essay, Dr. Avorn argues that private pharmaceutical investment cannot substitute for federal NIH funding. He opens with a historical account: around 1990, a Harvard researcher investigating a little-known peptide with potential to slow gastric emptying and reduce hunger — what would later become the basis for the GLP-1 drug class — sought pharmaceutical-company support because federal funding was una