As a law enforcement officer, I spent my career protecting the public from various threats. Today, I feel compelled to address a growing danger many may not be aware of: the risks associated with compounded medicines.

While these drugs can serve important medical needs, they also pose significant dangers, including the potential for exposing the public to counterfeit medicines or counterfeit ingredients used to make compounded medicines.

Moreover, I heard that some in Congress want to allow Medicare to cover compounded medicines. Quite frankly, this is a terrible idea because it would exacerbate these risks, ultimately jeopardizing patient safety.

Compounded medicines are custom-made drugs prepared by compounding pharmacists to meet the specific needs of individual patients.

These medications are not FDA-approved, meaning they do not undergo the rigorous testing for safety, effectiveness, and quality that brand-name drugs do. While compounding can be beneficial for patients with unique needs like allergies, it also opens the door to significant risks to patient safety.

Due to the lack of oversight, poorly compounded medicines have resulted in severe adverse reactions and even death of patients. These non-FDA-approved drugs put patients at risk of contamination from unsanitary conditions, incorrect dosages, and substandard ingredients. Unfortunately, we saw this tragically play out in 2012 when a fungal meningitis outbreak linked to contaminated steroid injections from a compounding pharmacy caused more than 60 deaths and hundreds of illnesses.

And in 2019, patients suffered eye injuries from non-sterile compounded eye injections made in a Florida outsourcing facility.

The lack of regulation and oversight also creates opportunities for counterfeit medicines to enter the market. Counterfeit drugs, which can be harmful or deadly, may contain incorrect ingredients, improper dosages, or harmful substances. The FDA has issued numerous warnings about counterfeit and poorly compounded drugs, including those for popular medications like semaglutide and tirzepatide.

We have seen for years the toll counterfeit opioid pills made with fentanyl have had on our communities. Opening the door to more counterfeit drugs in our communities is not the answer.

I witnessed the devastating effects of counterfeit drugs throughout my years in law enforcement. During my tenure, I was involved in several investigations to seize counterfeit drugs manufactured in unsanitary conditions and distributed through illegal channels run by organized crime syndicates that are driven solely by profits with no regard for the public’s health and safety.

Patients who unknowingly received these counterfeit drugs experienced treatment failures, adverse reactions, or worsening medical conditions.

The proliferation of counterfeit drugs undermines trust in the healthcare system and puts countless lives at risk. Allowing Medicare to cover compounded medicines may seem like a way to increase access to treatments, but it would have unintended consequences.

By covering compounded drugs, Medicare would effectively endorse treatments that lack FDA approval and oversight, which could increase Florida seniors’ exposure to counterfeit, substandard or adulterated compounded drugs.

Furthermore, expanding Medicare coverage could strain the already limited resources of regulatory agencies like the FDA. With more compounded medicines on the market, the FDA would face greater challenges in monitoring and ensuring the safety of these drugs. This could result in more cases of contamination, incorrect dosages, and counterfeit medications slipping through the cracks.

Maintaining strict oversight of compounded medicines is crucial to protecting patient safety. Regulatory agencies must have the resources and authority to enforce high standards for compounding practices. Additionally, healthcare providers and patients should be educated about the risks associated with compounded drugs and encouraged to use FDA-approved drugs whenever possible.

While compounded medicines can serve important medical needs, they also pose significant threats we cannot ignore. Expanding Medicare coverage of compounded medicines would only exacerbate these dangers, putting patient safety at greater risk. As a retired law enforcement officer, I urge policymakers to prioritize patient safety and maintain strict oversight of compounded medicines. Our health and lives depend on it.

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Mark Baughman is a 35-year law enforcement veteran whose career in Florida included serving in the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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House candidate Brian Hodgers sent out an email blast saying political opponents fabricated his arrest record. “I was NEVER ARRESTED,” Hodgers wrote.

But he admitted in an application for a Florida real estate license that he once pleaded no contest to selling a minor a beer.

Hodgers is one of three candidates running in the Republican Primary in a House District 32 Special Election to replace outgoing Rep. Debbie Mayfield.

He fired out the email blast after appearing in a Florida Today forum in which opponent Terry Cronin said, “I’m the only candidate who doesn’t have a criminal record.” Hodgers also alludes in letters to paid attacks from “one of our opponents and his liberal allies” that attempt to “frame me as having a criminal past.”

“On the issue of the criminal past, my father and I owned a gas station together about 30 years ago,” Hodgers wrote. “One of our clerks was cited for selling beer to an underage adult, and our business had to pay a fine. I was NEVER ARRESTED. My opponent is making things up and using a falsified document to suggest that I was arrested.”

But a LexisNexis search shows court records indicating that he was cited in May 1996 and required to appear in court on a second-degree misdemeanor. The document indicated he pled “nolo contendere” and adjudication was ultimately withheld. The document lists a sentence of two days in jail.

A license application with the Department of Business and Professional Regulations reveals further details. A portion of that form asks if applicants have ever been convicted of a crime, been found guilty or pleaded no contest. Hodgers marked “Yes.”

He also lays out a more detailed narrative explaining the crime, and acknowledging that the clerk cited was himself.

“I also realize that my application may be held up due to a misdemeanor offense in which I received adjudification with held for selling an alcoholic beverage to an underage minor while working for a gas station convenience store in 1996,” Hodgers wrote in the application.

In the candidate forum, Hodgers said there was no record of him being arrested with Broward County, which does not publish records on its website dating back to 1996. He said Cronin had “embellished” a minor offense. He again said that he and his father owned multiple gas stations, and he again blamed someone else for the offense.

“We had a clerk who was caught up in, I guess what you would call a sting operation where they brought in an underage person and they sold a beer to this underage person. And I, as the business owner, received a citation,” Hodgers said. He denied ever spending “days in jail.”

But that differs significantly from the account he hand-wrote in the state application for his license. There, he made clear he was the one who made the sale.

“As a cashier at a gas station, I mistakenly sold a can of beer to a underage minor,” he wrote. “I paid court costs and adjudification was witheld.”

The application also includes further written explanation about the incident, including that a Judge had informed him the sting was conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and that the incident was a “lesson to be learned” but “should not show up on my record.” “I have never been in any kind of trouble and have a clean record except for this one instance,” Hodgers wrote.

The LexisNexis document shows the court costs amounted to only $45. Hodgers was 23 at the time of the offense.

FL DBPR – License – Hodgers[29] by Jacob Ogles on Scribd

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Dr. David Weldon had been out of the national spotlight for more than 15 years when he was nominated to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many anti-vaccine advocates knew him well.

“He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum,” the co-director of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on Facebook. And on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Autism Action Network credited the former congressman with introducing legislation two decades ago “to stop the vaccine pedocide.”

Weldon, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before he can lead the nation’s top public health agency. His confirmation hearing is to be held Thursday.

The 71-year-old retired Florida congressman is considered to be closely aligned with his presumptive boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary who for years has been one of the nation’s leading anti-vaccine activists.

Department of Health and Human Services officials declined to make Weldon or Kennedy available for an Associated Press interview.

When he made the nomination announcement, Trump said Weldon “will proudly restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and Make America Healthy Again!”

The CDC was created nearly 80 years ago to prevent the spread of malaria in the U.S. Its mission was later expanded, and it gradually became a global leader on infectious and chronic diseases and a go-to source of health information.

Today, the Atlanta-based agency has a more than $9 billion core budget. It had about 13,000 employees when Trump took office, but more than 500 were fired as part of a dramatic — and continuing — push by the president and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk to cut staffing across federal agencies.

Weldon has no experience in federal public heath, but that isn’t unusual. The last few presidential administrations — both Democratic and Republican — have appointed outsiders with no CDC experience.

Unlike Weldon, however, those outsiders had been public health researchers or had run state health departments. He is an Army veteran and internal medicine doctor whose main claim to fame was representing a central Florida district in Congress from 1995 to 2009.

After he left Congress, Weldon practiced medicine in Florida, taught at the Florida Institute of Technology, served as board chairman for the Israel Allies Foundation and made unsuccessful runs at federal and state elected office. In a March 1 letter to HHS, Weldon said that if confirmed he will resign from the foundation and from two Florida health-care organizations. He also promised to sell his holdings in funds investing in energy, pharmaceutical and health-care companies.

Weldon was a leader of a Congressional push for research into autism’s causes, which began around 2000. It was fueled by a controversial — and ultimately discredited — study by British researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield that claimed to find a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism.

The action in Congress was driven largely by U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican whose grandson had autism. Weldon was a prominent voice in Burton’s hearings and co-sponsored a bill that would give responsibility for the nation’s vaccine safety to an independent agency within HHS — an idea that not everyone in public health opposes.

But Weldon also rejected studies that found no causal link between childhood vaccines and autism, and accused the CDC of short-circuiting research that might show otherwise.

Meanwhile, Weldon was a friend to practitioners of fringe medicine. When Weldon invited Wakefield to testify before Congress, he also brought in Dr. James “Jeff” Bradstreet, who used alternative medicine to try to treat autistic children. Bradstreet died in 2015, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration raided his office, of a gunshot wound that police labeled a suicide.

Weldon later appeared in “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a 2016 documentary directed by Wakefield and produced by Del Bigtree, an activist who later became the manager of Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. In the movie, Weldon repeated suspicions and accusations about CDC that he’d made as a congressman.

Kennedy has argued that experts who advise the CDC on vaccine policy have conflicts from working with, or receiving money from, pharmaceutical companies. Those advisers routinely disclose conflicts in public meetings, but the CDC last week launched a web tool “to increase the transparency of conflicts of interest.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Democrats are likely to press Weldon on his vaccine views and his plans for the agency under a health secretary who has shown disdain for it.

Dr. Anne Schuchat worked at the CDC for 33 years before retiring in 2021, and twice served as acting director. She said she doesn’t know Weldon, but that agency directors gradually develop an appreciation and respect for its work.

If Weldon follows a similar pattern, she said, he could be a great asset: His Capitol Hill experience could help CDC secure funding and political support.

“With an optimistic view, there’s lot you can build on, with what he has on paper,” she said. “With a pessimistic view, if he wants the job to tear the place down, that would be disappointing — and dangerous.”

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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.

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