Trump Nominates Alex Azar as Health and Human Services Secretary

The former chief of Eli Lilly USA is picked to replace Tom Price, who stepped down in September amid a controversy over the abuse of taxpayer-funded travel.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Update (January 25): The US Senate voted 55-43 to confirm former Eli Lilly executive Alex Azar as Health and Human Services Secretary on Wednesday (January 24). The vote was preceded by several critical speeches from Democrats who highlighted Azar’s oversight of Lilly’s drug price hikes while he was president of the company’s US branch.

President Donald Trump has nominated Alex Azar, a former pharmaceutical executive and health care consultant, for the position of secretary of the US Health and Human Services (HHS) department. If confirmed by the Senate, Azar will be one of few HHS secretaries to have come from an industry the HHS regulates, rather than from a career primarily in government.

“Happy to announce, I am nominating Alex Azar to be the next ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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