Raphael Stevens

Trainer Bob Baffert of Medina Spirit, raises the trophy after winning the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby with Medina Spirit, his seventh career Kentucky Derby win, at Churchill Downs on May 01, 2021 in Louisville, Kentucky.Andy Lyons | Getty ImagesKentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit on Tuesday was allowed to enter the upcoming Preakness Stakes race, with conditions, despite failing a drug test for the steroid betamethasone after its Derby victory.The conditions include “a binding commitment” from Medina Spirit’s trainer, Bob Baffert, for “full transparency of medical and testing results that will allow for all results to be released to the public,” Maryland Jockey Club and 1/St Racing said in a statement.The announcement said there will be “rigorous testing and monitoring” of Medina Spirit and another Baffert-trained horse, Concert Tour, which also is set to run in the Preakness.The 146th running of the Preakness, which is the second jewel of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, is set for Saturday at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.Baffert’s lawyer earlier had threatened to seek a court injunction if Medina Spirit was barred from Preakness Stakes, as the trainer awaits a second drug test from the Derby that would end with the horse’s victory there being voided if it is positive.Another Baffert horse, the filly Beautiful Gift, is entered to run in the George E. Mitchell Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico on Friday, and will be subject to the same conditions, according to Tuesday’s statement.”If any of the three Baffert horses test positive for a banned substance, or at a level for a permitted therapeutic substance that is above the designated limit, or if after medical review, reasonable conditions warrant, Baffert or [Maryland Jockey Club] on his behalf, will scratch the horse in question,” the statement said.Baffert on Sunday disclosed that Medina Spirit tested positive for 21 picograms of betamethasone, 11 picograms above the legal limit, on the day of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville.Baffert, who was suspended indefinitely from Churchill Downs as a result of the failed first test, said at the time that he did not know how the steroid, which is normally used to treat a horse’s joints, entered Medina Spirit’s system.”I got the biggest gut-punch in racing, for something I didn’t do,” Baffert said Sunday. His now-threatened victory with Medina Spirit was his seventh Kentucky Derby win.So far this year, five Baffert-trained horses have failed drug tests.John Velazquez aboard Medina Spirit (8) wins the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.Michael Clevenger | USA TODAY Sports | ReutersOn Tuesday, hours before the Preakness Stakes agreed to allow his horses to run, Baffert issued a statement through his lawyer saying that Medina Spirit had been treated with an antifungal ointment containing betamethasone once a day leading up to the Kentucky Derby, which was run on May 1.”My investigation is continuing, and we do not know for sure if this ointment was the cause of the test results, or if the test results are even accurate, as they have yet to be confirmed by the split sample,” Baffert said.”I have been told that a finding of a small amount, such as 21 picograms, could be consistent with application of this type of ointment.”Mary Scollay, executive director and chief operating officer of the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, told NBC News that it was difficult to believe that Baffert and his veterinarian did not know that betamethasone was in the medication Otomax.”It’s on the tube,” Scollay said.”It’s almost an aggravating circumstance at this point.”Just two horses in the 147-year history of the Kentucky Derby have been disqualified, according to The Associated Press.Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal owns NBC and NBC Sports, which broadcast the Triple Crown races. More

Daniel Carcillo, Wesana Health CEO, is a living example of the power of psychedelic drugs to help those suffering from mental illnesses when standard treatments — and other forms of alternative treatments — have already failed. The former National Hockey League player says he was on the verge of suicide as a result of traumatic brain injury he endured as a professional athlete.”Nothing worked,” Carcillo said at Tuesday’s CNBC Healthy Returns Summit, which included everything from standard medicine to isolation tanks. “I started to make plans to underburden my family and take my own life. I thought I had tried everything.”Then Carcillo discovered various mushroom-based alternative medical treatments for inflammation and wellness, such as Lion’s Mane and Turkey Tail, and psilocybin — the compound in “magic” mushrooms — the latter of which the former NHL player credits with saving his life.He says the day after a psychedelic trip under the right setting, he woke up feeling the way he hadn’t felt in years: normal. And over the course of two weeks his symptoms lessened in intensity before “all but fading away.”Medicinal uses for psilocybin include depression, PTSD and other mental disorders, and as more clinical data comes in, a recent spate of public offering has raised billions of dollars for the emerging mental health field.The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images”I found myself more connected to myself and the others around me. I have three young kids under the age of six and all I wanted to do was hug them and get back to my beautiful wife,” said Carcillo at CNBC Healthy Returns. His penchant for negative self-talk turned to positive self-talk — “Lots of amazingly destructive thought patterns disappeared in two weeks,” he recalled — and today, he no longer suffers from anxiety and depression.His experience is an anecdotal one but it is being corroborated by a growing body of clinical research in the use of psychedelics to treat a variety of mental health conditions including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Recent publications in The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine have detailed the latest encouraging results on MDMA and psilocybin as potential mental health drug breakthroughs.The data has attracted the attention of Wall Street and investors, including Kevin O’Leary, “Shark Tank” co-host and chairman of the O’Shares ETFs.This is a brand new area of medicine with such incredible potential.Kevin O’LearyCompanies including Wesana Health, Compass Pathways, MindMed and Field Trip Health are among an emerging class of stock market issues that, while coming with high risk, are raising billions of dollars based on a level of promise that O’Leary says is for real.”The potential of psychedelics far exceeds the potential of cannabis,” O’Leary said at CNBC’s Healthy Returns Summit on Tuesday.The investor said he looks at new uses for illegal drugs “pragmatically” and as an investor it makes more sense to him to bet on psychedelics where research is increasingly showing medicinal efficacy, rather than placing market bets on the recreational use of drugs that are still illegal in many jurisdictions and could face complications related to RICO statutes.”What interested me is scale and size of the market,” O’Leary said. “These opportunities have been ignored ever since the 1960s.”O’Leary has invested in MindMed and Compass Pathways as the past year-and-a-half has seen a major ramp in market acceptance of psychedelic usage in medicine, and multiple clinical trials moving along.”This is a brand new area of medicine with such incredible potential,” O’Leary said, adding that the way investors should be looking at it is based on the fact that we have not had new medicines for mental health approved in decades.O’Leary said investors also need to remember these are nascent businesses with a high degree of risk, and that clinical trials can have binary outcomes which can lead to a billion-dollar drug or a company going to zero. He has diversified his bets and said his preference is to overweight companies with multiple trials going on, which has led him to a greater holding in MindMed than Compass Pathways.”This is an exciting space. How often do you get to invest in something that’s never been done before?” he said.Recent Wall Street estimates for psilocybin as a mainstream mental health treatment option — in particular, for treatment-resistant depression — ballpark peak annual sales in the range of $1 billion to $5 billion, and a patient market size in the U.S. between two million and four million individuals. One analyst who covers the space recently told CNBC that investors shouldn’t rush into the space, but if they have an existing risk tolerance for the biotech sector, psychedelic medicine could comprise a portion of that allocation.Dr. Sharmin Ghaznavi, associate director at Mass General Hospital’s Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics, said as a psychiatrist she has a front row seat for the toll mental illness takes on individuals and the stories that keep occurring with patients who have “incredible responses” to psychedelics.”For far too many patients current treatments are inadequate or don’t help at all, and we owe it to these patients to explore the promise of these compounds,” Ghaznavi said. She added that the medical community also owes it to these patients to perform due diligence. “It’s early days … there is a lot we don’t know,” she said, including which drugs are the right match for the right patients, and in what dosages and treatment settings. “We need rigorous research in the coming years to optimize treatment delivery, to maximize the benefit and minimize harm.” Carcillo said it is critical to keep collecting the data and let it inform decision making, and how we set up these experiences. “It will really show us what these medicines can do,” he said. “We just want to be a company that is focused on supporting neurological wellness through the right pathways and looking at these medications to treat a wide variety of ailments,” he said, from TBI to PTSD, anxiety and depression.He cited the example of pioneering psychedelics researcher Rick Doblin at MAPS, which had its most rigorous clinical trial data on MDMA for treatment of PTSD published this week, a milestone for the sector, and he said companies should stay “close to the roadmap they’ve used.”Wesana is planning to file for FDA approval and approval in Canada in the fourth quarter. Stay connected with Healthy ReturnsFor a front row seat at CNBC Events, you can hear directly from the visionary executives, innovators, leaders and influencers taking the stage in “The Keynote Podcast.” Listen now, however you get your podcasts.For more exclusive insights from our reporters and speakers, sign up for our Healthy Returns newsletter to get the latest delivered straight to your inbox weekly. 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A healthcare worker administers a shot of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to a woman at a pop-up vaccination site operated by SOMOS Community Care during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in New York, January 29, 2021.Mike Segar | ReutersCovid-19 booster shots will be free to the public if they are needed to control the ongoing pandemic, David Kessler, chief science officer of the White House Covid-19 response team, told U.S. lawmakers Tuesday.”We do have the funds to purchase the next round and to assure if there are boosters that they are free just as the last round,” Kessler said at a Senate hearing. “Beyond 2022, I look to your guidance for at what point do you transition back to a commercial market, but I think for this coming round we are going to proceed as we have proceeded,” he said.Kessler said it is still unclear if the booster shots will be necessary to protect against future variants of the coronavirus. The U.S. is making the preparations in case they are needed, he said. Antibodies that protect against the virus wane over time and new variants that reduce the effectiveness of some vaccines “all increase the probability that booster doses may be needed,” he said.Kessler said the U.S. needs to speed its work in developing an oral antiviral drug that can be easily distributed to help combat the virus. The U.S. has granted emergency approval of a few drugs that use antibodies to fight Covid-19, but they have to be administered via an IV drip and haven’t been widely used by health providers.”People who are immunosuppressed, who do not mount an immune response for a number of reasons or choose not to be vaccinated will continue to be vulnerable and we need options for them,” Kessler said. “The antibody treatments are one approach, but a simple oral antiviral can add to our armamentarium to bring this epidemic under control.”CNBC Health & Science Read CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:Indian authorities warn of rare fungal infection seen in some Covid-19 patientsWHO labels a Covid strain in India as a ‘variant of concern’ — here’s what we knowWHO classifies triple-mutant Covid variant from India as global health risk’We were scared’: Asian-owned small businesses have been devastated by the double whammy of Covid and hateIf booster shots are deemed necessary by federal health officials, seniors and people with underlying conditions would likely be the first to have access to them, as they did during the first round of vaccines.Moderna is already running tests on a potential booster shot to be administered after a patient is fully vaccinated with both previous doses of the vaccine. The Moderna booster shot already shows promising results against the B.1.351 and P.1 variants first detected in South Africa and Brazil, respectively. More

In this article22UA-DEPFEKathrin Jansen, Pfizer Inc, poses for a portrait in one of her labs in Pearl River, New York.Carlo Allegri | ReutersThe mRNA technology used to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine could also help create “more potent” seasonal flu shots, Kathrin Jansen, head of Pfizer’s vaccine research and development, told CNBC.How well flu vaccines work can vary from season to season. But generally, flu inoculations reduce the risk of illness from influenza viruses by between 40% and 60%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Jansen said the reason why flu vaccine effectiveness varies is due to the fact that influenza viruses are always changing and a strain that was common in a previous season may not be as prevalent in the next. Scientists have to constantly monitor strains and select which ones will be included in the flu vaccine each year.Sometimes scientists make selections that don’t match well, Jansen said. But with the flexibility of mRNA technology, scientists could quickly “pivot” and adjust the flu vaccine to match the more dominant strain, she said.CNBC Health & Science Read CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:Indian authorities warn of rare fungal infection seen in some Covid-19 patientsWHO labels a Covid strain in India as a ‘variant of concern’ — here’s what we knowWHO classifies triple-mutant Covid variant from India as global health risk’We were scared’: Asian-owned small businesses have been devastated by the double whammy of Covid and hate”I think the great success of the mRNA vaccines in addressing Covid-19 has clearly opened up a large number of possibilities,” Jansen said in comments that aired Tuesday during CNBC’s Healthy Returns Summit.”We want to have better vaccines for older individuals” who are at risk for severe disease, she said in the interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. “This is in my mind a very powerful approach to get us to ultimately more potent seasonal influenza vaccines.”Jansen’s comments come after Pfizer had huge success with its mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine.Messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology has been under development for years, but Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines are the first time mRNA has been cleared for use in humans. The mRNA-based Covid vaccine works by tricking the body to produce a harmless piece of the virus, triggering an immune response. It’s said to be easier to produce over traditional vaccines, which generally use a dead or weakened virus to produce an immune response.Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced plans to develop a coronavirus vaccine in March of last year and submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization in November.The two-dose vaccine, given three weeks apart, was found in a clinical trial to be about 95% effective.In releasing its first-quarter earnings report last week, Pfizer said it expects full-year sales of $26 billion from the vaccine, up from its previous forecast of about $15 billion. It expects an adjusted pretax profit in the high 20% range of revenue for the vaccine.Pfizer executives told investors that they also hope to make improvements over current flu vaccines. They said given the strong immune response for the Covid-19 vaccine, they hope it will be the same for an mRNA-based flu vaccine. Rival Moderna is also working on a flu vaccine using mRNA technology.Stay connected with Healthy ReturnsFor a front row seat at CNBC Events, you can hear directly from the visionary executives, innovators, leaders and influencers taking the stage in “The Keynote Podcast.” Listen now, however you get your podcasts.For more exclusive insights from our reporters and speakers, sign up for our Healthy Returns newsletter to get the latest delivered straight to your inbox weekly. More

United Auto Workers union president Dennis Williams raises his arm in solidarity after his farewell speech during the 37th Constitutional Convention in Detroit, Michigan, June 13, 2018.Rebecca Cook | ReutersDETROIT — A former president of the United Auto Workers who took part in a scheme along with other union officials in which they embezzled at least $1.5 million in member funds for lavish trips, golfing, alcohol and other luxuries was sentenced Tuesday to 21 months in prison.Dennis Williams is the highest-ranking union official to be sentenced as part of a multiyear corruption probe into the prominent American labor union. He is one of 15 people to have been charged, including three Fiat Chrysler executives and his successor, who is awaiting sentencing.Williams on Tuesday choked up as he addressed the court during the virtual hearing. He apologized to his family as well as the UAW’s members for his actions.”I’ve thought long and hard about how my actions and the actions of others hurt the union that I love,” Williams said. “I am more than the actions that have brought me here before you in this case.”Williams pleaded guilty in September to conspiring with other union officials to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars, as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Under terms of the agreement, his sentence would be between 18 and 24 months.Williams was also instructed to pay $147,976 in restitution, including $132,517 to the UAW and $15,459 to the Internal Revenue Service. Federal prosecutors had recommended the maximum sentencing guidelines for Williams, who led the union from 2014 to 2018. In court documents, they described Williams as being intricately involved with the illegal activities and living a “double life.””Dennis Williams tried to live two lives. On the one hand, at public events, he excoriated the things that were ‘wrong in the United States of America’ because union members ‘cannot buy the things they build,'” assistant U.S. attorneys wrote last week in a sentencing memo. “But in private, he exploited the hundreds of thousands of UAW members that he led.”President Donald Trump talks with auto industry leaders, including General Motors CEO Mary Barra (L) and United Auto Workers (UAW) President Dennis Williams (R) at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, U.S. March 15, 2017.Jonathan Ernst | ReutersIn a separate memo, Williams’ lawyers argued he should not spend more than one year and a day in federal prison. They touted him as a “devoted family man” and Marine veteran who made “mistakes.””Mr. Williams’ life — until his conviction — was a great American success story,” they wrote. The lawyers blamed his successor, Gary Jones, a regional director under Williams, for much of the maleficence. Williams and his lawyer on Tuesday continued to blame Jones, portraying Williams as an unwitting beneficiary of the illegal activities.”In my gut I knew better, and I failed to stop it,” he said. “I lost my perspective of who I was and what I was about. I’ll always regret it.”Family members as well as others, including actor Danny Glover, submitted letters to the court in support of Williams. Glover, in a letter, said he “worked closely” with Williams for six years when the UAW was attempting to organize workers at Nissan Motor in Mississippi.Prison sentences for those charged as part of the federal probe have ranged from 60 days to five and a half years. Ex-Fiat Chrysler executive Alphons Iacobelli, who led the company’s labor relations, received the lengthiest sentence; however, it was recently reduced to four years. In December, the UAW and federal prosecutors agreed to end the corruption probe into the union under a civil settlement that included an independent monitor overseeing the organization for six years.Other requirements under the deal include the union conducting a memberwide vote to potentially reform its voting process and making certain repayments, including a $1.5 million payment to the IRS. The UAW has already paid back about $15 million to training centers for improper chargebacks uncovered by officials.A federal criminal investigation into individuals regarding the probe is ongoing, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit.The UAW, in a statement Tuesday, said Williams has “rightfully been sentenced today for his crimes that put his personal and self-interest above that of our members.” More