David L. Cohen, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada and Comcast executive, said the governor asked him to be his “agent” in helping to broker a deal between Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences.
No one, he said, wanted to see another University of the Arts, which abruptly closed in June 2024, leaving a hole in the city’s arts landscape and sending students and staff scrambling.
“I don’t want to lose the Academy on my watch, and neither does the mayor,” Gov. Josh Shapiro told Cohen, Cohen said. “Can you figure out if there’s a solution here? If there’s a solution, can you help convince the Academy and Drexel to pursue that solution.”
That’s what Cohen said he has been doing, holding 40 or 50 meetings over the last several months in search of an agreement and producing a draft proposal for the future of the Academy.
The two entities, he said, are close to agreeing to terms on governance and finances. While the museum is closing, as Drexel and the Academy announced Tuesday, the larger agreement would allow for the continued operation and growth of the Academy in Philadelphia, without jeopardizing Drexel, which is facing its own financial challenges.
“We want to preserve the Academy,” he said, “but we also don’t want to jeopardize Drexel.”
“Drexel and the Academy are working with my office, with Gov. Shapiro’s office, and with Ambassador David L. Cohen, as the governor’s representative, to preserve the essential mission of the Academy. We are working collaboratively toward the outcome we all seek for the City of Philadelphia,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said in a statement.
The governor’s press office did not responded to requests for comment.
The exterior of the Academy of Natural Sciences on Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026.Allie Ippolito / For The Inquirer
Cohen has long been a negotiator in many major city issues, formerly serving as chief of staff to former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell and leading the board of trustees of the University of Pennsylvania.
Shapiro, he said, was clear about the objectives.
“The goal that the governor articulated to me and the mayor was to preserve the essential mission of the Academy, all three legs on the stool,” he said citing research, education and public engagement with the collection. “Some of the legs might be a little shorter. They might be a little skinnier. But the goal is that the Academy survives and has a foundation to thrive and grow in Philadelphia. This is a matter of civic importance.”
Drexel and the Academy are exploring establishing another museum, maybe a smaller one, in another location through a third partner, Cohen said.
“That’s a work in process,” he said. “I had an hour and a half meeting yesterday with one of the potential institutions that could serve that function for the Academy and for Drexel.”
Cohen said he hopes ultimately the community rallies around the Academy and helps to support it.
“We don’t need a single savior here,” he said. “This can be a community effort. I know the Philadelphia nonprofit and foundation community, and time and again this community has stepped up, and I have every hope that we, and it’s a we, will step up again.”
Cohen credited both Drexel and the Academy for their cooperation and willingness to “focus on a common need for the community as a whole. They really deserve the credit for doing this.”
The mayor, too, commended Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences “for its significant, ongoing work to preserve the Academy’s educational mission and extraordinary two-century legacy as a natural history institution, including its world-renowned collections.”
Cohen said he first got involved in the matter about a year ago when he was home recovering from back surgery and got a call from two members of the Academy board about the issues they were having with their partner, Drexel.
The Academy was looking at possibly leaving the city, though it really didn’t want to do that, he said. He suggested they talk to the mayor and the governor. The board members told him they had been trying to do that but were unable to get attention.
Cohen texted the governor and mayor on the spot from his living room, he said. Meetings were convened, and that led to the governor seeking Cohen’s help.
“My wife says to me ‘why in the world did you take this on,” Cohen recalled. “Let me tell you, this legacy, this mission, this institution is worth fighting for. There is real history here, real value.”
Police have identified the victim killed in a knife-wielding spree in Times Square as a 32-year-old from Chester, N.J.
Erin Piacenti was a vice president of business at Bank of America based out of Manhattan with a background in law, according to her LinkedIn profile. But before that, she was a singer at Penn.
As a young girl, Piacenti, whose given name was Guiltinan, attended the private Catholic girls’ school in Morristown, N.J., Villa Walsh Academy. She went on toenroll in the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2016, and, later, Fordham University for law school in 2021.
She had deep roots in New Jersey and made lifelong friends through her involvement in the New Jersey Youth Chorus and later, Penn’s Dischord A Cappella group. A spokesperson for the New Jersey Youth Chorus confirmed Piacenti’s involvement but declined to comment further, citing sensitivity and privacy.
In Dischord, Piacenti was a frequent soloist with an explosive alto range, taking on renditions of big pop and R&B divas, from Ariana Grande to Tina Turner with confidence. Even when she wasn’t soloing, Piacenti often worked on Dischord’s song arrangements, according to credits from past performances.
Piacenti recently celebrated her second wedding anniversary. The couple — who both attended Fordham law school — married in Manahawkin, N.J., in 2024. Piacenti’s husband could not immediately be reached for comment.
“We are shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our colleague,” Bank of America told The Inquirer in an emailed statement. “She was a valued teammate who will be greatly missed. Our hearts go out to her family and all of her loved ones.”
Piacenti was fatally stabbed by Pamela Cisneros of Queens, who reportedly had a documented history of mental health concerns, but no criminal history, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.
Cisneros, 49, was caught on a string of now-viral videos waving around two large knives. Police fatally shot her Monday in the middle of Times Square after they said she injured two people at random: a 68-year-old man exiting the subway and, about 20 seconds later, Piacenti.
Piacenti was rushed to the hospital with a puncture to her abdomen and was pronounced dead, according to Tisch. The male victim, who has not been publicly named, was separately hospitalized and is recovering, according to police.
Tisch said that police attempted to negotiate with Cisneros, who held the knives toward officers for “four minutes,” but that she remained hostile and threatened to kill them instead. Responding officers deployed Tasers, but she advanced anyway, police said. Two officers opened fire at Cisneros, who was taken to the hospital where she died.
Tom Harris, the president of the Times Square Alliance, which represents the area’s businesses, said the stabbings were a “tragedy.”
“Our hearts go out to the victims and their families at this time,” Harris told the New York Times. “We are thankful that once again the NYPD was swift to act and put themselves in harm’s way to stop the perpetrator before more were injured.”
Philadelphia-area health systems have been moving swiftly to pull offline web links that publicly revealed the daily work schedules and cell phone numbers of healthcare workers, information that hospitals traditionally do not make available online.
The information for thousands of medical workers at Penn Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, ChristianaCare, and dozens of hospitals nationwide was published online through a popular scheduling service, QGenda.
Experts said the online availability of internal information raises serious security and privacy concerns at a time when healthcare workers increasingly face the threat of workplace violence and doxing.
The Philly-area health systems took down the schedules in late August after The Inquirer alerted them that the information was publicly available. Penn and CHOP did not respond to questions about whetherthey were aware the link was accessible without a log in.
A spokesperson for ChristianaCare said the system “recently became aware” the pages were public, and “immediately” worked with the QGenda to “eliminate the vulnerability.”
“We are not aware of any impact to caregivers, clinicians, patient care, or operations,” Christiana’s statement said. “Protecting the privacy and security of our caregivers, clinicians, patients, and information systems remains a top priority.”
Other Philadelphia-area systems did not appear have publicly available links.
The web pages managed byQGenda, an Atlanta-based workforce management software company, exposed months of schedules of physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, and other hospital employees.
The links don’t appear on Google searches, but anyone with access to basic AI chatbots could pull up live schedules showing the hours and assigned hospital service for on-call doctors andother providers.
“That’s very concerning,” said Lane Kantor, a fourth-year medicine-pediatrics resident at Penn and CHOP, explaining that healthcare providers’ work “sometimes comes with patients who can harass and threaten us.”
Kantor, a leader at Penn’s resident union, said the public information of providers who work with undocumented immigrants or in the areas of gender-affirming or abortion care was especially concerning.
QGenda is used by more than 4,500 organizations, according to the company’s website, including many hospitals that use the software as a one-stop source of information about providers who are on-call and available for consult at any given moment.
It is not clear how the schedules became public, how long the information was available online, to what extent hospital administrators knewthe information was not safeguarded with a log in requirement, or whether anyone — let alone someone wishing to inflict harm — accessed the information.
QGenda did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Hearst-owned company offers “QuickLinks” to allow “any staff member without a QGenda account” to easily access the schedule, according to the company’s website. The site also notes that “on-call schedules may contain sensitive information” and that there is risk of “unauthorized access or data breaches” without proper safeguards.
The platform also enableshealthcare systems to restrict access,“so that only devices on your practice’s secure network can access schedule data on the public-facing landing page,” the company’s site says.
Health systems in the Philadelphia area and across the country have taken steps in recent years to minimize doctors’ publicly available information in response to the growing politicization ofmany health services, especially those involvingdiversity, equity and inclusion, abortion, and gender-affirming care.
CHOP, for example, removed provider names from the webpage of its gender and sexual development program in 2022 as the clinic received threats because it provides gender-affirming care for teens. But information on clinic’s providers was available through the now-removed public schedule.
Security experts say releasingpublic work times and locations alongside cell numbers leaves providers vulnerable to being targeted by dissatisfied patients, or individuals who disapprove of the type of medicine a doctor practices.
“This is really alarming,” said Will Owen, a spokesperson for Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a New York-based privacy nonprofit. “Hospitals must scrutinize the platforms they work with in their data collection to minimize information that can be weaponized.”
Live hospital schedules exposed
After receiving a confidential tip that three East Coast health systems had public QGenda web pages, The Inquirer identified public landing pages for nearly 50 health systems or hospitals nationwide, including Veterans Affairs hospitals, using OpenAI’s Codex.
For some, like Penn and CHOP, the landing pages for the entire system were public. For other hospitals, schedules for only one department or service surfaced.
Some of the United States’ largest and most prestigious institutions had public QGenda links, including Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of California-San Francisco.
The Inquirer attempted to reach out to each hospital or system for which it found schedules before publication. At least 10,including Hopkins and UCSF, have removed the public link completely or added a password requirement.
A spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said it was “unaware” that its anesthesia department’s schedule was public. The schedule has since been removed.
The call schedule for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and dozens of hospitals nationwide, was available online through a public QGenda link. CHOP updated the web page’s permissions to require a login after being alerted by The Inquirer.Screenshot
CHOP informed hospital staff last week about security updates made to QGenda “out of an abundance of caution.”
“We are taking a precautionary step to update access to the QGenda platform used to display CHOP on-call schedules,” CHOP said in an email to staff obtained by The Inquirer.
QGenda’s platform does not contain patient information, and CHOP “continually assess our systems, processes, and technologies with an eye toward privacy, security, and operational needs,” a CHOP spokesperson said in a statement.
Penn said it uses QGenda to support communication among care teams.
“We continually monitor the risk environment surrounding online information and, as it continues to evolve, we are adding controls that both preserve appropriate protection and provide reliable access for those who need the information to coordinate patient care,” Penn said in a statement.
Gennadiy Ryklin, a hospitalist at ChristianaCare, was surprised to learn a colleague had done a work-hour analysis for ChristianaCare’s attending union using an AI model.
“I asked him, ‘well, how’d you do that without having Claude get access to our private schedules?’ And, well, it’s not private, there’s a public link here,” Ryklin said.
Privacy and data security are principles are drilled into physicians through policies, procedures, and training courses, Ryklin said.
“We understand that patient information in the wrong hands can cause a lot of harm,” the doctor said. “Where’s that same concern for us?”
A June shooting that killed one IT intern and left another injured in ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital underscored for Ryklin the threat of violence within health systems. Law enforcement charged a third intern in connection to the incident.
He reached out to hospital administrators and last week the hospital began removing the public web pages.
Employee privacy exists in a legal gray area, with protections often dependent on institutional policies, said Matthew Bodie, a law professor at the University of Minnesota.
Publicly sharing schedules and cell numbers does “feel invasive,” Bodie said, “especially if employees didn’t know about it.”
The combination of cell numbers and work schedules could be used to cause harm, whether by patients, politically motivated individuals, or stalkers, said Sharona Hoffman, a co-director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University.
The lack of any sweeping federal employee privacy requirements makes the online availability of the information, “not surprising though very disturbing,” the professor said.
Roy Hamilton’s varied racial, social, and religious identities helped him in his former role as a chief diversity leader at the University of Pennsylvania— and now they will help him in his new role as chair of Penn’s faculty senate.
The behavioral neurologist at the Perelman School of Medicine is the son of a Japanese immigrant and an African American. He is married to a white woman who is Jewish, while he was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and now is a secular humanist. And one of the couple’s children is LGBTQ+; he is an ally. Add to that growing up in a lower middle-class family and learning to navigate an Ivy League education system, first as an undergraduate and then as a medical school student.
That background has made it easier for him to understand a range of factors in his own life and how they affect his thinking, Hamilton said, and more readily understand where others are coming from and look for common ground.
Those same skills, he said, will be just as valuable as he steps into a position leading Penn’s faculty senate, the representative body for the school’s approximate 3,000-member standing faculty in a system of shared governance.
Hamilton said one of his primary goals will be to make the faculty senate representative of the collective views of a vastly diverse staff and foster conversation across those views.
“It does call for a person who is interested in hearing and honoring a multiplicity of opinions and perspectives and then coming to some kind of collective consensus as to how to act in the face of that,” Hamilton, 53, said during an interview in his office this month.
“Penn has acted judiciously in a difficult time,” when responding to Trump, said Roy Hamilton, faculty senate chair and a behavioral neurologist at Penn. “It’s trying to thread a needle. Time will tell whether that strategy ultimately pays off.” Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
The senate plays a key role on campus discussing issues of faculty concern, making policy recommendations, responding to regular reports of university administrators, and providing oversight on issues that include academic freedom and research policy. AndHamilton, who has spent 24 years at Penn, comes in as chair at a pivotal time. The school is searching for a new president to replace J. Larry Jameson, who will step down next summer, and continuing to operate under the scrutiny of the federal government, which has targeted elite universities. There are ongoing concerns about access to federal research funding, and the school this year plans to adopt new guidelines for open expression on campus that have drawn strong objections from faculty.
“As Penn confronts the major questions of our time, the Faculty Senate’s contribution is not to provide a single set of answers, but to pursue a constructive process of thoughtful deliberation and principled engagement conducted in good faith,” he said in a message to faculty last week.
Roy Hamilton collects masks and his office is filled with pieces he has received from his students and mentees over the years. Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
‘Trying to thread a needle’
Hamilton has been in the hot seat before. He was the medical school’s vice dean for inclusion, diversity, and equity when President Donald Trump’s administration last year cracked down on diversity initiatives in higher education and Penn scrubbed its websites of those programs. Hamilton’s own title was changed to special adviser to the dean.
“It would be disingenuous to say that it was easy,” Hamilton said. “It was a huge change. It was a difficult change. It was a change that I wish the institution didn’t feel like it had to make.”
But Hamilton — who for more than a decade held administrative roles centered on diversity and inclusion at Penn — said he understood that Penn felt it had to make changes, given its reliance on federal research funding. Hamilton pointed out that he gets National Institutes of Health funding for his work.
“If you jeopardize some of the fundamentals of how the institution works and runs, you jeopardize lots of positions and roles, including the roles of persons like myself and the very diverse lab that I run,” he said. “So I understand the Sophie’s choice that the medical school was faced with. That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
Roy Hamilton talks about his work as a behavioral neurologist.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Still, he said, some of the work continues.
“We are the same people, and I believe that Penn’s values will endure,” he said.
Penn at times has stood up to the Trump administration and at times negotiated. It ardently opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s quest to get lists of Jewish people on campus for its investigation into antisemitism. The EEOC dropped its subpoena last month and said it would not take further measures to seek the information through other means.
Last summer, the school entered into an agreement with the administration over the past participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas on the women’s swim team. Penn met a number of the White House’s demands, including adhering to the Trump administration’s definitions of sex, female, male, women, and men only as they apply to athletics, and sending letters of apology to female athletes who felt aggrieved by Thomas’ position on their team during the 2021-22 season.
“Penn has acted judiciously in a difficult time” when responding to Trump, Hamilton said. “It’s trying to thread a needle. Time will tell whether that strategy ultimately pays off.”
“I was one of those guys, even as a small child, sort of door to door trying to talk to people about the Bible and what God had planned,” Roy Hamilton said, discussing his upbringing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Hamilton’s upbringing was instrumental to his interest in diversity.
“Every step of the way has felt like I was … some kind of explorer finding some new territory,” he said. “I’ve historically been very interested in seeing to it that other people don’t have that level of alienness in the process.”
Raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, then on to Harvard
Born in Long Beach, Calif., Hamilton grew up as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. His late father worked in a brewery and his mother, who got her undergraduate degree in Japan, earned money as a seamstress, working from the family home. (She later returned to college, earned a master’s degree, and became a teacher.)
Neither of his parents was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith, but his father had several family members who belonged. When his mother emigrated from Japan, she told his father she would like to go to church, and he took her to a Kingdom Hall, the worship place of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“By the time I was a small child, she was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so that was the background in which I was raised,” Hamilton said. “I was one of those guys, even as a small child, sort of door-to-door trying to talk to people about the Bible and what God had planned.”
But he and his family parted ways with the religion when it came time for Hamilton to go to college. Hamilton was in the gifted and talented program as a child, did well in school, and wanted to continue. At that time, the faith generally discouraged higher education, he said.
He recalled congregation elders pulling him aside and questioning his intent to apply to college.
“It had the same kind of vibe as if I had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom,” he said.
Hamilton did not just go to college — he went to Harvard University. His father feared flying, so Hamilton took the train from California and arrived three days later in Massachusetts.
The Ivy League experience was “a huge adjustment,” he said. One of his roommates hung out with a son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, he recalled. A student down the hall was dating then-Vice President Al Gore’s daughter.
He got his bachelor’s degree in psychology and graduated from Harvard’s medical school, where he said he felt a bit of “impostor syndrome.” He also got a master’s degree in health sciences technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At Harvard, his interest in the brain grew and was amplified when he worked in the lab of cognitive neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher, whose work led to the discovery of the region of the brain that processes facial recognition.
“It’s the reason why we recognize incredibly subtle differences between faces,” he said.
Roy Hamilton discusses how transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) units are used in helping to study the brain and develop new treatments for patients with conditions like aphasia. When a TMS device is triggered, the box-shaped main unit discharges a large current through the attached coil. This creates a magnetic field that, when placed against the scalp, activates electrical signals in the brain.
“You can basically force the brain to fire,” he said.
Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Another key moment came when neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone visited his medical school seminar and showed how magnets aimed at the head could temporarily affect behavior in the brain.
“I was like, ‘That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’” he said. “‘I’m going to do that for the rest of my life.’”
Magnets and the brain
After an internship at UCLA, in 2002 he came to Penn, where he now runs the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation, as well as the Brain Stimulation, Translation, Innovation and Modulation Center. Putting it simply, he said: “I take magnets. I put them on people’s brains and I make them think different things.”
He sees patients struggling with memory and cognition disorders, such as dementia and aphasia.
“The central but not sole clinical focus of my research is in persons with language loss,” he said.
He is married to Dawn Mechanic-Hamilton, a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor in Penn’s department of neurology.
Last year, Hamilton became chair elect of the senate, which functions under tri-chairs — chair-elect, current chair, and past chair — all one-year terms for a three-year commitment.
The senate earlier this year was charged with naming faculty to serve on a committee outlining priorities for Penn’s next president. Among its priorities this year, the senate will focus on implications of artificial intelligence on teaching and learning, he said.
“While Penn’s future remains full of promise, the road ahead may not always be easy,” he wrote to faculty. “Difficult moments, however, provide an opportunity to think carefully about the principles that give purpose to our work and ought to guide our decisions.”
The University of Pennsylvania Health System had $337 million in operating profit in fiscal 2026, up from $247 million the year before, the Philadelphia nonprofit reported to bond investors Friday.
“We saw good growth in several of our clinical programs that helped us to generate the operating performance,” Julia Puchtler, the health system’s chief financial officer, said in an interview.
That’s money “we’re going to be able to reinvest in the academic missions and in our clinical programs and our workforce,” she said.
Here are more details:
Revenue: Penn’s total revenue rose 13.7%, to $13.6 billion from $12 billion the year before. Revenue from patient care accounted for $11.4 billion of the total in fiscal 2026, according to Penn’s report to bondholders.
Outpatient cancer care and outpatient surgeries by urologists and ear, nose, and throat doctors stood out as areas of growth, Puchtler said. On the inpatient side, neurosciences and transplants had notable increases, she said.
Expenses: For the first time since 2021, the average length of time a patient spent in the hospital fell below 6 days. Longer stays have higher expenses, even though hospitals generally don’t get paid more for them.
The average in fiscal 2026 was 5.93 days, from 6.14 days the year before. That looks like a small decline, but it adds up when spread over the health system’s more than 161,000 admissions in the year. The reduction helped Penn reduce expenses relative to revenue. It also freed capacity for more patients, Puchtler said.
In employee benefits, Penn had an additional $20 million in expenses because it aligned retirement plans across the system, Puchtler said.
Notable: Penn refinanced about $300 million in debt last month at a lower interest rate. That means the health system will save $28 million in interest payments over the next 9 or 10 years, Puchtler said.
Gov. Josh Shapiro came to the Philadelphia suburbs on Friday morning to announce a new investment in a local police department. But the first question he fielded at a news conference concerned the growing confusion and political intrigue surrounding his administration’s response to two deaths associated with the state’s spiraling measles outbreak.
For the last three days, Shapiro, a Democrat, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Republican heading the federal Department of Health and Human Services, have clashed over what the state has disclosed about the deaths and the consequences of Kennedy’s longtime anti-vaccination activism.
By Friday, Shapiro wanted to bring the focus back to an outbreak that has grown to more than 400 cases so far this year, saying “getting into a back-and-forth with people online who are spewing irresponsible conspiracy theories” does not “serve the public interest.”
But public health and communications experts say that the state’s initial refusal to share more information on the deaths created an environment in which anti-vaccination skeptics could spread their own narrative.
State officials announced the deaths of two unvaccinated Lancaster County residents at a news conference Tuesday, calling the deaths “measles-associated.” Their ages, causes of death, or their medical histories were not disclosed by the governor or his health secretary.
Within hours, other voices started filling the information vacuum. Lancaster County’s coroner told reporters that he had handled just one of the deaths. Coroner Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected official who is also a physician, said his office had examined a newborn who had tested positive for measles, but said the baby had not died from measles.
Soon misinformation and innuendo were spreading online out of the seemingly contradictory and limited details being disclosed by state officials, the local coroner’s office, and federal health leaders — all with their own political affiliations at a time when the safety of the measles vaccine increasingly divides Democrats and Republicans.
In response to the coroner’s statements, state health officials said they define a “measles-associated death” as one in which measles was present, even if measles is not identified as the immediate cause of death. Shapiro’s administration confirmed the newborn’s case was one of the two announced deaths, but offered no information on the second death.
President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy, pounced on the missing details the next day to spread misinformation. He wrote on X that the deaths may have been “fabricated” by the Shapiro administration and said in a television interview that “they cannot find any measles deaths in Lancaster County.”
Shapiro’s administration has called this inaccurate. Still, his administration has not revealed details of its medical review, beyond saying the state Department of Health’s epidemiology team had “thoroughly investigated.”
By late week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which operates under HHS, posted on X that state health officials were not sharing “information relevant to the outbreak” as it worked “to clarify conflicting information from Pennsylvania officials about whether the two reported deaths were caused by measles.”
State officials, including Shapiro, have repeatedly said the state is cooperating with the CDC.
But Pennsylvania health officials could have shared information on the patients’ ages, causes of deaths, and reasons for being unvaccinated, said Paul Offit, a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who heads the hospital’s Vaccine Education Center and is a vocal critic of Kennedy.
“It created fertile ground for conspiracy theories to thrive,” he said.
In a statement, a Shapiro spokesperson said the governor understands the “desire for as much information as possible to be made public.”
“However, when an individual dies, it is our legal responsibility to protect their right to privacy by maintaining patient confidentiality,” the statement said, noting this is critical to maintaining trust among communities statewide.
In a highly politicized environment in which measles cases are rising — and vaccination rates dropping — public health experts say it’s imperative for health officials to communicate accurately and transparently.
“You have to be transparent, be very clear about what you know, what you don’t know, what you’re trying to find out, and what questions are outstanding,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
A lack of information from the state, he said, “created an information vacuum with people very adept at using information vacuums to spread their message.”
President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order about vaccines as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks on Aug. 10 in the Oval Office of the White House. Jacquelyn Martin
What’s known about the Lancaster County deaths
Diamantoni said Friday that the baby died shortly after birth at a Lancaster County birthing center on Aug. 14.
Postmortem testing of the baby’s lung tissue showed that the baby had an active measles infection acquired before birth, he said.
He has not talked to the baby’s mother or the midwife who delivered the baby, and has not fully reviewed records from the birthing center where she gave birth, he said in interviews.
He told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that measles was listed on the baby’s death certificate, in a section of the certificate that reports other ”conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause.”
He told the outlet that measles was included on the death certificate “to offer a broader view of the general health of the child.”
Babies can become infected with measles in utero if the mother is infected with measles and develops a rash within 10 days of giving birth, Offit said.
Diamantoni said a forensic pathologist in his office concluded the baby died of a ruptured spleen and cited trauma to the baby’s torso. He said he was unsure what had caused the trauma, and added that the baby’s spleen did not appear enlarged or infected.
Offit said that measles can cause an enlarged spleen that is then more likely to rupture — including during birth — and that it’s often difficult to tell whether a spleen has become enlarged once it ruptures.
A spleen also doesn’t have to become “massively” enlarged to rupture, he said: Measles can cause the spleen to become fragile, which also heightens the risk of rupture.
In conversations with state health officials, Offit said he learned that the patients who died in Pennsylvania would not have died were they not infected with measles.
He said the coroner should explain why the spleen ruptured, if it was not damaged from measles. Diamantoni said the office is still investigating the cause.
The state has released no additional information on the second death, and Diamantoni said his office was not handling it. He said his chief deputy spoke to the department prior to Shapiro’s news conference Tuesday.
“At no point was the Pennsylvania Department of Health told that this was not a measles-associated death,” a state spokesperson said on Friday. “The Shapiro Administration stands firmly by their comments on Tuesday.”
Public health communications
Pennsylvania’s health department has cited a state law prohibiting public access to death records, saying they cannot release more information on the deaths. Another state law requires the state to keep records of diseases confidential, except when it’s necessary to inform the public of the risk of communicable disease, a department spokesperson said in a statement.
The department “works hard to build and maintain trust in communities all over the Commonwealth — which includes doing everything possible to keep people’s identities confidential,” the statement read.
The department didn’t share information that could be used to “personally identify individuals or their grieving families” because “the circumstances of these individuals’ deaths do not change the Commonwealth’s response: Measles is a serious, highly contagious and preventable disease, and our focus remains on protecting Pennsylvanians, getting people vaccinated, and stopping the spread of this outbreak,” the spokesperson said.
But the state could have been more transparent about how they characterize deaths in a measles outbreak, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
People who are not trained in medicine may not understand the term “measles-associated,” for example, or how it differs from a cause of death, and state officials should have taken time at the news conference to explain what they meant by that term.
“You have an obligation to make sure that people don’t mishear on something as fraught as this topic,” she said.
Jamieson added that the political clashes around the deaths could overshadow a crucial point: A highly contagious disease is spreading in an under-vaccinated community, exposing children — including newborns unable to be vaccinated — to a serious illness.
“If we miss that moment, then the public health community has failed,” she said.
Reed E. Pyeritz, 78, of Radnor, pioneering medical geneticist, cofounder of the Marfan Foundation and the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, professor emeritus of medicine and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania, author, mentor, veteran, and nationally ranked masters triathlete, died Monday, Aug. 10, of interstitial lung disease at Bryn Mawr Hospital.
Dr. Pyeritz was a trailblazing expert on the diagnosis and treatment of Marfan syndrome and other inherited cardiovascular disorders. His 44 years of research and clinical work, from 1978 to 2022, advanced the understanding and management of the diseases, and extended the life expectancy of Marfan patients by 30 years.
“So many of us in the community owe Reed so much,” Bert Medina, board chair of the Marfan Foundation, said in a tribute. “His legacy lives on in all of us, thanks to his dedication.”
In an online tribute, a relative of former patients said: “Without this amazing doctor, I wouldn’t have my sister or dad. He changed the world for Marfan patients and their families.”
Dr. Pyeritz joined the faculty at Penn in 2001 and spent more than 20 years treating patients, teaching students, doing landmark studies on the value and social implications of genetic testing, and championing patient-centered care. He was codirector of Penn’s research center on hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, onetime chair of the faculty senate, and a fellow at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and other medical associations.
His “vision and scholarship fundamentally transformed the care of patients,” Nimesh D. Desai, director of the Penn Aorta Center, said on X.
Before Penn, Dr. Pyeritz spent nine years in Pittsburgh with what is now the Allegheny Health Network and 17 years at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. In 1991, his team at Hopkins discovered that mutations in the FBN1 gene cause Marfan syndrome and followed up with new regimens to treat it.
He cofounded the Marfan Foundation in 1981 and the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics in 1991. “It became clear that folks with Marfan syndrome could benefit by an organization that allowed them to communicate [and] to stimulate other physicians to become involved,” he said in a 2018 video interview.
This story and photos about Dr. Pyeritz appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1994.Newspapers.com
Colleagues, friends, and former patients called him “a phenomenal physician,”“a guiding light,” and “an extraordinarily reassuring presence” in online tributes. In 2018, he said: “The most gratifying thing is the fact that folks [with Marfan syndrome] are living their normal life expectancy.”
Dianna Milewicz, chair of the John Ritter Foundation advisory board, noted his “excellence in clinical care, teaching, and research” on Facebook. Michael L. Weamer, president and CEO of the Marfan Foundation, called him “a true hero” and said his “impact on our community is immeasurable.”
He served 13 years in the Army Reserve Medical Corps and earned lifetime achievement awards from the Marfan Foundation, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, and other groups.
Dr. Pyeritz and his wife, Jane Tumpson, married in 1972.Courtesy of the family
On weekends, he did marathons and triathlons, and was part of a world record 100-man, 100-mile relay. His family said in a tribute: “He measured a successful life less by titles or awards than by what one gives, what one learns, whom one loves, and what one leaves behind in others.”
Reed Edwin Pyeritz was born Nov. 2, 1947, in Pittsburgh. He was fascinated by science and space as a boy, and he built rockets in his backyard and performed scientific experiments in his bedroom.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Delaware in 1968, a master’s degree and doctorate in biological chemistry at Harvard University in 1972, and his medical degree at Harvard in 1975.
He met Jane Tumpson in first grade, and they graduated together from Mount Lebanon High School near Pittsburgh in 1965. They reconnected on the tennis court a few years later, married in 1972, and had daughters Allyson and Abigail.
Dr. Pyeritz, left in the top photo and right in the bottom photo, enjoyed time with his family.Courtesy of the family
Dr. Pyeritz and his wife honeymooned on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and traveled the world together for years. In April, the whole family went to Spain.
He liked to wear bow ties, build stone walls, watch the news, and spend time outside with his dogs. He followed the Pittsburgh pro sports teams closely and enjoyed Manhattans and chocolate milkshakes.
“I will miss it all,” he told colleagues at Cure HHT when he retired a few years ago. “But I am certainly looking forward to spending time with my two granddaughters, Tallulah and Penelope.”
His daughters said: “Ever an adventurer, he instilled in us the importance of making the most of every day, watching the sunrise or sunset, and cherishing the time you have.”
His wife said: “He loved without exception and reservation.”
In addition to his wife, daughters, and granddaughters, Dr. Pyeritz is survived by son-in-law Keith Hopkins and other relatives. A brother died earlier.
A celebration of his life is to be held later.
Donations in his name may be made to the Marfan Foundation, 22 Manhasset Ave., Port Washington, N.Y. 11050.
Dr. Pyeritz “loved without exception and reservation,” his wife said.Courtesy of the family
When Richard Sperry’s right shoulder began to ache, the pharmaceutical executive thought he was overdoing it at the gym.
“I was doing CrossFit at the time,” Sperry said. “I thought it was from doing things that I shouldn’t be doing in my mid-40s.”
Then, almost overnight, the entire right side of his body was weak. He could not pick up a coffee mug, grasp a pen, or shave his face with his right hand. His wife had to help him button his dress shirts each morning.
An orthopedic doctor sent him to a Philadelphia neurologist in late 2019. After a battery of tests, the neurologist diagnosed Sperry, then 45, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal nervous system disorder. The neurologist said he would die within three to five years. He went for another opinion, and a second neurologist concurred.
In early 2020, Sperry traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a third opinion.
“‘I’m gonna cut to the chase — I don’t think you have ALS,’” Sperry recounted the Mayo doctor saying, as his sister erupted in tears.
Sperry actually had a rare autoimmune disease called multifocal motor neuropathy, or MMN. The doctor prescribed intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, a treatment made from the blood plasma of healthy donors. Immunoglobulin is an antibody found in plasma, the straw-colored liquid in blood.
Once back home in Princeton, Sperry got infusions for five straight days, sitting about four hours each time. A few days after treatment ended, Sperry awoke and discovered he could move his right hand for the first time in more than a year, he said.
“My wife and I were in bed bawling,” Sperry said. “It was like a wonder drug.”
Demand for plasma is growing as the global population ages, more people like Sperry are being diagnosed with chronic diseases, and new medical treatments that require plasma are discovered, research shows.
The value of a liter of plasma rose from about $181 in March to $192 in June, likely because of increased demand, according to Georgetown University professor Peter Jaworski, who studies the global economics and ethics of the plasma industry.
No cure existsfor all three conditions, butsymptoms are alleviated with regular infusions of plasma-based therapies.
“It is life-changing for patients with rare and chronic diseases,” said Anita Brikman, president and chief executive of the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, a trade organization that represents donation centers in North America and Europe.
Doctors are not exactly sure how it works on patients like Sperry, said Sami Khella, a Penn Medicine neurologist and clinical neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
But if Sperry does not get his medicine on time, he will “develop weakness almost right away,” said Khella, who sees Sperry as a patient.
Sperry’s condition causes his immune system to attack his nerves. The immunoglobulin in plasma quells the attack, Khella explained.
Every four weeks, Sperry receives 35 grams of immunoglobulin through infusions over two days. It takes hundreds of donors to make 35 grams, Khella said.
Sperry, who is back doing CrossFit, said it feels “scary” to be dependent on plasma donations. When he sees people going in and out of donation centers, he said, he is enormously grateful.
“It’s not like the drug manufacturer can just build another plant and make more pills,” Sperry said.
Whitney Biennial curators travel the length and breadth of the country, paying visits to artists in their studios, surveying their work, and picking creators whose work they think represents the present climate of art making in the country. Together, they bring a once-every-two-years expansive exhibition to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, often regarded as the most prestigious and faithful register of American art.
Past biennial curators — the 2024 edition was curated by the Institute of Contemporary Art’s former associate curator, Meg Onli — have embarked on these travels separately, but for the country’s 250th year and the biennial’s 82nd, Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer traveled together.
Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial 2026 curators Drew Sawyer, Marcela GuerreroBryan Derballa
“We wanted to just listen to artists and see where they were at, see what they were thinking about, how they were processing recent events,” said Guerrero. They traveled for a bit over a year, nationally and internationally, and visited more than 300 artists.
“The idea of relationality and how do we relate in different ways” at political and interpersonal levels, is a theme that eventually emerged from their survey, Guerrero said.
While in the past some curators have traveled as far as Hawaii, Guerrero and Sawyer’s short travel to Philadelphia in the winter of 2024 proved equally fruitful.
“Philly was such a productive trip and very coherent in terms of what we were hearing from artists on gentrification, displacement, and the cost of living,” Guerrero said.
Artists in Philadelphia, Sawyer noticed, “seem to be particularly preoccupied with ideas of infrastructure” and there exists a strong sense of connection among them. Several of the city’s artist are graduates of the MFA programs at the University of Pennsylvania and University of the Arts, taught by the same professors like Michelle Lopez (whose work is included in this year’s biennial) and Sharon Hayes (whose work was a part of the 2024 biennial).
Maia Chao, “Being Moved,” 2026. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 14–17, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.Julieta Cervantes
Performance artists Maia Chao and Jonathan González, both of whose works are part of the biennial, live in West Philadelphia and are friends and collaborators. Emilio Martínez Poppe attended Penn and studied with Lopez, and was particularly interested in the idea of infrastructure from the perspective of the labor of public sector employees to help build and maintain our social and civic architectures.
“A kind of certain institutional critique, I would say, was common” among Philadelphia artists, said Sawyer.
“One of my biggest takeaways is the real vibrancy of the artistic scene in Philadelphia,” he said.
Here are the Philadelphia artists whose works appear in the Whitney Biennial.
West Philadelphia-based artist Maia Chao’s performance pieces “Being Moved’ and “Scores for the Museum Visitor” are part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial.Amelia Golden
Maia Chao
“Scores for the Museum Visitor,” “Being Moved”
Maia Chao’s performance art emerges from studying social behavior. Where some might see the mundane walk from home to work, she sees choreography, a rhythm, and an interaction of the body with its surroundings.
Her biennial performance piece Being Moved, choreographed by Lena Engelstein, takes inspiration from how museum visitors interact with the art. “It reframes the focus from the art itself to the visitors’ experience,” she said. The title refers to both “this potential to be moved by an artwork,” but also “of the ways that the institution makes us move, makes us move our bodies, and makes us behave in the presence of extremely valuable assets.”
That tension of the push and pull of a museum — where its mission might seem inviting and welcoming but once inside, rules around how to behave, what to touch abound — is at the center of Chao’s piece.
Maia Chao, “Being Moved,” 2026. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 14–17, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.Julieta Cervantes
When visiting the biennial beyond Chao’s performance schedule, visitors view Scores for the Museum Visitor as a set of prompts, an invitation to create “micro performances” of their own.
Among the scores are: “Identify another museum visitor. From afar, copy their movements as closely as possible.” “While holding a museum brochure, clasp your hands behind your back. Drop the brochure.” “Find a bench. Take a seat. Imagine the artworks slowly falling to the floor.”
“These are invitations to kind of transgress the rules, [for] engaging with the artwork, or interpreting and encountering an artwork,” the artist said.
Maia Chao, “Being Moved,” 2026. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 14–17, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.Julieta Cervantes
Chao first caught the curators’ attention with Agents of Deterioration (2024), made in collaboration with Ethan Philbrick, a performance piece commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Sawyer was drawn in by Chao’s “legacy of institutional critique through affective registers.”
“There’s a real kind of commitment to the institution, even as Maia is critiquing it, which we felt was important in this moment where there’s, from many different directions, an eroding of faith in institutions. We were really interested in the way she both critiques and pushes institutions to do better,” he said.
Artist and Penn professor Michelle Lopez whose “Pandemonium” is part of the 2026 Whitney BiennialKelsey Valencia, Denniston Hill Residency
Michelle Lopez
“Pandemonium”
Pandemonium is a fully Philadelphia piece of art. It was made in collaboration with the Moore College of Art and Design and the Franklin Institute, supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the University of Pennsylvania, filmed at Northeast Philadelphia’s RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency), premiered at the Fels Planetarium and the Galleries at Moore, and inspired by artist Michelle Lopez’s earlier work exhibited at the ICA.
“Philadelphia is just a really supportive environment for artists,” said Lopez, who is an associate professor of fine arts at Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where she leads the sculpture program. “I could not have made that work in New York.”
The video project, as Lopez says, came from a desire to “situate the viewer in the eye of a storm so that they could feel, on a somatic level, what it was like to have their environment really collapse around them.”
At the Whitney Museum, Pandemonium plays on a domed screen on the ceiling of the gallery and demands that the viewer sit below it and look up. What they witness is things moving around with a violent force against the sky — debris, newspapers, packaging, clothing (including Lopez’s own and her son’s old underwear), and other markers of extreme human consumption.
In order to make this mayhem happen, Lopez, who is trained in sculpture, built a tornado machine using a robotic contraption, industrial fans, and leaf blowers. Together they created a simulation of a tornado at RAIR which was then filmed and eventually screened in the Fels Planetarium.
“A lot of the work imagistically, came from seeing images of tornadoes and hurricanes wiping out towns. I was really interested in the way nature could collapse culture,” said Lopez, who lives in South Philadelphia.
Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, March 8–August 2026). Michelle Lopez, “Pandemonium,” 2025.Jason Lowrie/BFA.com
While a Whitney gallery is nowhere close to the grandeur and wonder of the Fels Planetarium, the 360-format video manages to suck in a viewer who feels almost weightless as the feeling of being thrown around by the forces of nature is simulated.
When the curators visited Philadelphia for studio visits, “top on our list was Michelle Lopez,” said Sawyer. “We were aware that she had been working on this major moving image project that departed from what she’s most well known for, which is sculpture. So we were really excited to meet with her, especially because her work had not been a part of the biennial before.”
Artist Emilio Martínez Poppe, whose work “Civic Views” was on display in the City Hall courtyard last year. This year, it’s a part of the Whitney Biennial.Neal Santos
Emilio Martínez Poppe
“Civic Views”
Like Lopez’s Pandemonium, artist Emilio Martínez Poppe’s Civic Views is an artwork that is only possible because the city of Philadelphia exists. Several Philadelphians have already seen Martínez Poppe’s workwhen it was on view last year in the City Hall courtyard.
Martínez Poppe was then studying city planning and working toward an MFA in visual art from Penn when he was mulling over the future of city planning graduate students who’d go on to join the public service workforce.
It was in conversation with professors that he found out that the oldest surviving daguerreotype in the country, which is stored at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, was taken by Joseph Saxon, who was a public sector employee working for the U.S. Mint.
“That was shot out of the U.S. Mint, where the Widener Building is today. He’s following Daguerre’s technological recipe, he uses it to photograph what he sees through the window. Unlike Daguerre, who was a theater entrepreneur, Saxton was a public sector employee who was doing something he was not hired to do,” said Martínez Poppe. “He was hired to work on the newly nationalized currency and he was tinkering with this invention in his office, and that view is one of the only real entry points that we have into his position at his job there, which is interesting.”
Emilio Martínez Poppe looks out the windows at the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services office on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025 in Philadelphia. Emilio Martínez Poppe is working on a project curated by Jameson Paige that documents the views from municipal service buildings. The project also includes interviews with city workers.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Inspired, Martínez Poppe visited municipal buildings all across Philadelphia and photographed views from the inside out so he could document what city workers see from their windows. Alongside, he conducted “dozens of long form, anonymized interviews” with city workers from more than 20 agencies.
“I would ask them, what was your perspective of city government before working here, who taught you about the value of public sector work? Often, so many people would tell me it was their mothers.”
Civic Views is a result of those conversations — a coming together of anonymized interview snippets and photographs displayed in a scaffolding-like structure in the middle of a Whitney gallery. “It’s the scaffolding that dissolves the authoritative center, even in the Whitney Biennial,” said Martínez Poppe.
An installation view of Emilio Martínez Poppe’s “Civic Views.”Summer Surgent-Gough
“The public sector is vulnerable to radical change, for better or worse. With my work, I want to say that it’s time to seize the means, seize our technology to create the world that belongs to us,” the artist, who now works for the New York City Mayor’s Office as a civic arts programs coordinator, said.
“We need to assume that responsibility. That’s why the project centers the voices of workers and how their positions shape their views. But also how their views shape the structures that we are living in and living through.”
On the curators’ Philadelphia visit, Guerrero recalled seeing Civic Views and people of the city interacting with it. “It was very touching,” she said. Her favorite part about the work is that it uses “the tropes of the camera, of the interview, of bureaucracy, but then upends it completely.”
Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, March 8–August 2026). “Civic Views” (2024) by Emilio Martínez Poppe, “Philadelphia Housing Authority, South,” 2024; Emilio Martínez Poppe, “Philadelphia Department of Sanitation, North,” 2024; Emilio Martínez Poppe along with works of Kainoa GruspeJason Lowrie/BFA.com
“You see how important the job of a public servant is,” she said, “and how you know they’re in kind of a double bind because they’re the face of the government and also they receive the same services they provide … their kids are in the public school system, they depend on the Department of Sanitation.”
She finds this complexity “beautifully translated” in Civic Views. “You can really put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s speaking and feel the care that really goes into this type of work that should not be overlooked.”
Artist Jonathan González whose performance piece ‘magic hour — golden time’ is part of the 2026 Whitney BienialRudy Gerson
Jonathan González
“magic hour — golden time”
Like Chao, Jonathan González’s work also sees a two-pronged approach with performance and photography. Three Super 8 photographs, A, B, and C, mark the locations, across the museum, of the three-hour long performance piece presented by González and their co-artists.
“Each photograph shares with the performers how to perform the work,” said González, who also lives in West Philadelphia. Magic hour-golden time, they said, “is a double leaning. Magic hour comes from the usage in broadcast television when you have the highest viewership. And golden hour is that moment of the sunset. And so the piece is merging this experience of looking out and also being seen over three hours.”
Jonathan González, “magic hour–golden time,” 2026. Rehearsal performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 12, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.Julieta Cervantes
From three terraces around the museum, the performers follow the sun’s movement for three hours. In the first hour, the performers “embody the architecture that surrounds the museum” and makes up the city’s skyline. The second hour, they said, “is a procedure of call and response … the dancers dance with every dance you’ve ever danced, and take information from one another as dancers, as well as from the pedestrians.”
The final hour, González said, is performed on an inaccessible terrace. “It can only be viewed from across the street, you cannot see it from the museum. It’s called the ‘Endless Bow,’ and it’s 60 minutes of bowing to the sun and bowing to the world and bowing to the performance.”
Philadelphia, the former University of the Arts professor said, gives them “the capacity to slow down to hear these voices, and have dreams, visions come to you.” The city allows them the time to spend time in the studio with friends like Chao and inspires them to “collaborating not toward a particular product or aim, but much of the time experimentation.”
Jonathan González, “magic hour–golden time,” 2026. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 12, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.Julieta Cervantes
“Just the fertile nature of Philly as a historical Black geography has been really important for me to really situate the questions of time and what happens to a city at the late stage of industrialization, and to really think critically about what a group can do, what mutuality is,” they said.
“Certain artists just stay in your mind, and you want to come back and see what they are working on,” said Guerrero recalling her first tryst with González’s work. “The work felt so mature. There’s this notion of how, through improvisation, you can be attuned to your surroundings. In the case of their performance, they make these other effective strategies [for attunement] that don’t always rely on the senses, and that is something that is very present in the show.”
The Whitney Biennial 2026 is on view through Aug. 23 and on partial view, which will include all of the Philadelphia artists’ static works, through Oct. 12. The Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., New York. whitney.org
Philadelphia-area patients say they are often being left in the dark about side effects that could result from new medications given during hospitalizations, even though hospitals are required to explain the potential risks.
One in three patients at Philadelphia-area hospitals claimed that staff did not consistently explain possible side effects of medication, according to a leading patient satisfaction survey conducted annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
To gauge the patient experience, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey asks questions about the hospital environment and how staff treated them during their stay. These quality indicators are less tangible thanclosely watched rates of infections or falls but still can offer meaningful insight into hospital culture and help administrators identify gaps in care.
The regional hospitals where large portions of patientssurveyed reported not being told about medication side effects included three operated by the Virtua health system in New Jersey. About 40% of patients at Our Lady of Lourdes, Mount Holly, and Willingboro said staff had “never” or only “sometimes” explained side effects.
“These survey results reinforce that it is not enough for patients to receive clear information most of the time,” Jen Khelil, executive vice president and chief clinical officer at Virtua, said in a statement.
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“Our goal is for every patient to feel fully informed about new medications, including their potential side effects, every time,” Khelil said.
Medication safety
The most recent HCAHPS report, released in June, includes responses from about 2.3 millionpatients across the country, including nearly 32,000 from Philadelphia-area hospitals, between July 2024 and June 2025.
The survey covers topics such as noise levels, room cleanliness, staff friendliness, and whether they would overall recommend the hospital.
Among the questions: Before giving you any new medicine, how often did hospital staff tell you what the medicine was for?
Patients can answer “never,” “sometimes,” “usually,” or “always.” The survey results published by CMS combine “never” and “sometimes” answers.
These multiple-choice answers are subjective. But generally speaking, doctors and nurses should strive to always explain side effects, said Jeffrey Millstein, an internist and regional medical director for Penn Primary Care who regularly writes about the doctor-patient relationship as an Inquirer contributor.
Patients who do not fully understand potential side effects may disregard a dangerous complication as “normal.” Alternatively, a common, harmless side effect could be alarming to a patient who wasn’t educated about what to expect when taking a new medication, he said.
“They need to know the real red flags, and to not discontinue their medicine for the wrong reason,” he said.
In busy medical settings, staff may focus on other aspects of medication adherence, such as explaining what the medication does, instructions for when and how to take it, and whether it will negatively mix with a patient’s other medications. Side effects may be mentioned last, quickly, or by telling patients to refer to a manufacturer’s pamphlet with warnings.
“That’s really useless,” Millstein said. “It doesn’t put anything in context.”
Doctors and nurses should open a conversation about side effects by asking patients what they know about a drug, or what concerns they have, which can allow staff to dispel inaccurate information, he said.
Philadelphia-area hospitals respond
Across the Philadelphia region, three Penn Medicine hospitals scored the highest marks for explaining medication side effects.
More than half of survey respondents who stayed at Chester County Hospital, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania said staff “always” explained side effects. About a quarter of respondents said they had received such information “sometimes” or “never” during their stay at the Penn hospitals.
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Lower Bucks Hospital and Roxborough Memorial Hospital — both owned by California-based Prime Healthcare Foundation — received the region’s lowest marks for explaining side effects.
Forty-five percent of survey respondents said Lower Bucks staff had “never” or only “sometimes” explained side effects, while 34% said they had “always” received such information during their stay.
Michelle Aliprantis, a spokesperson for Prime, said the 2024-2025 data in the CMS survey does not reflect more recent efforts at the hospitals to improve bedside medication education and postdischarge follow-up. The health system has also expanded pharmacy consultation to ensure patients understand medications.
“We are always focused on continued improvement,” Aliprantis said in a statement.
Virtua’s chief medical officer said the health system closely monitors results from the CMS survey, which includes responses from about 2,000 patients across the New Jersey hospital system.
Administrators review feedback from a total of some 300,000 consumers a year from satisfaction surveys, Google ratings, and other ratings systems.
Virtua has been working to improve consistency and patient communication.
“We remain committed to listening, learning, and improving so that every patient receives clear, compassionate, and consistent communication,” she said.
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