The day President Donald Trump signed a funding bill
including a provision ordering VA to announce its plans to add four conditions
to the list of Agent Orange-linked diseases within 30 days, VA Secretary Robert
Wilkie said the decision wasn’t likely to come until at least “late 2020.”
In a letter to Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., dated Dec. 20 and
obtained by Military Times, Wilkie said he would not make a decision until the
results of two long-awaited studies are submitted to or published in scientific
journals.
In March, VA officials told members of Congress that the
decision would be announced within 90 days.
Then Wilkie said he was just awaiting the results of the
studies — the Vietnam Era Health Retrospective Observational Study, or
VE-HEROES, and the Vietnam Era Mortality Study — expected in 2019.
But the requirement that the results be analyzed,
peer-reviewed and in the publication pipeline could add months to the process.
VE-HEROES results are currently “being analyzed,” while data from the mortality
study is “expected to be available for peer review and publication in late
2020,” Wilkie wrote in the letter.
No comments:
Post a Comment