Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) explained her reasoning for not voting for the bipartisan House of Representatives’ select committee on China this week, even as 146 members of her own party joined Republicans to do so.

“I voted no because again it’s another sham effort here. It’s really clear that this is just a committee that would further embolden anti-Asian rhetoric and hate and put lives at risk,” Pressley told CNN on Thursday. “We have enough infrastructure and governance to tackle those issues that we don’t need this select committee and that is why I voted no, because I am afraid that it will embolden anti-Asian rhetoric and hate.”

“So do you think the 146 Democrats who voted ‘yes’ on it are wrong in their votes?” CNN anchor Kaitlin Collins asked. 

“We just see it differently,” Pressley answered. 

On Tuesday, the House came together to establish the select committee centering on China in a 365 to 65 vote. The move creates the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

“Here’s the good news: There is bipartisan consensus that the era of trusting communist China is over,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday on the floor of the House.

“I’ve heard my colleagues on both sides say that the threat posed by Communist China is serious. I fully agree,” McCarthy noted. “This is an issue that transcends political parties. And creating the select committee on China is our best avenue for addressing it.” 

“We want the very best ideas, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. At the end of the day, we won’t need a minority and majority report. We’ll just need one philosophy, with one principle, and America will be stronger for the future to come,” he said.

“You have my word and my commitment. This is not a partisan committee. This will be a bipartisan committee,” McCarthy noted. 

“House Democrats have been clear that we are willing to extend the hand of bipartisan partnership on issues where we can work together for the American people, and will also stand up against extremism where necessary,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said in a statement after the vote. 

“As it relates to the new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, House Democrats will work in a serious, sober and strategic manner to evaluate our relationship with the Chinese government and to address the rise of authoritarianism globally,” he added.

A new report revealed that the cancer death rate in the United States has gone down 33% since 1991, even as some concerns remain over rises in other cancers. 

The report, published in the CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians on Thursday, said that even though the pandemic happened, and was different from other top mortality causes, the death rate from cancer kept going down from 2019 to 2020. This assisted in a comprehensive drop of 33% since 1991, and around 3.8 million deaths avoided by estimation. 

However, not all cancer rates went down. The prostate cancer rate went up 3% per year from 2014 to 2019 after it had been going down for twenty years. Breast and uterine corpus cancers also went up. Early discovery can help with all of these cancers, the report stated. 

“There’s a significant call to arms,” Karen Knudsen, the American Cancer Society’s chief executive officer, told the Wall Street Journal. “We are not catching these cancers early when we have an opportunity to cure men of prostate cancer.”

As the Journal pointed out, the report noted that prostate cancer rates went down from 2007 to 2014 by around 40% because of lower “localized tumors” diagnoses that were caught due to PSA testing. The United States Preventive Services Task Force said men 75 years old and up shouldn’t be screened in 2008 – and in 2012, they said all men shouldn’t be screened. But, as the report noted, prostate cancer rates have gone up each year from 2014 to 2019. The increase is being pushed by more later-stage diagnoses that have gone up around 4.5% each year, starting in 2011. 

According to the Premier Medical Group, the National Cancer Institute said that PSA testing could essentially lead to overdiagnosis, causing men to go through remedies that they don’t need that could be harmful to them. 

In 2018, the task force said that men between the ages of 55 to 69 should talk to their doctor about possible risks and upsides and make their own choice about whether they should be screened.

Death rates from prostate cancer are around two to four times higher for black men than they are for other racial and ethnic demographics.

“We’re seeing some of the consequences of diminished screening,” Dr. Jonathan Shoag, who has analyzed prostate cancer PSA testing, said, per the Journal. “We’re not detecting cancers we don’t want to know about, but the cancers that we’re finding are worse cancers.”

Cervical cancer rates have also gone down 65% in the years of 2012 through 2019 for young women, who were the first group to get the human papillomavirus vaccine.