Ike Swetlitz is a journalist currently working as a health reporter at Bloomberg News. He is based in Boston.

At Bloomberg, Ike uncovered a shortage of Adderall caused by manufacturing problems at the largest drugmaker, Teva. Millions of Americans take this drug to treat ADHD or narcolepsy, and many were unable to fill their prescriptions, so this quickly became a national story. Ike continued to break news about shortages of other essential drugs like the antibiotic amoxicillin and the flu treatment Tamiflu.

Previously, he was an investigative reporter for Searchlight New Mexico, a non-profit news organization. He was based in Albuquerque, and covered health care, social services, housing, the criminal justice system, education, and child well-being.

At Searchlight, Ike wrote narrative pieces that expose systemic injustices. Most notably, he revealed allegations that Modern Vascular, a national chain of medical clinics, was pushing unnecessary surgeries, instructing staff to falsify records, and recruiting doctors in a position to refer patients to be investors in the clinics. (A year and a half after we published this story, the US Department of Justice filed a complaint in a lawsuit against Modern Vascular, alleging that the organization engaged in a fraudulent kickback scheme with the referring physicians.)

In addition to his health reporting, Ike also wrote about courts, prisons, education, child welfare, and housing. He uncovered a 450-plus case backlog at the Court of Appeals and revealed a pay-for-play scheme at a halfway house. He also exposed how Black children, and kids with disabilities, sometimes as young as 6 or 7, were disproportionally identified as “threats” to school safety in Albuquerque. He diligently covered the effects of COVID-19, from an attack on incarcerated migrants by private prison guards to millions of calls left unanswered by the unemployment office. And he wrote several stories on housing, chronicling the difficulty of finding landlords willing to accept Section 8 vouchers, and discovering that New Mexico landlords tried to evict nearly 200 households with pending rental assistance applications.

Prior to that, Ike worked in Boston and Washington, D.C. as a correspondent for STAT, a national health and medical science publication. He covered artificial intelligence, basic science, concussions and the NFL, Donald Trump, drug pricing, genetic engineering, the pharmaceutical industry, and other odds and ends. His reporting resonated around the world. He appeared in the Washington Post and on the public radio programs Here & Now and The World.

Ike's reporting on the price of EpiPens in the summer of 2016 helped spur congressional inquiries and attorney general investigations into Mylan for their pricing of EpiPens and potentially anti-competitive business practices. 

He sat down for three hours with Donald Trump's doctor, investigated a Trump vitamin company that purported to sell customized nutritional supplements based on a urine sample, and revealed a relationship between Trump and a top Boston hospital.

Ike traveled across the country of Burkina Faso to learn how scientists were getting the people's consent to do research on "gene drive" mosquitoes, which might eliminate malaria but could also spread rapidly throughout the region and might be unstoppable once released. Back in the United States, he took a ferry to the Lyme-stricken island of Nantucket to report on how scientists are using local government to give people a voice in genetic engineering projects. And he lifted the curtain on an international project to create whole genomes from scratch.

He wrote about the relationship between the football and concussion science, looking at how dubious science conducted by a former NFL physician impacted in the medical literature and vetting questionable claims by a chocolate milk company that their product might help athletes recover from a concussion. 

Ike began his journalism career as a student at Yale University, where he graduated in 2015. During college, he wrote and edited for The New Journal. In 2013 and 2014, The New Journal was recognized as the best student magazine in the northeast by the Society of Professional Journalists. He also wrote for the New Haven Independent, a local non-profit news organization, and participated in a radio internship in Ghana for 90.1 Rite FM. After graduating, Ike worked as an investigative journalism intern at The Medill Justice Project, a criminal justice reporting center at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

In addition to journalism, Ike is also passionate about the physical sciences. Ike received a Bachelor of Science in Physics and has done research in high energy particle physics and quantum computing. He assisted a professor in the Quantronics Laboratory at Yale University in writing an undergraduate-level quantum physics textbook, and he wrote particle physics data analysis programs during summer research stints at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.