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Good morning. I’m back on the newsletter beat today while Theresa’s on holiday, but I’m off to Chicago soon to cover the American Heart Association’s scientific sessions. Ping me if you’ll be following the conference, too.
Anti-vaccine views threaten U.S. children, Biden administration health leaders warn
Two senior health officials in the Biden administration expressed their fears yesterday that new leadership inspired by ant-vax sentiment will send the country backward — and children will pay the price. Speaking at two different events, the head of the CDC and the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research answered questions about remarks made by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who called earlier this year for the country to stop using mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, and about the agenda pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose influence on the second Trump administration could reshape public health.
“I think we have a very short memory of what it is like to hold a child who has been paralyzed with polio or to comfort a mom who’s lost her kid from measles,” CDC’s Mandy Cohen (above) told an audience at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C. “No one wants to see a child paralyzed, a child die from something that we can prevent.”
“I like to be respectful of people’s opinions, but to me, this is not an opinion issue. It’s just black and white,” FDA’s Peter Marks said at the 12th International mRNA Health Conference in Boston. “We know what the safety profile of these vaccines are. We know how many lives they saved, and I think we’re just going to have to reiterate that and let people make their choices.”
Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell and Anil Oza.
Plan B’s efficacy for people with higher BMI is a matter of debate
Last week’s election results have spurred many Americans to stock up on emergency contraception and abortion pills, according to reproductive health companies like Cadence OTC and Wisp that sell them. While preparing in this way may allay some fears, other troubling questions have been bubbling up in social media discourse about whether the drugs are less effective for people at higher weights.
The medical evidence is far from conclusive, with conflicting results for different drugs at different weights. “The science isn’t clear. There have not been any studies that have been big enough and properly designed to answer this question,” Kelly Cleland, president of the American Society for Emergency Contraception, told STAT’s Timmy Broderick.
That doesn’t mean people at higher weights shouldn’t take emergency contraception, she and other health experts clarify — but it’s a gap in knowledge that highlights the ways this population can get left behind, in both research and practice. Read more.
U.S. drug overdose deaths may dip below 100,000
Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. fell to 93,087 during the 12-month period ending in June, according to new CDC statistics released this week. That nearly 17% drop will likely send the yearly toll below 100,000 deaths for the first time since 2020. Fentanyl, the potent illicit opioid that now dominates the U.S. illicit drug supply, is responsible for a large share of the 111,615 deaths attributed to overdoses in 2023.
The decline could be a blip in the data, but CDC Director Mandy Cohen said otherwise yesterday during a panel at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C. She cited the increased use of harm-reduction resources like fentanyl test strips, as well as immediately connecting people who survive overdoses to longer-term addiction care. STAT’s Lev Facher has more.
It’ll take more than social media bans to ease teen mental health crisis
Et tu, Strava? The fitness tracker isn’t the first social media app that comes to mind when considering the damage Instagram, TikTok, and others can do to some teens’ mental health. But any forum that invites people to compare themselves to others can amp up the pressure young people feel, Harvard social scientist Emily Weinstein and Indiana University social psychologist Sara Konrath note in a STAT First Opinion. Still, “One thing is clear: We can’t pin all the blame for teen mental health on social media, and school phone bans can’t fix it.”
In their national survey of over 1,500 American teens, they found that more than half reported negative pressure to grind out a game plan for life. They pointed to teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, and other school adults; themselves; and their parents and family members as the top three sources of that pressure to achieve. Social media came in fourth — not even making the podium.
“Social media can be like gasoline on the fires that are burning some teens out,” they write. “But to fix mental health trends, we also need to widen our lens beyond Instagram and TikTok: to other technologies, and even to the Strava-fication of school in the form of educational technology platforms that continually pressure students and parents with endless performance updates.” Read more.
A long look at long Covid (and other mysteries)
Ever since long Covid emerged in the pandemic’s first year, people suffering from other post-infection syndromes have been clamoring for serious attention to their illnesses, too, rather than the skepticism and stigma that have so often greeted myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), long-term Lyme disease, or other unexplained conditions. A new issue of Science Translational Medicine published yesterday considers these often debilitating syndromes together, whether leaders of federal health agencies are describing the NIH’s RECOVER initiative (criticized for its slow progress), immunobiologists are looking at sex differences in susceptibility, or infectious disease clinicians are making the case for sustained funding to study these chronic illnesses, separately and together with long Covid.
Here’s what they say:
- “Like medical mysteries of the past, this one too will be solved by science. How fast that occurs depends on continued attention and robust and rigorous scientific pursuit.”— NIH’s Jeanne Marrazzao, NHLBI’s Gary Gibbons, and NINDS’s Walter Koroshetz
- “Despite their potential to substantially contribute to our scientific understanding of [post-acute infection syndromes, or PAIS] and autoimmune diseases, current research has yet to extensively focus on the development of PAISs in transgender individuals, a group disproportionately afflicted with PAISs and one uniquely positioned to illuminate the interplay between biological sex differences and the impact of sex hormones on disease outcomes.”— Julio Silva and Akiko Iwasaki
- “The risks of conflating long Covid and ME/CFS go both ways; although there is hope that long Covid research will provide some of the answers needed to fully understand ME/ CFS, this should not come at the expense of investment in efforts to study pre-2020 ME/CFS, which may still be driven by distinct biology” — Michael Peluso, Maureen Hanson, and Steven Deeks
Infant mortality is stable. So are disparities
Anti-vaccine views threaten U.S. children, Biden administration health leaders warn
Two senior health officials in the Biden administration expressed their fears yesterday that new leadership inspired by ant-vax sentiment will send the country backward — and children will pay the price. Speaking at two different events, the head of the CDC and the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research answered questions about remarks made by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who called earlier this year for the country to stop using mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, and about the agenda pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose influence on the second Trump administration could reshape public health. “I think we have a very short memory of what it is like to hold a child who has been paralyzed with polio or to comfort a mom who’s lost her kid from measles,” CDC’s Mandy Cohen (above) told an audience at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C. “No one wants to see a child paralyzed, a child die from something that we can prevent.” “I like to be respectful of people’s opinions, but to me, this is not an opinion issue. It’s just black and white,” FDA’s Peter Marks said at the 12th International mRNA Health Conference in Boston. “We know what the safety profile of these vaccines are. We know how many lives they saved, and I think we’re just going to have to reiterate that and let people make their choices.” Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell and Anil Oza.
Plan B’s efficacy for people with higher BMI is a matter of debate
Last week’s election results have spurred many Americans to stock up on emergency contraception and abortion pills, according to reproductive health companies like Cadence OTC and Wisp that sell them. While preparing in this way may allay some fears, other troubling questions have been bubbling up in social media discourse about whether the drugs are less effective for people at higher weights. The medical evidence is far from conclusive, with conflicting results for different drugs at different weights. “The science isn’t clear. There have not been any studies that have been big enough and properly designed to answer this question,” Kelly Cleland, president of the American Society for Emergency Contraception, told STAT’s Timmy Broderick. That doesn’t mean people at higher weights shouldn’t take emergency contraception, she and other health experts clarify — but it’s a gap in knowledge that highlights the ways this population can get left behind, in both research and practice. Read more.
U.S. drug overdose deaths may dip below 100,000
Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. fell to 93,087 during the 12-month period ending in June, according to new CDC statistics released this week. That nearly 17% drop will likely send the yearly toll below 100,000 deaths for the first time since 2020. Fentanyl, the potent illicit opioid that now dominates the U.S. illicit drug supply, is responsible for a large share of the 111,615 deaths attributed to overdoses in 2023. The decline could be a blip in the data, but CDC Director Mandy Cohen said otherwise yesterday during a panel at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C. She cited the increased use of harm-reduction resources like fentanyl test strips, as well as immediately connecting people who survive overdoses to longer-term addiction care. STAT’s Lev Facher has more.
It’ll take more than social media bans to ease teen mental health crisis
Et tu, Strava? The fitness tracker isn’t the first social media app that comes to mind when considering the damage Instagram, TikTok, and others can do to some teens’ mental health. But any forum that invites people to compare themselves to others can amp up the pressure young people feel, Harvard social scientist Emily Weinstein and Indiana University social psychologist Sara Konrath note in a STAT First Opinion. Still, “One thing is clear: We can’t pin all the blame for teen mental health on social media, and school phone bans can’t fix it.” In their national survey of over 1,500 American teens, they found that more than half reported negative pressure to grind out a game plan for life. They pointed to teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, and other school adults; themselves; and their parents and family members as the top three sources of that pressure to achieve. Social media came in fourth — not even making the podium. “Social media can be like gasoline on the fires that are burning some teens out,” they write. “But to fix mental health trends, we also need to widen our lens beyond Instagram and TikTok: to other technologies, and even to the Strava-fication of school in the form of educational technology platforms that continually pressure students and parents with endless performance updates.” Read more.
A long look at long Covid (and other mysteries)
Ever since long Covid emerged in the pandemic’s first year, people suffering from other post-infection syndromes have been clamoring for serious attention to their illnesses, too, rather than the skepticism and stigma that have so often greeted myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), long-term Lyme disease, or other unexplained conditions. A new issue of Science Translational Medicine published yesterday considers these often debilitating syndromes together, whether leaders of federal health agencies are describing the NIH’s RECOVER initiative (criticized for its slow progress), immunobiologists are looking at sex differences in susceptibility, or infectious disease clinicians are making the case for sustained funding to study these chronic illnesses, separately and together with long Covid. Here’s what they say:
- “Like medical mysteries of the past, this one too will be solved by science. How fast that occurs depends on continued attention and robust and rigorous scientific pursuit.”— NIH’s Jeanne Marrazzao, NHLBI’s Gary Gibbons, and NINDS’s Walter Koroshetz
- “Despite their potential to substantially contribute to our scientific understanding of [post-acute infection syndromes, or PAIS] and autoimmune diseases, current research has yet to extensively focus on the development of PAISs in transgender individuals, a group disproportionately afflicted with PAISs and one uniquely positioned to illuminate the interplay between biological sex differences and the impact of sex hormones on disease outcomes.”— Julio Silva and Akiko Iwasaki
- “The risks of conflating long Covid and ME/CFS go both ways; although there is hope that long Covid research will provide some of the answers needed to fully understand ME/ CFS, this should not come at the expense of investment in efforts to study pre-2020 ME/CFS, which may still be driven by distinct biology” — Michael Peluso, Maureen Hanson, and Steven Deeks
Infant mortality is stable. So are disparities
What we’re reading
After rising between 2021 and 2022, infant mortality has plateaued, new national data from the CDC show. Looking past the overall figures, differences among racial and ethnic groups also didn’t budge significantly, as this chart shows. Geography looks different, too. State by state, the rate of deaths per 1,000 live births ranged from 3.32 in Massachusetts to 9.11 in Mississippi. Mortality rates declined in New Mexico (5.88) and West Virginia (7.32) but increased in Nevada (4.49) and Washington (4.34).