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Too much news yesterday, so here’s a link to a late-breaking story that the FDA has chosen Vinay Prasad’s interim successor.
Trump drops Casey Means’ surgeon general nomination
The White House has dropped its nomination of Casey Means to be the next surgeon general, opting instead for Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and Fox News contributor.
The swap signals the limits of the Trump administration’s power in the Senate and represents a blow to the Make America Healthy Again movement’s months-long push to get Means confirmed. But Saphier’s interest in personal wellness and skepticism of vaccine mandates suggest she may be able to appeal to both MAHA and more mainstream Republican senators.
President Trump announced the change in a social media post and blamed Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who leads the committee tasked with reviewing the surgeon general nomination, for tanking Means. Cassidy, we will remind you, was the deciding vote to approve Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. Read more from my STAT colleagues, including a look at Saphier in her own words.
If a model outperforms physicians, should that change clinical practices?
A large language model from OpenAI outperformed physicians in simulated diagnostic evaluations, according to a study published Thursday in Science.
One experiment fed the model previous cases from the emergency department at Beth Israel in Boston. One patient went to the ER with a blood clot that had traveled to their lungs and the model correctly attributed it to the patient’s history of lupus before two physicians who also reviewed the case file.
The paper’s authors — and their colleagues in the field — were quick to caution, however, that the results should not be taken as proof that AI should be used in clinical care. They said AI models still need to be subjet to the safety and efficacy reviews that undergird medicine.
In usual fashion, STAT’s Katie Palmer has a phenomenal breakdown of the study’s findings and the ethics of its implications. For the many medical professionals that read this newsletter, what do you think? Read the story and respond to this email.
PFAS is still in some infant formula
Most of the infant formula in the U.S. is safe, but experts and health officials say regulators can take steps to make the product safer.
The Food and Drug Administration recently published findings of more than 300 formula samples to test whether they contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” The FDA detected five types of PFAS, with the most common one found in half of all samples, though in trace amounts.
STAT’s Sarah Todd spoke with two experts to determine what, exactly, that means, as the FDA analysis doesn’t explain the PFAS results in much detail. Read more.
An architect of modern genetics passes away
J. Craig Venter, an ambitious scientist who helped turn genetics from an artisanal trade into an industrialized information machine, died Wednesday of cancer at 79.
The logline of Venter’s life is eye-popping. He raced against a government-funded project to sequence the first human genome, sailed around the world collecting genetic information about life in the sea, and removed a bacterium’s genome and rebooted the organism with an identical set of genes he and his team had synthesized.
STAT’s Matt Herper penned a poignant obituary about Venter’s life and work and how he shaped our modern systems of science and biotechnology. Read more.
Her daughter got a bespoke medicine. Now she’s starting a new biotech to make more.
If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again? Julia Vitarello is certainly trying to.
Eight years ago, Vitarello’s daughter Mila received a bespoke medicine designed for her particular disease-causing mutation. This week, Vitarello revealed that she is in the process of starting a new company to try to create those individualized therapies at scale.
Vitarello’s previous effort, EveryONE Medicines, recently folded after the FDA released guidance that investors found not so encouraging for the development of customized therapies. EveryONE had sponsored a trial in the U.K. that aimed to treat 10 patients with fatal and life-threatening neurological conditions and eventually build up enough evidence to gain regulatory approval.
Read more from STAT’s Andrew Joseph to understand why Vitarello thinks that this time will be different.
America is worrying about fertility again. But it’s not really about families
America’s anxiety about fertility has never been only, or even primarily, about supporting families. It is about power, control, and determining who, exactly, gets to have children, write Sonya Borrero and Rachel Logan, authors of the forthcoming book “Reproducing Control: The Family Planning Framework’s Conflict with Reproductive Autonomy.”
Throughout U.S. history, reproduction policy has been less about personal decisions than about securing national strength and economic growth, they argue. It was repackaged as “family planning” in the 20th century, but its focus on preventing “unintended pregnancies” made it clear that reproductive freedom was never a goal.
This underlying logic has stayed the same, even as the United States now confronts the opposite problem — its declining birth rate. Read more.
What we’re reading
- Guns and bulletproof vests: How federal agents arrested Fauci aide, Science
- When natural disasters strike, another crisis hits those recovering from opioid addiction, KFF Health News
- FDA wants to exclude weight loss drugs from a compounding list, STAT
- DOJ, Elevance spar over access to top exec in Medicare Advantage fraud case, STAT