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Good morning. We’ve got a heartbreaking story from Jason Mast today on two friends with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Read that now, and if you need a pick-me-up afterward, read about our 2026 class of Wunderkinds.
Democrats go MAHA for the midterms
As the midterms approach, Democratic candidates including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed are building agendas around issues like food and toxins that are important to the Make America Healthy Again movement. In some ways, it’s a rebranding of long-held progressive ideals, STAT’s Daniel Payne writes. Democrats are largely disregarding vaccine injuries, the signature issue of MAHA leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“A lot of [the MAHA activists] really don’t believe that their fight is partisan,” Ocasio-Cortez said on a podcast in July, “and it’s not in many ways.” Read more from Daniel on the midterm push to woo MAHA voters, as well as what universal health issue still looms larger than the others.
83%
That’s the percentage of adults with health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts who would put that money toward oral care products like toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, if it were allowed. That interest is even higher among families and younger adults, according to a recent survey of 1,200 people by the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
HSAs and FSAs usually don’t cover “general health products” like toothbrushes. But as sellers of these accounts beef up their lobbying power to expand the market, the distinction between what is and isn’t covered starts to sound silly. Internally, a few STAT staffers have closely followed the growing list of products that you can use your HSA to buy: mountain bikes, Meta glasses, saunas, radiation-blocking underwear … etc.
Worried about the plague? Read this
Infectious disease doctor Krutika Kuppalli’s new opinion column for STAT, ID Consult, is arriving just in time. In the wake of our collective Covid trauma, the recent death of a 28-year-old in Russia who worked at a lab that studies, among other diseases, the plague, has raised concerns around the world. (The WHO has said the case presents a “very low” risk outside Russia.)
Kuppalli offers some factual reassurance: There’s no evidence that this is the start of the next pandemic. Currently, we don’t even know what truly caused this person’s pneumonia. But as Kuppalli also explains, there’s historical context that requires transparency and independent verification here. Read more on why reports out of Russia deserve attention, not panic.
Two friends, one diagnosis, disparate outcomes
Yannick and Brecken became friends because of their diagnosis. Each boy, age 13 and 12 respectively, has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare, fatal muscle-wasting disease. But only Brecken has received a promising new drug to treat the condition. The medicine makes the cell’s protein-building machinery “skip” part of the gene, called an exon, behind Duchenne. But it won’t work for everyone — it has to be targeted to a patient’s specific mutation.
As Brecken grows, Yannick is losing function. This summer, the company that makes Brecken’s treatment delayed a clinical trial for another drug candidate that would treat Yannick. Brecken decided to write a letter to the company, his mom told STAT’s Jason Mast. “My friend Yannick is waiting to get the next Avidity therapy,” Brecken wrote. “He was so happy when I got it.”
Read Jason’s heartbreaking story about two friends with vastly different experiences and the regulatory landscape that has some parents taking matters into their own hands.
2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded for research with an impact on pharmacology
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai were awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry this morning for “the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.” They solved a chemical mystery: Some molecules exist in the world that are mirror images of one another, a phenomenon known as chirality, from the Greek word from hand (as hands are mirror images of one another). Amino acids are among chiral molecules, and a living organism can only contain one of the versions. The other mirror molecule is found rarely elsewhere in nature, but prior to the laureates’ experiments, how such imbalance could occur was not understood.
Their research has an important impact in pharmacology, as more than half clinically employed drugs are chiral. For instance novrad, a cough medicine, and darvon, a painkiller, are mirror images of one another (hence their mirror names, too). — Annalisa Merelli
ER visits from people born outside the U.S. dropped after ICE raids
Amid mass ICE raids, dramatically increased arrests, and deadly encounters with federal agents, it’s long been clear that many immigrant patients are avoiding medical treatment. “There’s been a huge lapse in care,” a Minneapolis-based pediatrician told STAT’s Daniel Payne in February.
A study published Monday in JAMA Network Open puts some hard numbers to those claims. Researchers found that visits by people born outside of the U.S. to three Los Angeles emergency rooms dropped precipitously after immigration enforcement increased last year. At the same time, the number of hospital admissions among that population rose, suggesting that “heightened immigration enforcement may lead to avoidance of acute care among immigrant patients, with potential negative health and economic consequences for patients and the systems who care for them.”
A WUNDERful bunch of scientists
Today, STAT announced the 2026 Wunderkinds, an annual roster of ambitious, intelligent doctors and researchers at the beginning of their careers. This year, we’re spotlighting people working on important issues like “chain of thought” cognition, how immune systems talk to one another, and ethical debates in medicine. In their spare time, these scientists listen to house music, train for marathons, and hang out with the adorable 2026 class of Wunderkind pets.
Here’s a preview of some of the scholars in this year’s cohort, but I encourage you to take a spin through all of the profiles:
- Physician-researcher Andy Zeng was already interested in biology in college. But a visit to his grandmother, near the end of her life in China, planted the seed for his singular focus on understanding cancer. Today, he uses cutting-edge tools to illuminate how stem cells influence cancer.
- For years, Duke researcher Drew Schreiner observed rodents pressing levers to get rewards of cocaine, methamphetamine, and food. But all the while, he wondered about birds. “What makes us human is this ability to culturally transmit learning,” Schreiner told former STAT reporter Eric Boodman. Birds do this, too, in how they learn and teach their music. Now, he hopes his birdsong research will eventually help uncover how human brains learn, and how it could help treat diseases like Parkinson’s.
- Health policy researcher and surgeon Vishal Patel was driving and trying to queue up a new Taylor Swift album when he noticed he was drifting out of his lane. The experience inspired a widely discussed study that found traffic fatalities increase by about 15% on days with major music album releases.
What we’re reading
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How to win the Chem Nobel, C&EN
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I’ve covered death row cases for nearly a decade. What happened to Christa Pike wasn’t an anomoly, ProPublica
- My oncologist recommended active surveillance for prostate cancer. Life insurers called it ‘untreated cancer,’ STAT
- Are federal disability rights at risk? WNYC
- What Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak could mean for pregnancy care across America, The 19th