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As I was writing this newsletter, I was listening to Rebecca Black’s recent album — who you might recognize from her 15-year-old song, Friday. Happy Friday, everyone!
A surprising statistic about health equity
Before writing this newsletter for you all, I sat on a panel at the National Academies of Science. The session was part of an all-day roundtable about studying population health and communicating that information to the public. A common thread was how the way we talk about research impacts trust in science, something we have been thinking a lot about at STAT. We discussed some of my reporting over the past year on health equity researchers, who have felt political pressure not to speak publicly about their work.
But my co-panelist, Phillip Alberti from the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Health Justice, raised polling he conducted showing that most American adults favor efforts to achieve health equity, though the amount of support varied a bit based on how you framed the question.
“When we asked a representative sample of U.S. adults … ‘Do you support the goal of health equity’ without any definition, 65% of self-identified conservatives said ‘I do.’ So I think even though there was a difference, it’s not as big as maybe we are being told it is,” he said.
Alberti also noted that the AAMC will have more data in coming weeks about how trust in health care institutions has changed. You can watch a recording of the panel here. Relatedly, I had a story late on Wednesday about some researchers pushing back on the National Institutes of Health’s screening of grants for specific keywords by suing the agency.
Kennedy goes on offense against vaccines
Speaking of trust in science, Isa Cueto brings us a dispatch from the Children’s Health Defense conference in Washington, D.C., where CHD founder and current health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the keynote. At points during his tenure, Kennedy has downplayed his skepticism about vaccines, but that attitude was not present on Thursday. For more than 20 minutes, he cast doubt on shots, saying he feels the public has “no idea” about the risk profile of vaccines that have been administered tens of millions of times.
You can read more about Kennedy’s “victory lap” here. And it’s worth revisiting Daniel Payne’s reporting on CHD from last year here as well.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has all new members
On Thursday, Kennedy also named new members to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. The committee has largely stayed mum throughout the second Trump administration — last year Kennedy announced he would fire task force members because they were too “woke,” and the panel has not met in over a year. The group is tasked with determining which preventive measures insurance companies cover.
Kennedy’s USPSTF is now made up of specialists instead of generalists, which the American Medical Association called a “significant departure from the Task Force’s traditional membership.” One expert added that specialists often don’t sit on the panel because they may introduce conflicts of interest. (The page intended to host conflict of interest disclosures says it is being updated). Read more about the eight new members of the task force here. You can also revisit this write-up of the 2025 Supreme Court decision that handed Kennedy the power to remake the committee.
205
That’s the number of medical facilities that have been attacked in Sudan since 2023, when the current civil war began, forcing some 13 million people to flee their homes.
With support from the Pulitzer Center, Sophie Neiman travelled to the Heiban District, where she talked to physicians doing their best to offer care that they are not always properly equipped to provide.
Mother of Mercy, the hospital Sophie visited, has at times had to send tissue samples to the United States to be biopsied, which can take as long as six months. A physician there estimated the nearest hospital equipped to provide cancer care is both 700 miles away and across an active frontline. You can read that story here.
ARPA-H announces new grants to speed up diagnoses
Yesterday, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health announced a new effort to improve autism diagnosis. “We are not satisfied simply for describing autism and managing its consequences,” Kennedy said of the initiative in his speech at CHD. “We are asking what drives the different forms of autism, and why developmental trajectories differ, why some children regress, and which interventions work for them.”
The effort calls for “solutions” that speed up the time to diagnose autism. Wait times for an assessment can take months, if not years, as the number of people with autism increases. The issue has also received more attention under the Trump administration. You can read Rose’s story about the announcement here.
Looksmaxxing is making its way into the plastic surgeon’s office
Avid Morning Rounds readers may recall when “maxxing” and “mogging” swept the STAT newsroom. That lingo comes from the looksmaxxing community, a male-dominated group that seeks to improve their attractiveness at all costs. What started as an internet subculture is now also sweeping plastic surgery appointments, doctor Kavitha Ranganathan writes in a First Opinion.
She is seeing more men in her waiting room than ever before, and worries about the risks that come with the questionable and sometimes dangerous practices common among looksmaxxers. But she struggles with where to place the blame.
“Is it Clavicular who is responsible, or is it the people who have designed the incentive structures that have elevated the status and prestige of his misinformation?” she writes, in reference to the internet’s most notorious looksmaxxer. You can read more from Kavitha here.