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Good morning. Remember when the streets were covered in snow? The passage of time is so wild. Below we’ve got some news to start another week.
Readouts from the annual diabetes conference
The American Diabetes Association’s annual conference in New Orleans wraps up today, after three days of data readouts, presentations, and, unexpectedly, a police interaction? Here are some highlights:
- On Friday, half a dozen ADA members, including a past president, were reportedly escorted out of the convention center after attempting to hand out copies of an editorial that criticized Trump administration policies. The ADA’s media team told MedPage Today that the members violated code of conduct rules. You might find it amusing that the editorial in question was published by ADA’s very own Diabetes Care journal.
- That same afternoon, a senior adviser to the NIH made a full-throated endorsement of the Make America Healthy Again movement in the conference’s keynote address. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to give the address but needed a last-minute substitute due to an in-person meeting with President Trump, per the ADA. STAT’s Elizabeth Cooney has more on the address and the ensuing pushback from attendees.
- As expected, there was some of GLP-1 news at the conference. Liz and Elaine Chen did a quick roundup on Friday of the drugs to be discussed over the weekend. Highlights include safety and tolerability data on Eli Lilly’s next-gen obesity drug, detailed data from a mid-stage study on the obesity drug that Pfizer acquired from Metsera, and new data on Boehringer Ingelheim’s obesity drug.
Disciplinary proceedings re: DOJ’s trans agenda?
Federal courts continue to question the integrity of the Trump administration’s investigations into youth gender-affirming care. On Friday, a federal judge in Rhode Island referred Justice Department lawyers for disciplinary proceedings after previously excoriating them for a “misleading, if not utterly false” account of DOJ’s negotiations with a hospital regarding subpoenas for gender-affirming care records.
DOJ first sent administrative subpoenas to hospitals last summer, requesting extensive records on trans health care. Now, the agency appears to be initiating a criminal investigation out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas. District Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee, found the DOJ has misrepresented and withheld information regarding the Rhode Island case from both her court and the Texas court. Two days before she ordered disciplinary proceedings, the DOJ issued a statement calling her conclusions “without merit.”
In the meantime, legal battles over gender-affirming care continue, with multiple cases challenging DOJ subpoenas for patient information. In New York, two parents told Gothamist that Mount Sinai Health System will cooperate with DOJ and turn over anonymized patient records.
What ‘Schedule F’ means and why it matters
Last week, President Trump issued an executive order reclassifying thousands of positions within the federal government, including HHS. The policy, known as “Schedule F,” dates back to Trump’s first term, and would create a new class of federal employees who are not political appointees but could be fired at will. This new designation without civil service protections would make workers more vulnerable to political pressure.
Creating a more politicized workforce is part of the Trump administration’s broader goal to shift power away from Congress and toward the executive branch, health policy experts say. Read more from a team of STAT reporters about how this could affect work happening at the NIH, CDC, FDA, and CMS.
One clinic’s unusual strategy to save limbs
At a Massachusetts General Hospital vascular surgery clinic held every three months in Boston, there is no typical day. Run in partnership with one of the city’s prominent mobile clinics for the city’s unhoused, the program aims to keep patients without adequate access to preventive care out of the emergency room. People come in with what could be blocked carotid arteries, peripheral artery disease, abdominal aortic aneurysms, or infected sores that could seed sepsis, the overwhelming full-body infection.
Elizabeth Cooney recently visited the clinic. Read her story to understand the doctors’ unique approach to meeting patients where they are. In one case, a surgical resident escorted a patient out onto the street so he could smoke a cigarette — then petitioned passersby and drivers in parked cars for a lighter.
Two experts on the Ebola outbreak response
We have a couple of First Opinion essays from experts with real experience working during the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic. Consider reading them:
As STAT’s Helen Branswell has reported, the U.S. plans to send exposed or infected Americans to facilities in third countries like Kenya. In an essay published Friday, infectious disease doctor and former WHO medical officer Krutika Kuppalli argues that Americans with Ebola deserve to come home. She deployed to Sierra Leone during the outbreak a decade ago. “I understood the risks,” she said. But there was also an understanding that, if the worst happened, she’d be taken home to receive the best possible care. “That assumption now appears to be changing,” she wrote. And that change will have consequences.
Tom Frieden was the CDC director while Kuppalli was in Africa, meaning he led the response to that epidemic. It wasn’t perfect, and in an essay published Saturday, he recalls a mistake he made that nearly cost him his job and people’s lives. Still, the last epidemic “showed the route to success,” he argues. The new outbreak requires a massive, immediate, and meticulous plan. “The virus has a running head start, and every minute counts.” Read more.
What we’re reading
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Scientists edit human embryo genes with startling precision, New York Times
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Woman accused of fabricating abortion pill ‘coercion’ story allegedly hid text messages, second phone, Autonomy News
- Opinion: American horses are obese, too, STAT
- How prediction markets could forecast the future of science, Scientific American
- Opinion: $2 million gene therapy cures require a financing model, STAT