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Good morning and happy Friday. I hope you’ve got great long weekend plans ahead. But first, scroll down to read about a Senate hearing on the NIH, a Supreme Court death penalty decision, and two related items on confusion around STIs.
Bhattacharya grilled at Senate hearing
When National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday, the focus was supposed to be on the agency’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year. But first, senators had questions about more immediate concerns.
Kicking off the meeting, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) disclosed that the acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease had stepped down from his role. Amid the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks, the lack of leadership sparked concerns for the committee. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) posed: “With less funding, and fewer staff, and stalled research, can you credibly tell us that we are better prepared for public health threats than we were a year ago?”
Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell and Anil Oza on the specifics of the NIAID acting director’s departure. For more on the other burning questions raised at the hearing, Anil has you covered.
Supreme Court dismisses death penalty case re: people with intellectual disabilities
The Supreme Court dismissed an Alabama death penalty case yesterday, ultimately sparing the life of Joseph Smith, who was sentenced to death in 1998. In a separate 2002 case, the Supreme Court held that it’s a violation of the Eighth Amendment to execute an intellectually disabled person. Smith has been challenging his looming execution ever since, and lower courts recently sided with him against the state.
By the time the case arrived at the Supreme Court, the main issue centered on how states should assess whether a person on death row qualifies as intellectually disabled — a question left open by the 2002 case. The dismissal means that the court decided after the fact that it should not review the case. In a notable dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the 2002 decision against executing intellectually disabled people should be overruled completely, as it “degrades” them.
The dismissal is not part of a pattern in favor of people with disabilities on death row. Just last week, the Supreme Court lifted a stay on the execution of Edward Busby Jr., who became the 600th person killed by Texas since it reinstated the death penalty in 1976. A lower court had previously halted the execution due to concerns over potential intellectual disabilities.
More data on Lilly’s powerful new weight loss drug
In a late-stage trial, Eli Lilly’s next-generation obesity drug led to levels of weight loss approaching what’s seen with bariatric surgery, the company reported yesterday. But participants experienced high rates of side effects, and about 11% discontinued due to adverse events, raising questions about how appealing the treatment would be.
STAT’s Elaine Chen has more on the data. The results suggest that, if approved, the drug may be the most effective weight loss medication on the market. But as Elaine reported last year, some people in earlier trials for the drug felt like they were losing too much weight.
What to know about the seed oil panic
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, and grapeseed oils the most unhealthy aspect of the American diet. The latest dietary guidelines lent even more institutional legitimacy to this sort of trepidation around seed oil. In a new First Opinion essay, dietitian Cole Hanson offers a breakdown of the actual evidence.
“Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong,” he writes. “It’s just misattributed.” His argument is a slower and less influencer-friendly one, he admits: “The right answer here doesn’t make good content.” Read more on the science.
Does the public understand how STIs spread?
Mostly? A new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that, while most Americans understand the basics on how sexually transmitted infections spread, there’s less public knowledge on rarer pathways and vaccination.
More than 1,600 people responded to the survey over two weeks in April. The vast majority of respondents knew that infections such as gonorrhea, genital herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, and HPV are sexually transmitted. Far fewer knew that mpox and Zika can also be transmitted sexually.
And most respondents understood the main ways that these infections spread. But 20% thought they could get an STI by sitting on a toilet after somebody with an infection sat there. (They can’t.) Only 33% knew that, in addition to being sexually transmitted, HIV can be passed through breastfeeding. (It can.)
The most confusion occurred regarding vaccination. While the majority knew about the HPV vaccine, only 42% knew about the mpox shot. For infections without vaccines like genital herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV, more than half of respondents were unsure about whether a vaccine exists, or incorrectly thought one did.
Where does confusion like this come from? Read the next item for related news.
CDC page on mpox caught in political crosshairs
HHS is again ordering changes to the CDC website that are at odds with the recommendations of the public health agency’s scientists. Earlier this week, the CDC was told to take down a webpage that explained how people who have multiple sexual partners can reduce their risk of contracting mpox. (The archived page can be viewed here.) Asked why, an HHS spokesperson said it “was not medically accurate” and didn’t “align with Administration priorities.”
Demetre Daskalakis, a former top CDC scientist who served as deputy coordinator of the Biden administration’s mpox response, disputed the assertion that the information on the webpage was inaccurate. “Providing advice to people that is actionable is what public health should do and we did that,” he said. “The document went through CDC scientific clearance.”
Last fall, HHS told the CDC to stop using the term mpox and revert to calling the disease monkeypox, a term the WHO has advised against using. And HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccines critic,instructed the agency to change a webpage on vaccines and autism to state that claims the two are not linked aren’t evidence based. — Helen Branswell
What we’re reading
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The word ‘Black’ has disappeared from a set of bills aimed at addressing Black maternal health, The 19th
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Family grieves for man who died in troubled psychiatric hospital, Public Health Watch
- Lab Dish: Dark times ahead at the FDA, STAT
- 2 Minnesota autism therapy providers charged in $46 million Medicaid fraud case, New York Times
- Opinion: Check-in and intake at the doctor’s office are perfect for AI, STAT