Florida’s decision on Covid vaccines for healthy kids adds to confusion

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced yesterday that the state will recommend that healthy children not be vaccinated against Covid-19, contradicting federal guidance over Covid-19 vaccination for kids. Ladapo’s decision is unlikely to interfere with the efforts of parents who want to have their children vaccinated, experts told STAT’s Helen Branswell, but they added it will likely dissuade some parents who have been on the fence. The CDC recommends Covid-19 vaccination for all children over the age of 5. Uptake, however, has been modest; as of March 2, just over one-quarter of kids aged 5 to 11 have had two doses of vaccine. “It adds to the confusion and the distrust,” Wendy Parmet of Northeastern University said. “And parents will understandably wonder what to do.” Read more.

Prisons aren't asking for Covid treatments like Paxlovid

Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid seems tailor-made for combatting Covid-19 in prisons. It doesn’t require an intravenous infusion like other treatments, there are signs it could significantly reduce people’s ability to spread the virus, and it significantly cuts people’s chances of getting seriously ill or dying from Covid-19. But the antiviral isn’t available to the vast majority of federal prisoners, according to STAT’s review of available data. Since Paxlovid was authorized by the FDA in December, the federal Bureau of Prisons has received just 160 doses of the drug for the entire federal prison system, which houses more than 150,000 people. “HHS has not received a request from the BOP for additional product at this time,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote in a statement. Read more from STAT’s Nicholas Florko.

Newly discovered brain cells may be a memory filing system, study says

A scientist opens a laptop in front of a patient. On screen, a boy, tied to a fleet of balloons, fades in. As he rises into the air, the scene cuts abruptly to an office, where a man sits in front of his boss. A question then appears: “Was anyone in the video wearing a tie?” As with the 18 other patients in the study, neurosurgeons had placed electrodes in the patient’s brain to pinpoint seizures, so that while subjects watched movie clips and answered questions, their brains were monitored. Over three years, the work led to the discovery of two new groups of brain cells that may be involved in cleaving experiences into distinct events that humans can better remember. The study, in Nature Neuroscience, may pave the way for new treatments for memory disorders, the authors said. STAT’s Tino Delamerced delves into how.

Closer look: A gap in the new surprise-billing law leaves patients on the hook

(MOLLY FERGUSON)

Soung Luy’s primary care doctor told him he could get blood work done down the hall in his office building in Marina del Rey, Calif., all owned by the Cedars-Sinai health system. The doctor assured Luy the lab accepted his insurance and was in-network. But that wasn’t the case: Luy’s bill came to $686.70 for a handful of blood tests. A new federal law, the No Surprises Act, is meant to address patients in situations where they have no control over whether their provider participates in an insurance network — like emergency care, surgeries where patients never meet their doctor, and air ambulance rides. But Luy's example is an early warning of yet another type of service that doesn’t actually fall under the law’s protections, a category that notably includes ground ambulances as well as lab tests. STAT’s Bob Herman explains.

As long Covid studies continue, researchers cast a wider net

There are almost as many questions about long Covid as there are symptoms. I recently spoke with Ingrid Bassett, an infectious diseases physician leading a study at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of six Boston hospitals joining RECOVER, an NIH effort to understand, prevent, and treat long Covid.

What's different about this study?
It’s the strategy of enrolling people at the time of their acute infection and really understanding the circumstances of their acute infection.

How do you make sure your study includes people disproportionately affected by Covid?
The NIH enrollment goals are 27% of participants being Hispanic or Latinx, and 16% being African American. That’s really intentional, understanding those communities were very hard hit. An infectious disease essentially dictates that we’re all in this together, and that means we need to figure out how to engage communities.

You can read our full conversation here.

FDA plan to improve clinical trial diversity falls flat

Six years ago, the FDA launched a five-year action plan to improve diversity and transparency in pivotal clinical trials for newly approved medicines. A new analysis in Health Affairs finds the effort failed to move the needle for Black people, whose participation in clinical trials remained inadequate. Black participants accounted for just one-third of the required enrollment for adequate representation, whether the trials started before, during, or after the FDA plan. Black people were underrepresented in 85% of all trials and disease categories, except psychiatry, an exception attributed to studies for one particular drug. And while Black people were least represented in clinical studies for cardiovascular medicines, they were 30% more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites, according to federal data for 2018. STAT’s Ed Silverman has more.

What to read around the web today

J&J’s controversial prison testing resurfaces in baby powder lawsuits. Bloomberg
Tolerating misinformation is better than the alternative. The Atlantic
A key study of Gilead’s breast cancer drug meets goal, but withheld data raise doubts. STAT+
States aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to tighten abortion laws. New York Times
Key Democrat moves to crack down on FDA accelerated approvals. STAT+