Calling Alexa for health care may not improve access, experts say

Amazon and Teladoc have pitched a new feature letting millions of consumers call doctors directly from their smart speakers — “Alexa, I want to talk to a doctor”— as a way to get more people to seek health care. But while voice assistants are certainly helpful for patients with mobility and accessibility challenges, the partnership is more likely to deepen Amazon’s foothold in the health care market than it is to draw huge numbers of new patients who had previously been left out, researchers and analysts say. The company has been building its own virtual care business, Amazon Care. “People who have Alexas already both have the means to afford these technologies and they have high technical literacy,” which is typically correlated with health literacy, Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University told STAT’s Mohana Ravindranath. Read more in STAT+.

House Republicans launch new probe of Eric Lander's behavior

Eric Lander's last day as President Biden's science adviser was more than two weeks ago — but that doesn't mean Republican lawmakers are done asking questions about the toxic workplace environment that led to his resignation. In a letter released late last week, a trio of GOP lawmakers called for the release of all records detailing Lander's workplace misconduct, as well as any official White House communications conducted via the encrypted messaging app Signal, popular among D.C. journalists and political staffers. (That might be tough: Many Signal users set their messages to auto-delete within days or even hours.) "The serious issues Committee Republicans are uncovering at [the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy] have not been remedied by Lander's resignation," the lawmakers wrote.

Disputes over how the White House spent Covid funds could block more funding

The White House hasn’t publicly detailed exactly how it’s spent the more than $4 trillion Congress authorized for Covid-19 relief — and now, that lack of transparency could imperil its request for more money to fight the pandemic and buy therapeutics. Amid heated negotiations over a government funding bill, three dozen Republican senators are refusing to consider more Covid-19 relief funding unless the federal government provides a full accounting of how funds have been spent, STAT’s Rachel Cohrs reports. That’s a big problem for the Biden administration: The White House acknowledged last week that its Covid-19 response money has nearly run out. The White House has held off on buying millions of courses of Pfizer’s highly effective antiviral drug that the White House already committed to buy due to budget constraints. Read more.

Closer look: A case for keeping medical licensing reciprocity alive after the pandemic

Braxton Davis with his parents, Beth and Brent. (courtesy davis family)

Like many other 3-year-old boys, Braxton Davis is lively and at times playfully mischievous. But he might not have survived to that age if states hadn’t temporarily loosened medical licensing requirements during the pandemic, his surgeon Bret Mettler of Johns Hopkins Medicine writes in a STAT First Opinion. Braxton needed two surgeries for his congenital heart disease, tetralogy of Fallot. But crossing state lines from his home in Georgia to Nashville and then to Baltimore when Mettler moved there could now be a barrier. “Though Braxton’s most recent surgery was successful, and there’s hope that he’ll never need another, there’s still a crucial need for him to have regular checkups, many of which can be safely conducted via telemedicine,” Mettler says. “Yet as state licensing rules are put back in place, Braxton’s access to medical care is being restricted.”

A road map out of the pandemic to the 'next normal'

A new report released today charts a path out of the Covid-19 pandemic and into the “next normal” — life in which the SARS-CoV-2 virus remains a threat that needs to be managed. More than 50 experts outline both how the country can deal with endemic Covid and prepare for future biosecurity threats. Getting there will require improvements in:

Surveillance for Covid and other pathogens
Keeping tabs on how taxed hospitals are
Addressing air quality in buildings
Investment in antiviral drugs and better vaccines
Access to testing and antiviral drugs

The country should aim to keep the cumulative annual death toll from Covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus to about 60,000 a year — roughly the number of deaths in a bad flu season — the group also suggests. STAT’s Helen Branswell has more here.

Women fare worse after chemo and newer cancer treatments

When Crystal Ortner was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, her doctors tackled it with an aggressive six-drug chemotherapy regimen along with surgeries. During her initial round of treatment, Ortner experienced septic shock. Later, she said, chemotherapy meant constant vomiting, nausea, an overall feeling of complete debilitation — like “going to hell and back.” There’s no telling how other patients might have responded to the treatment, but there’s at least some reason to believe Ortner’s sex could have been a factor. Overall, women were 34% more likely than men to experience severe adverse effects in response to their cancer treatments, a figure that increased to 49% for women receiving immunotherapies, according to a recent study. Part of the problem, experts say, is that sex differences are not taken into account in the development of cancer treatments. STAT contributor Marcus A. Banks has more.

What to read around the web today

High demand for drug to prevent Covid in the vulnerable, yet doses go unused. New York Times
Judge approves fix to stem race bias in NFL concussion deal. Associated Press
Microsoft closes $16B acquisition of Nuance, launching a bold experiment in health AI. STAT+
The latest climate report includes a new focus on pregnant people. One of its authors explains why. The 19th
ViiV causes an outcry by declining to pursue voluntary licensing for its HIV prevention shot. STAT+