How a basement hideaway nurtured a generation of blind innovators

Joshua Miele at his home in Berkeley, Calif. (LAURA MORTON FOR STAT)

In 1987, Joshua Miele and other blind students at the University of California, Berkeley, would find their way to an underground hideaway whose university-sanctioned name was the blind students study center. But pretty much everyone called it The Cave. “It’s where the bats hung out,” Miele explained to STAT’s Isabella Cueto. Today, he’s a MacArthur “genius grant” winner who builds adaptive technologies at Amazon, work that has made it an industry-wide expectation that consumer devices are accessible to people who are blind and have other disabilities. He is just one of a generation of leaders, innovators, creatives, and geniuses who are reshaping the world — and have roots in The Cave. Many of them point to The Cave as the place where they found a certain power, learned how to cut through discriminatory bureaucracy, and felt deeply understood for the first time. Read more.

Another monoclonal fails against another variant; another booster may be OK for 50+

Just as federal data predict the BA.2 coronavirus variant will soon become the dominant variant in the country, U.S. health officials have stopped further deployment of the Covid-19 treatment sotrovimab where BA.2 is now causing the majority of infections. The move, based on lab studies showing it likely doesn’t work against the variant, marks the third monoclonal to fade this way. Six New England states plus New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands will no longer get shipments of the therapy made by Vir Biotechnology and GSK. While antivirals have maintained their potency against different variants, monoclonals are more vulnerable to a fast-changing virus, STAT’s Andrew Joseph explains. As for vaccines, the Biden administration plans to give Americans age 50 or older the option of a second booster of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, the New York Times reported.

Two cities 2,000 miles away share parallel plights

Tom Sequist straddles two worlds. One is in Boston, where he works for one of the country’s best health care systems. The other is in northern New Mexico, where he is a member of the Taos Pueblo tribe. “While these two communities could not be more different,” he writes in a STAT First Opinion, “the Covid-19 pandemic has linked them in an unfortunate but all-too-common way: Both are beset by racism and racial disparities in health care.” The disparities in Boston and neighboring Chelsea are amplified in tribal communities like Navajo Nation, he says. Before the pandemic his hospital system had partnered with Navajo Nation hospitals to provide both on-site clinical care and telehealth support. “My two worlds, Chelsea and Taos Pueblo, drove my decision-making,” he writes. “I knew we had to take an equity-first approach to fighting the pandemic.”

Closer look: Once told ‘girls don’t do that,’ she's a top executive at UnitedHealth Group

Margaret-Mary Wilson, executive vice president and chief medical officer of UnitedHealth Group. (COURTESY MARY-MARGARET WILSON)

Long before she became a top executive at UnitedHealth Group, back in her native Nigeria, Margaret-Mary Wilson was discouraged from her dreams of becoming a doctor because “girls don’t do that.” But Wilson persisted. She talked with STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling about her journey and her goals.

What path led you to think about issues of health equity?
When I started medical school, I just couldn’t figure out why people were dying of simple illnesses. In Nigeria, if you were wealthy, you got good health care. If you weren’t, you died. But then I worked in the U.K. and the U.S., where there are an abundance of resources, the outcomes were still not where they should have been.

How are you leveraging the power of your company to make health equity a reality?
We’ve tried the hammer approach, we’ve tried the carrot approach, and we see that doesn’t get us where we need to get. What gets us there is aligning around common purposes.

Read the full STAT+ interview here.

Co-infection with Covid and flu spelled more severe illness for hospitalized patients

Pandemic precautions may have averted the dreaded “twindemic” of Covid and flu for two years running (even though flu may be ticking up), but as the world emerges from behind masks and social distancing, the likelihood of future co-infections seems higher. That could make a new Lancet study more compelling. In what its authors believe is the largest study of hospitalized people with Covid also being tested for endemic respiratory viruses (flu, RSV, enteroviruses), they report there were 583 confirmed co-infections and 6,382 confirmed infections with Covid alone. People with both Covid and the flu were more than twice as likely to need a ventilator to breathe than people infected just with Covid. Caveat: The study ran from February 2020 through December 2021, so Covid vaccination was not available for all patients.

No, light drinking is not good for your heart

Whether light drinking helps people’s hearts has long been controversial, from the French paradox to conflicts of interest that derailed an NIH study. A new study in JAMA Network Open uses genetic epidemiology to get around a question that bedevils observational studies: Could there be something else about people who enjoy this benefit? The researchers conclude from an analysis of UK Biobank data that lifestyle — physical activity and diet — better explain cardiovascular health than light drinking. Genetic predisposition to drink alcohol was strongly connected to drinking more and to developing high blood pressure and coronary artery disease. While consuming as many as seven drinks per week was associated with modest upticks in risk, that risk rose much more when moving to seven to 14 drinks a week — levels U.S. guidelines now call “low risk” for men.

What to read around the web today

A freelancer’s forty-three years in the American health-care system. The New Yorker
Some kids are happy to ditch the mask at school, others struggle with the transition. NPR
Pfizer, Moderna and J&J face shareholder pressure to broaden Covid-19 vaccine access. Wall Street Journal
In difficult cases, 'families cannot manage death at home.' New York Times
Opinion: HHS’s failure to address the health harms of climate crisis constitutes environmental and institutional racism. STAT