Covid’s circling the White House. How much risk does Biden face?

For weeks, the coronavirus has been closing in on the Oval Office. In late March it was press secretary Jen Psaki, then the clutch of infections following the Gridiron Dinner. On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris tested positive. When President Trump became infected with Covid in October 2020, he had to be airlifted to Walter Reed Medical Center for treatment. If Biden, who is 79, were to become infected with Covid, how worried should Americans be? While age remains a strong risk factor with Covid, vaccines and treatments have greatly decreased the threat of grave illness, experts told STAT’s Megan Molteni. “The president is vaccinated, boosted, and will be receiving very good medical care,” said William Hanage of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “He’s also relatively healthy. Under the circumstances, it’s about as good as you can get.”

Climate change threatens to bring more viral spillover from animals

Climate change will force animals to migrate, and in turn, some species — and the pathogens they harbor — will come into contact for the first time. In a new modeling study, scientists predict that even if warming remains within the global target of 2 degrees Celsius, there could be more than 4,000 new cross-species swapping of viruses by 2070. Bats — which carry pathogens like coronaviruses — account for most of the simulated viral sharing in the study, published today in Nature. Such an ecological transition might already be underway. “There is this monumental and mostly unobserved change happening in ecosystems,” lead author Colin Carlson of Georgetown University said. “We are probably well into those changes, we are not keeping a close eye on them, and they make pandemic risk everyone's problem.” STAT’s Andrew Joseph has more.

JAMA’s challenges were not unique, incoming editor says

Incoming JAMA Editor-in-Chief and STATUS List honoree Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo chats with STAT Executive Editor Rick Berke at a dinner last night for the inaugural STATUS List at Fenway Park in Boston. (STAT)

A year after the prestigious medical journal JAMA drew scalding headlines over a podcast criticized as racist, its incoming editor-in-chief put the controversy in context. “They're not issues that are unique to JAMA,” said Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a Black internist, epidemiologist, and health-equity researcher from UCSF who will become the first person of color to hold the position. “It’s just more public,” she said in her strongest comments to date about the issue. She was speaking at a dinner held at Fenway Park in Boston last night to honor her and other members of the inaugural STATUS list, STAT’s compilation of influential leaders in life sciences. She also promised to trade advice with Eric Rubin, her counterpart at NEJM, who was a guest at the dinner. “I think we are going to have a lot to learn from each other,” he said.

Closer look: Machine learning can figure out who’s likely to miss appointments, but not what’s next

Boston Children's Hospital employees helped develop and test a model to predict missed appointments. (Lane Turner/Boston Globe)

For every five appointments at Boston Children’s Hospital, one patient doesn’t show up. Missed appointments are a common problem at health systems. And they're a particularly attractive target for machine learning researchers, who can use patient datasets to get a handle on what's causing patients to miss out on needed care. In a study published this month, a model from researchers at Boston Children’s found patients who had a history of no-shows were more likely to miss future appointments, as were patients with language barriers and those scheduled to see their provider on days with bad weather. They’re predictions that, in theory, could help a health system target interventions. But even though Boston Children’s leaders helped develop and test the model, the health system isn’t yet sold on taking it out of pilot mode and actually putting it into practice. STAT’s Mohana Ravindranath has more.

WHO and UNICEF warn of future measles outbreaks

UNICEF and WHO are sounding the alarm about increasing measles cases in the first two months of this year, warning that pandemic-related disruptions and conflicts in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Afghanistan are creating ideal conditions for large outbreaks of the disease. In the past 12 months, there have been 21 large measles outbreaks around the world. The two agencies point to a 79% jump in cases for January and February 2022 compared to the same two months in 2021, but how much of that jump relates to better reporting of cases isn’t addressed. Numbers are more certain for the 23 million children who missed basic childhood vaccines in 2020, the highest number since 2009. “Now is the moment to get essential immunization back on track and launch catch-up campaigns,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Vaccinated heart-transplant recipients fared better against Covid than unvaccinated recipients

New research published in BMJ yesterday confirms that fewer people die from Covid-19 in communities with higher vaccination coverage. That may seem like obvious but important evidence for population-level benefits of a public health marvel. More surprising is a much smaller study, out yesterday in JAMA Cardiology, that says among 436 adults who got heart transplants at one hospital, those who were vaccinated had a significantly lower risk of Covid-19 infection, hospitalization, and death compared with unvaccinated recipients. Transplant recipients take medications to keep their immune systems from rejecting their new organs, which also means their response to vaccines is blunted. The study authors say that even though the heart recipients’ immune response was lower than in other people’s, the vaccine was still tied to protection from Covid-19, “suggesting it is imperative that all heart transplant recipients obtain the Covid-19 vaccine.”

What to read around the web today

How Paxlovid came to be: From the germ of an idea to a vital tool against Covid. STAT
Moderna to ask FDA to authorize Covid-19 vaccine for young kids. Politico
Sweden trial starts in stem-cell windpipe transplants case. Associated Press
Adam's Take: A company developing a human blood substitute attempts a comeback, but IPO plans look dicey. STAT+
Walmart, CVS pharmacies have blocked or delayed telehealth Adderall prescriptions. Wall Street Journal