What the current spike in Covid-19 cases tells us

Even the experts thought we might be getting a reprieve from Covid, once the Omicron wave subsided in the U.S. earlier this year. I’m not so naive to think we’re done with Covid, but as someone who lives in the Northeast, where infections have been increasing, as they also have in Puerto Rico and now are picking up in the rest of the country, I’m still struck by my colleague Andrew Joseph’s report that hospitalizations are up 20% over two weeks. The decline in deaths has bottomed out at some 350 a day, which epidemiologist David Dowdy told him is encouraging, but “it’s also a little bit discouraging that we’ve been through all this.” Read more on what this might say about the durability of protection — from vaccination, infection, or both — and the ongoing evolution of the virus.

NIH licenses Covid-19 tools to a WHO program

Global access to Covid-19 medical products has been a lightning rod for issues of equity during this pandemic. (Remember our poll asking if getting a booster gave you qualms while people in other countries hadn't had their first dose?) Yesterday looked like a new day: The NIH said it's agreed to license 11 technologies to a WHO program launched two years ago to share information for developing drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics. The goal is to offer patent rights, regulatory test data, and other information to low- and middle-income countries. The program got off to a rocky start, STAT’s Ed Silverman notes in STAT+, as few governments signed up and the pharmaceutical industry declined to participate. (Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla called the pool “dangerous.”) The U.S. did not commit until March, but is sending a message that such efforts are needed to mitigate this pandemic — and the next one.

Opinion: Why a drug pricing expert walked away from biopharma

Mick Kolassa today, playing the blues. (courtest donna criswell)

When Biogen announced the price for its controversial Alzheimer’s drug, its explanation — the “overall value this treatment brings to patients, caregivers, and society” — came right out of Mick Kolassa’s playbook. For many years, journalist Billy Kenber tells us in a STAT First Opinion, Kolassa was the man drug companies turned to for advice on how to price a drug. Not that long ago, drugs were typically priced at or below the cost of the existing treatments, upped by only 10% only if they represented a therapeutic advance. Now Kolassa is dismayed by how the industry changed under the influence of Wall Street. Companies "went from trying to find out what their products were worth to finding out how much they could get for them,” he said. Read more about how this led Kolassa to walk away from the industry — and devote his time to playing the blues.

Closer look: ‘Google Maps’ of human cells is here

Intestinal crypts, seen here, were stained with histological techniques and single-cell data was layered on top, showing the different populations of cells that make up the tissue. (Pranathi Vemuri/CZ BiohuB and Serena Tan/Stanford)

About a decade ago, a group of scientists began conducting a cellular census of every tissue in the human body to find out what cells actually live there, using a powerful new technology called single-cell RNA sequencing. Yesterday, the collaborative effort, called the Human Cell Atlas, reported a major feat: the creation of detailed maps of more than a million cells across 33 organs. STAT’s Megan Molteni spoke with Stephen Quake of the Human Cell Atlas organizing committee.

How are you feeling?
This is a big moment. There’s a good analogy with the Human Genome Project. These are drafts, ... but boy, it’s going to be so useful.

Is this carrying forward the tradition of Big Science?
It’s more collegial. The Human Genome Project was sort of famously acrimonious. And that’s important because I think that what we’re trying to do is enormously more difficult than sequencing a genome.

The idea being you could look at signatures of disease coming from RNA circulating in someone’s blood and trace it back to the specific cells where that dysfunction is occurring?
Right, exactly.

Read the full interview here.

'It makes my heart cry': Black veterans on racism and health

Anger, resentment, and distrust. For 36 Black veterans with chronic kidney disease, these are their responses to encounters of racism, they told researchers who gathered their perspectives in JAMA Network Open. Kidney disease, both chronic and end-stage, falls disproportionately on Black people, and Black veterans are twice as likely as white veterans to do worse. Here’s what some Black veterans said:

On racism and stress: “I’m stressing for my people. Damn. I hate to say that, but it makes my heart cry, man.”
On distrust in health care: “They still talk to you a certain kind of way until I tell them that I know a lot about what they’re talking about.”
On bottling up feelings about racism: “I try to keep that down because of my condition. I don’t need to be stressed out and lose this kidney.”

Children with autism show typical joint attention when playing with a parent

When trying to understand autism spectrum disorder in children, scientists have zeroed in on where children focus their attention while playing with a toy, knowing that children with autism often have trouble following another person’s gaze. Researchers have previously collected data from lab experiments or interactions with clinicians, but a new study reports on a different way to assess children, with different results. When they used a head-mounted camera to follow 37 toddlers’ eye movements when they played with their parents, children with autism looked at the same toy at the same time as the parent did — called joint attention — as much as typically developing children did, following their parent’s hands to know what they were looking at, not their faces. “These results raise important questions regarding the nature of [joint attention] deficits in ASD,” the authors write in Current Biology.

What to read around the web today

3 burning questions about the future of prescribing drugs online. STAT+
Overturning Roe v. Wade will make it harder to treat miscarriage. Bloomberg
Why won’t more older Americans get their Covid booster? Kaiser Health News
DeafBlind communities may be creating a new language of touch. The New Yorker
A Caribou CAR-T treatment, backed by Nobel-winning science, shows blood-cancer remissions in first data reveal. STAT+
Report: Trump officials, meat companies knew workers at risk. Associated Press