Biden's Covid tightrope

(Susan Walsh/AP)

Being a successful pandemic president often has as much to do with messaging as with policy. As STAT’s Lev Facher reports, that’s where Joe Biden has found himself in a pickle.

On one hand, the administration wants to highlight the progress it’s made against the virus over the past 17 months, especially as the economy flails and Biden’s approval ratings sag ahead of the midterm elections. But at the same time, officials want to remind Americans that around 300 people are still dying per day and that things could get worse before they get better.

It’s not an easy tightrope to walk and officials haven’t always maintained perfect balance. Complicating things even further: The administration doesn’t have just one audience. There’s the public, for whom Biden wants to stress steady but not finished progress, and Congress, which Biden is trying to convince to renew funding for vaccines and antivirals by emphasizing the risk the virus still poses.

How to level the playing field for Black residents

Yesterday, we brought you an investigation from STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling detailing how Black physicians are pushed out of residency programs at much higher rates than white physicians, a problem long hidden or ignored by the medical establishment. Today, we publish part two: What to do about it?

Programs could start by tracking race and ethnicity data for people forced out of residency or put on probation — a step proponents point out previously helped improve attrition rates among women residents in elite specialties. There are also calls to give residents greater protection, such as by allowing them to bring allied faculty into disciplinary hearings and reforming the process for reporting complaints to remove conflicts of interest.

“We have to stop letting this happen,” said Vanessa Grubbs, a Black physician who founded a group that helps residents facing discrimination. “They’re picking us off one by one.”

The researchers preparing for Roe's fall

As legislators have ratcheted up abortion restrictions, small groups of local, independent researchers have worked over the past decade to track how these policies impact people’s health and the overall level of access to family planning and reproductive services, STAT’s Theresa Gaffney reports. If Roe v. Wade is overturned — as is now widely expected — and abortion is further curtailed or outright banned in much of the countries, these researchers’ work will now become even more important, even as the data they need becomes all the more difficult to collect. Already one group in Texas showed that after legislators there passed the nation’s most restrictive abortion law last September, in-state abortions fell by half and the number of people traveling out of state for abortions increased by a factor of 12 — changes that they knew from past research means the law is taking its biggest toll on poor, marginalized Texans.

Remember when Apple and Google we're going to curb the pandemic?

For folks who follow tech, one of the many signs of how much the early pandemic disrupted and warped daily life was the news, on April 10, 2020, that fierce rivals Apple and Google would team up. The goal? Develop software that iPhone and Android users could download and authorities could use for contact tracing, instantly alerting close contacts after a positive test and slowing the deadly virus’s spread.

So whatever happened to those? Or the rest of the pandemic apps released by different academic groups or countries like China and the U.K.? In most places, they never took off as hoped, but did any of them stem infections — or compromise patients privacy — and can we learn anything about how to build better ones for future outbreaks? A new paper tried to take a look. STAT’s Edward Chen has the scoop.

Can European academics turn the table on pharma?

For many academics in life sciences, the best-case scenario for their work is that a pharmaceutical company comes along, licenses it, and turns it into an approved drug. But when that happens, the chemist or biologist or even their university generally has little to no control over how the drug is priced or how widely it’s made available. Now, amid soaring drug costs, a growing number of European academics and activists are hoping to change that paradigm by trying to negotiate greater control into their licensing agreements with pharma.

As Jessica Davis Plüss reports for STAT, they face significant headwinds: European universities increasingly want licensing deals that can fund operations, university tech transfer offices are often staffed with traditional biotech and business development professionals, and often the licensed tech is simply too early stage to know whether it will ever have value. But there is precedent: In 2018, Novartis acquired and significantly raised the price of a cancer drug developed at a Dutch medical center. In response, with government backing, three Dutch universities started manufacturing the drug themselves with compound pharmacies, bypassing the Swiss giant.

Another long Covid clue

Another wrinkle in the long Covid riddle: Women appear to get it more often than men and suffer a different constellation of symptoms. That’s according to a review from Johson & Johnson’s Women’s Health division published Tuesday in Current Medical Research and Opinion. The authors scoured 4,346 published studies and found women were 22% more likely to develop long-term symptoms from infection. Those symptoms tended to cluster around the ear, nose, and throat or relate to mood or neurological issues, whereas men more often reported symptoms in the kidney and endocrine system, such as diabetes. However, the results remain remarkably preliminary: Of the 4,346 studies, only 35 actually broke down symptoms and disease progression by sex in sufficient detail to be included, pointing — the authors write — to the need for for academics to design better studies with more attention to potential differences in sex in the future.

What to read around the web today

How common is long Covid? Why studies give different answers. Nature
This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins. The Washington Post
Despite another Covid surge, deaths stay near lows. The New York Times
The U.S. needs to revitalize research on the health effects of low-dose radiation. STAT

Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,