Good morning and a heads-up: Join STAT and industry experts for "How tech can — and can't — eliminate barriers to good health care," a deep dive into ways companies are using technology to reach patients on Medicaid or Medicare. It's virtual and it's at 1 p.m. ET June 29. Speaker list and registration here.

FDA advisers vote unanimously for Covid shots for young children

Time for parents eager to vaccinate their children to breathe a sigh of relief. A FDA advisory panel yesterday recommended the agency issue emergency use authorization for Covid vaccines in the youngest kids. By unanimous votes, the experts endorsed vaccines made by Moderna and by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech for children as young as six months. There were some concerns, STAT’s Helen Branswell and Matthew Herper report, including potential side effects, largely seen as manageable, and issues with the strength of the evidence for the Pfizer vaccine, where a relatively small number of cases of Covid were used.

In the end, although they raised many different concerns, every panelist agreed that both vaccines should be made available. Next up: FDA has to give its OK, followed by CDC’s advisory committee recommendation and acceptance by Director Rochelle Walensky after meetings later this week.

One-third of top hospitals' websites sent patient data to Facebook, investigation finds

Anson Chan for The Markup

To even the most jaundiced viewer of patient privacy, this is jaw-dropping. An investigation by the nonprofit newsroom The Markup, co-published with STAT, documents finding Meta Pixel, a snippet of code that tracks users, installed inside the password-protected patient portals of seven health systems. That means when a patient clicked the “Schedule Online” button on a doctor’s page, Facebook got the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the search term patients used: “pregnancy termination” in one case and “Alzheimer’s” in another that allowed The Markup to find them.

The patients volunteered to participate in the Pixel Hunt project, a collaboration between The Markup and Mozilla to understand how Facebook gathers information about its users. “Almost any patient would be shocked,” said Glenn Cohen of Harvard Law School. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, did not respond to questions. Read more.

Common drug may have new benefit in men with diabetes, but not women, study shows

Here’s an interesting turn: A small new study has found that a popular erectile dysfunction drug increasingly used to prevent heart complications in people with type 2 diabetes doesn’t benefit women with diabetes. The research in Science Translational Medicine follows only one previous randomized trial that enrolled both men and women — and it didn’t analyze the data by sex, STAT’s Akila Muthukumar reports. The new trial showed that tadalafil, sold as Cialis, improved how heart muscle fibers contract and circulate blood in men but not women.

It reminds me that sildenafil was first developed to treat angina. It didn’t work all that well for chest pain, but its side effect of erection in men foretold its fate as the little blue pill. More on Viagra's origin story is here, at about the 7-minute mark of STAT's former "Signal" podcast.

Closer look: Tracing lupus in a girl's gene variant

(courtesy Piqueras family)

Lupus is a confounding ailment, like other autoimmune diseases in which the body attacks its own tissues as if they were foreign invaders. When lupus comes in childhood, it is heartbreaking, but in Gabriela Piqueras’ case, it can also help unravel some of the secrets of this perplexing illness. Gabriela, pictured above, was diagnosed with the rare pediatric version when she was 7. Her illness was traced to a single variant in the gene that encodes for the protein called Toll-like receptor 7, or TLR7.

A recent paper in Nature reports success in simulating her disease in lab animals that developed very low platelet counts, ubiquitous autoantibodies, kidney damage, and enlarged spleens and lymph nodes. “Finding these very rare mutations that might only be present in a few patients is enormously important and informative,” study author Carola Vinuesa told STAT’s Isabella Cueto.

How states are weathering the pandemic

The pandemic has stress-tested health care systems, pushing hospitals and providers beyond capacity to treat not just Covid-19 but diseases and disorders that didn’t stop. A Commonwealth Fund report out today grading states on their response reminds us that health systems that entered 2020 stronger performed better in delivering high-quality, accessible, and equitable health care. Hawaii and Massachusetts topped the list for 56 health outcomes and Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia fared the worst. Other data points:

All states reported more deaths than typical, from Covid-19 as well as from other causes, since February 2020. But excess deaths varied fivefold across states, from 110 per 100,000 people in Hawaii to 596 per 100,000 in Mississippi.
Drug overdose deaths increased to record highs in almost every state during 2020 and 2021. The toll was particularly devastating in West Virginia and the Southeast.

Suicide deaths rose less in states that expanded Medicaid

Deaths from suicide have been climbing 1% to 2% a year since 2000, a new study notes, but they increased less in states that expanded Medicaid coverage. Writing in JAMA Network Open, the authors caution that their cross-sectional study can only show association, but they suggest the blunting of rising suicide rates among adults age 20 to 64 could be linked to better access to mental health care.

Other measures of health also improved after the Affordable Care Act allowed more people to gain health coverage via Medicaid, the authors say, bolstering their conclusions for mental health. “Increased access to mental health care and reductions in financial barriers are vital to appropriately and adequately address the national emergency of suicides in the country,” they say.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (Español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

What to read around the web today

Dr. Fauci tests positive for Covid, is having mild symptoms, CNBC
How months-long Covid infections could seed dangerous new variants, Nature
100 million people in America are saddled with health care debt, Kaiser Health News
Supreme Court sides with hospitals on Medicare drug pay dispute, STAT
Trans kids’ treatment can start younger, new guidelines say, Associated Press
A 'veritable playground': a CVS whistleblower details how consumers were charged higher drug prices, STAT