Good morning. Today Usha Lee McFarling steps inside a hospital network's campaign to fight racism, exploring what works and what obstacles inside and outside must be overcome.

Special report: A hospital system confronts racism — and resistance to change — within its own walls

(vanessa leroy for stat)

When a routine cancer screening came back showing an elevated PSA reading, George Brickhouse (above) knew he should take it seriously. But his urologist and other health staffers didn’t do the same for him. It was only after Brickhouse, a basketball coach who also runs a youth advocacy nonprofit, attended a Zoom meeting for Black men, part of an outreach program run by Mass General Brigham, that he got the care he needed.

The outreach program is a sign of change at the large, Boston-based hospital network criticized for not being welcoming to patients from the city’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. The system is undertaking a sweeping campaign to confront and address the systemic racism that has led here, as it has across the nation, to poorer health outcomes and higher death rates for patients of color. STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling explores early progress — and doctors’ skepticism that slowed the work.

Psilocybin might help treat alcohol addiction, study suggests

It does seem counterintuitive, as STAT’s Olivia Goldhill points out, to use one recreational drug to fight dependence on another. But a new JAMA Psychiatry study backs up that approach, concluding that psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, could be a promising treatment for alcohol use disorder. During the trial, participants had 12 psychotherapy sessions over 12 weeks, and had two daylong sessions under medication. Study participants who got psilocybin-assisted therapy reduced their heavy drinking, defined as four or more drinks for women, or five or more drinks for men per day.

Eight months after the first psilocybin dose, 48% of those who had psilocybin stopped drinking altogether, twice as many as the 24% in the placebo group. One big caveat is that people likely could tell if they took psilocybin or placebo, but experts told Olivia the results were still impressive for a problem with few solutions. Read more.

Fauci: Threat to science is a threat to democracy

Anthony Fauci, who announced this week he plans to step down from his positions in December, has come to embody the nation’s response to disease outbreaks, from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to Covid-19. The medical adviser to seven presidents shared his take on the pandemic, his timing, and science with STAT’s Sarah Owermohle.

On Covid: “We’re not going to eliminate it. We have a very unusual situation of a virus that continually varies and you get new variants every several months.”
On his departure date: “My timing had absolutely nothing to do with the election coming up, zero.”
On science: “When you have a society that's leaning towards a disrespect to science, a distortion of the truth, and then just out-and-out lying, that's really not only a threat to my field, which is the scientific enterprise, I think it's a threat to our democracy.”

Read more on what his exit means for the ongoing fight against Covid.

Closer look: How a pandemic push for data sharing could spur research on pregnancy

(felipe dana/ap)

Did you know that electronic medical records don’t have a consistent place to plug in a pregnancy start or end date? That’s just one of the hurdles to conducting research on pregnancy, which is already rare due to an understandably low tolerance for risk. STAT’s Katie Palmer reports that some of the technology introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic — opening up medical records while preserving patient privacy — might help. These moves gave researchers a near real-time window into Covid-19 outcomes and the efficacy of therapeutics and vaccines, including among pregnant patients.

The advances could be helpful in studying dangerous complications such as preeclampsia or whether drugs and procedures are safe during pregnancy. But first the real-world data needs to be wrangled. “It just took us two years to define pregnancy, so we’re ready to roll with new questions,” Elaine Hill, a health economist at University of Rochester Medical Center, told Katie. Read more.

Study: Paxlovid works well for people over 65, but has no benefit for younger adults

Paxlovid works very well at keeping people over 65 out of the hospital and alive after they’re infected with Covid-19, a new NEJM study says, but it doesn’t help younger adults. Researchers tracked nearly 4,000 people over 40 who received the antiviral during the January Omicron surge and found that while Paxlovid cut hospitalizations and deaths significantly for patients over 65, it didn’t make a difference in younger patients.

The authors note that NIH currently recommends treatment with Paxlovid for people at high risk of severe disease, regardless of their vaccination status. That includes older adults, but demand has been high among others for the treatment, which involves taking a combination of two drugs twice a day for five days. Paxlovid rebound, when people (including President Biden and Anthony Fauci) test positive again after taking the drug, may have dampened interest.

Amazon will shelve telehealth venture Amazon Care

It looks like Amazon is mortal. In a surprising move, the tech giant said yesterday it will shut down its medical venture Amazon Care at the end of the year, less than a month after announcing it would acquire One Medical. Amazon Care began in 2019 as a way to provide care just for Amazon employees, but it later offered virtual services to employers including Hilton, Whole Foods Market, and Peloton-acquired Precor. But it struggled to find broader appeal among employers, according to an email sent to employees late yesterday afternoon and first reported by Fierce Healthcare and Geekwire.

If Amazon’s proposed acquisition of One Medical for $3.9 billion goes through, it will have another significant entry point into primary care, alongside its existing partnership with Crossover Health to provide primary care services to its own employees. STAT’s Katie Palmer and Mario Aguilar have more.

What to read around the web today

Congressman’s wife died after taking herbal remedy marketed for diabetes and weight loss, Kaiser Health News
Rise of monkeypox worries L.A. sex workers: ‘It feels like we are seen as disposable,’ Los Angeles Times
Could tiny blood clots cause long Covid’s puzzling symptoms? Nature
Opinion: Surgeons fold against Medicare’s stacked deck, STAT
Our first steps? Fossil may boost case for earliest ancestor, Associated Press