My thanks to our readers in this tumultuous year

Dear Readers,

Two days after the 2024 presidential election, I sent you an email asserting that the reelection of Donald Trump was set to usher in a period of "dramatic change" in health and medicine.

Little did I know. "Dramatic change'' sounds tame when we consider all that has changed since then.

While the Trump administration has upended so much of the status quo in this country, there is nothing more critical than our health, and I genuinely believe STAT is better positioned than any other news organization to write — accurately and dispassionately — about the health issues that affect all of us. That's why I'm asking you today to subscribe to STAT+ — not only to support our essential journalism but to get full access to all that we produce. Right now, you can get 25% off your first year of STAT+ with our holiday discount.

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STAT is leading the way in covering the Trump administration's changes in health care and medicine because our journalists have deep sourcing and backgrounds on these issues.

Just in the past several days, we've published a series titled "American Science, Shattered,'' a comprehensive look at how the administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries. We kicked off the series by not only documenting how the last year has rocked the country's research enterprise, but also explaining how that enterprise, which catapulted the United States to the technological fore of the world, turned out to be much more brittle than expected. In a more recent piece, we reported from France on researchers who have left the U.S. for jobs in science.

Beyond the series, we published a story on how health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., unrestrained by Congress, is moving even more aggressively to consolidate his power. And just this morning, we published an exclusive on how a new program intended to fast-track FDA drug reviews is quickly becoming a way for the White House and other top political officials at the agency to exert control over which medicines make their way most quickly to patients.

It's not all about Trump, however. We published an investigation this week into how Humana, the health care behemoth, is skewing the debate over how to care for older Americans. Also this week, our biotech-truth teller, Adam Feuerstein, was out with his always popular end-of-year takes on the best and worst biopharma CEOs of the year.

And for the season finale of our "First Opinion Podcast," we hosted a discussion on religion and science between Francis Collins, the former NIH director, and Marc Siegel, a physician and medical analyst at Fox News, that was, to say the least, provocative.

I'm incredibly proud of our talented, meticulous, driven, and collaborative newsroom. My colleagues are working around the clock, often literally, to produce these stories. It's not easy, and it's not cheap. I'm grateful that you read STAT, and I hope you'll support our journalism by buying a subscription to STAT+. Besides access to our impactful investigations and other stories, you also can receive subscriber-only newsletters on AI, pharma, biotech, and other topics, and special invitations to our events around the country.

We just celebrated our 10th year, and we're only just getting started!

As always, feel free to email me with tips, gripes, or compliments. I'm at rick.berke@statnews.com.

Wishing you the best for the holidays.