VACCINES
ACIP meeting postponed
A scheduled meeting of federal vaccine advisers has been postponed, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to STAT. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will not meet as planned next week, when they were expected to discuss Covid-19 shots and other mRNA-based injections, according to a person familiar with the planning but not authorized to speak publicly.
The postponement, for which HHS gave no reason, comes as the White House tries to shift the Department's focus away from politically-divisive vaccine policy and towards more popular policies, like food and drug pricing, ahead of the midterms.
Whether HHS would be able to hold the meeting had been up in the air in recent days: Officials missed a required federal deadline to provide notice to the public of the meeting, and a lawsuit before a federal judge is asking for an overhaul of the vaccine changes under health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Among other things, the suit asks that the committee, which had been handpicked by Kennedy after he fired the previous panel, be declared illegitimate. — Chelsea Cirruzzo
FIRST OPINION
When AI outperforms clinicians, is it ethical not to use it?
A Nature study found that Google Health's AI matched or exceeded the performance of six radiologists and reduced false negatives and false positives. The findings sparked a debate about the importance of algorithms versus clinical judgment in health care settings.
This is a false binary, writes Morish Shah, a master's of precision health student at the University of Chicago, and Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology. The solution is not an all-or-nothing approach to AI, but finding out how to design systems that allow algorithms and clinicians to concentrate on tasks where they excel. When tech evangelists claim that AI is "better," it's important to clarify "what" it's better at, they write.
"We do not let pilots fly without instrument support simply because they technically could. Why should medicine be different?" Shah and Bhatt write. Read more.
No comments