August 13, 2025
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Morning Rounds Writer and Podcast Producer
Good morning. Here in Boston, the MBTA announced it will extend service by around an hour on Friday and Saturday nights. I'm old enough to remember the last time the T tried something like this. I hope it works out better this time.

politics

Challenges ahead for RFK Jr. and the CDC

The deadly shooting at CDC, one of the public health agencies that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vilified during his rise to power, is proving to be a unique test of his leadership at a time when fractures are emerging in his Make America Healthy Again movement. Agency employees have also expressed anger over Kennedy’s slow response to the tragedy, compounded by what they saw as his role in directing public anger toward the agency in the first place. One employee said there is “lots of frustration with lack of HHS-level messaging to our own staff and publicly.” Read more from STAT’s Chelsea Cirruzzo and Daniel Payne on where things stand.

Within the CDC, newly installed director Susan Monarez sought to reassure employees yesterday that their mission would continue and efforts to ensure their safety would be stepped up. The message was delivered during an all-hands meeting that was both brief and chaotic — it was expected to last one hour but closed after 13 minutes — leaving some agency employees marveling at what they saw as inadequate effort. Read more about the call from STAT’s Helen Branswell and Chelsea.


public health

Life expectancy is lower in the U.S. For kids, too.

We spend way more on health care in the U.S., but still lag behind other high-income nations in the ultimate measure of health: life expectancy. That may be a familiar story for adults, but a new analysis out yesterday in JAMA shows children are no exception. As of 2022, infants and children up to age 19 were 78% and 80% more likely to die as in other similar countries. This disadvantage, monitored from 2007 through 2022, cost nearly 316,000 young people their lives, the researchers concluded. 

A companion editorial cites poorer access to health care, physical inactivity, and guns in the home, among other factors. Poverty leads to poor diet and unsafe neighborhoods. It’s a long list of ways the U.S. is an outlier, ending with the lack of public policies on paid parental leave and early childhood education.

“While the administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement is drawing welcome attention to chronic diseases and important root causes such as ultra-processed foods, it is pursuing other policies that will work against the health interests of children,” the editorial says. 

In two words: budget cuts. “There is reason to worry that the health of US children will fall further behind that of children in other high-income countries.” — Elizabeth Cooney


lab dish

Japanese scientists can now make human embryos from stem cells

Japanese regulators just quietly gave researchers there a historic OK to generate human embryos from stem cells in the lab — no ovaries or testes needed. Scientists around the world are quickly working toward making viable human eggs and sperm from stem cells, a process called in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG. Those stem cell-derived sperm and eggs could be used for vitro fertilization (IVF) to generate human embryos for research or, one day, making babies. 

Under the new rules, Japanese researchers will be able to produce and then study stem cell-based human embryos for up to 14 days in the lab. And as STAT columnist Paul Knoepfler writes, it won’t be long before researchers in other countries are allowed to follow suit. Read more from Knoepfler about the critical questions raised by this decision.



politics

Inside the AMA’s advocacy strategy shift
Megaphones with illustrated speech bubbles over them

Adobe 

As President Trump entered the White House this year, the federal government quickly began embracing policies that diverged from medical consensus. And while medicine’s influence in Washington is waning, the American Medical Association still serves as the largest professional group for physicians, as well as a major political lobbying group. But publicly, the organization said nothing about the Trump administration’s actions — even as members “begged” leadership at the organization to speak out more forcefully, per Laurie Lapp, a resident who served on an AMA council that reviews proposed federal legislation. 

But in recent weeks, there’s been a sudden change in tone, with the organization issuing a slew of public statements critical of decisions made by the administration. “We have to stand up for science,” the AMA’s new CEO John Whyte said in an interview. “People look to the AMA to do that. And I’m not sure I always realized that to the degree that I recognize it now.” 

For my latest story, I spoke with half a dozen members of the organization as well as its leadership to figure out what led the organization to bring its advocacy work out of the shadows. Read the story.


health tech

This AI tool helped doctors detect polyps too well

In a new study, researchers tested an AI tool that can be used during colonoscopies to improve the detection of precancerous polyps known as adenomas. As endoscopists snake a camera through patients’ large intestines, an algorithm draws a square around adenomas. It’s already been proven that tools like this typically work quite well. But what they also wanted to know is how well doctors might detect polyps without AI after they had gotten used to its help? 

Like students who try to write an essay independently after using ChatGPT one too many times, the answer was: not great. Researchers called their finding the first documentation of a potential “deskilling” effect from clinical AI, STAT’s Katie Palmer reports. “It's not something we expected, to be honest,” said senior author Yuichi Mori. Read more from Katie about what it means and what questions remain.


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What we're reading

  • A giant Indian drugmaker failed to fix safety breaches. The FDA let it off the hook again and again, ProPublica

  • Boston’s lab building boom has gone bust. What can be done with the empty space? Boston Globe
  • Trendy mousse sunscreens may not actually work, FDA warns, Bloomberg
  • First Opinion: Medicine’s AI era urgently demands new doctor-patient relationship, STAT

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