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Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. Good morning. It’s cold in Boston, and I heard from folks in a few different areas yesterday that they saw light, light snow. I’m not ready. Advertisement Today: A ‘hush-hush’ MAHA summit A who’s who of Make America Healthy Again leaders will meet today at a daylong summit in Washington. The agenda, obtained by my STAT colleagues, includes the most powerful health officials across the federal government (seen above) and even Vice President JD Vance. The event, which was “hush-hush” according to one person familiar with the planning, raises new questions about which groups get access to top leaders and when policy ideas are disclosed to the public — even as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his deputies have promised “radical transparency” and decried closed-door meetings between former policymakers and industry leaders. Read more from STAT’s Daniel Payne and Allison DeAngelis about the agenda — which includes an “eloquent rant” from Russell Brand — and why it matters. Can you hypnotize hot flashes away? While the FDA is hoping that removing the black box warning from menopause hormone therapies will increase access to the drugs, some people are pursuing treatments outside of traditional medicine. A small randomized clinical trial recently tested self-administered hypnosis against “sham hypnosis” in order to treat hot flashes. The results, published yesterday in JAMA Network Open, found that those in the hypnosis group saw their hot flash scores — measuring severity and frequency — cut by more than half, while the sham group saw a decrease of about 41%. Advertisement Hypnosis here refers to a six-week course of daily 20-minute audio sessions including “relaxation induction” and “mental imagery for coolness.” The sham group listened to recordings of white noise on the same schedule. Caveats: Most of the people in this already-small study (250 total participants) were white and went to college. More importantly, one of the authors has previously received funding from a telehealth company that offers hypnotherapy. Menopause is having a moment these days, and as STAT’s Katie Palmer has reported, telehealth startups are trying to find the profit. Saturated fats: ‘You’re probably wondering how I got here’ After months of delays, Kennedy announced recently that the country’s new dietary guidelines will be released sometime next month. That’s just in time for one of the many changes he’s promised to enact before the end of the year: officially encouraging the consumption of more saturated fat. He’s particularly focused on the fats found in dairy and meat, emphasizing MAHA’s insistence on whole foods over ultra-processed meals. There are real debates in the nutrition field over the health effects of saturated fat in whole-fat dairy. But STAT’s Sarah Todd spoke with nutritionists who fear the implications of abandoning decades of data showing that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol — that’s the “bad” one, linked with higher risks of strokes and heart disease. Read more from Sarah on why MAHA wants more saturated fat and what the latest science says. How two top FDA officials are quietly upending vaccine regulations The FDA has limited access to Covid-19 vaccines in a number of ways this year. And while many observers point to Kennedy as the source behind these changes, a new investigation by STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence shows how two leaders at the agency are driving plans to reshape vaccine regulation far beyond Covid-19. You know the players: special assistant and clinical advisor Tracy Beth Høeg and vaccine center director Vinay Prasad. The two have seized control from career scientists who run the FDA’s vaccine surveillance programs, changing procedures rapidly with little staff input. “Why don’t you want people that have been doing this all their life to weigh in?” said Kathryn Edwards, a former advisory committee member and vaccinologist. Advertisement Høeg and Prasad are working on making it harder for doctors to offer different vaccines at the same time, and are unilaterally changing study designs to try and pick up more adverse events from vaccines. In September, Høeg suggested a label change that would make it prohibitively difficult for young men to receive Covid shots, based on thin evidence. She backed down after staff pushed back. Read Lizzy’s thorough investigation, for which she spoke with more than 20 current and former FDA employees, contractors, and experts, and reviewed all sorts of data, regulatory documents, internal memos, and emails. The heart’s chambers & my favorite bubble tea flavor I’m still finding STAT’s weekly mini crossword to be difficult, but I did better this week than I have in the past. How will you do? Find out here. A pro-vaccine doctor attended the biggest anti-vax gathering around In more MAHA meeting news: Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine-skeptical organization once led by Kennedy, currently has more power in Washington than its leaders ever imagined possible. Craig Spencer, a public health professor and emergency medicine physician, doesn’t ascribe to the group’s beliefs. But last weekend, he traveled to Austin, Texas, to attend the group’s first conference since Kennedy took the helm at HHS. He wanted to hear how this movement wins people over, and why its message resonates so deeply. “What’s easy to miss from the outside is that this isn’t chaos — it’s community,” Spencer writes in a new First Opinion essay. Movement leader Del Bigtree proclaimed “God is an anti-vaxxer,” while wellness influencers worried about Wi-Fi and crypto enthusiasts traded peer-to-peer coins. Read more on Spencer’s experience crossing the aisle, and why he thinks more physicians should do the same. What we’re reading
