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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. Yesterday was World CRISPR Day, and today is the last day you can get 50% off a STAT subscription in honor of the occasion. Don’t miss out. Advertisement A new precedent for long-term care admissions? Two skilled nursing facilities in North Carolina will adopt new anti-discrimination admission policies after reaching a settlement in a lawsuit brought by a “John Doe” who was denied admission. The policies will apply both to people currently using illegal drugs and those taking addiction medications. Facilities are not required to bend their own rules regarding the use of drugs by patients, but they will not be allowed to automatically deny someone based on past substance use. “If our client had been interviewed — if he had been assessed using non-discrimination policies — he would have been admitted, most likely,” said Sara Harrington, an attorney with Disability Rights North Carolina. “He’s in a facility now, and has been there for over a year, and any concerns the other facilities had came to nothing, because he’s a great resident.” Read more from STAT’s Lev Facher on how the settlement could set a precedent for how long-term care facilities around the country treat people with addiction. The AMA wades into the AI regulation debate The American Medical Association announced a new Center for Digital Health and AI yesterday, one of the first major initiatives from CEO John Whyte, who took over the role in June. Whyte told STAT’s Mario Aguilar that he plans to spend millions of dollars on the new center — and he’s looking for a senior vice president to lead it. Advertisement The AMA joins a number of groups jockeying for power over standards governing artificial intelligence as use of the technology in health care grows and the Trump administration escalates its attacks against the Coalition for Health AI, an industry-funded group that’s been working on frameworks for evaluating the technology. At the same time, the AMA has been walking a tightrope as it aims to promote the interests of doctors under the Trump administration. Mario spoke with Whyte about what to expect from the new center, why the AMA calls it “augmented” intelligence, and if the group should be worried about drawing more ire from the federal government. Read more. Congo’s last Ebola patient was discharged The WHO announced Sunday that the last Ebola patient in Congo’s latest outbreak was discharged over the weekend, starting a 42-day countdown to declare the outbreak over if no more cases are confirmed. As of yesterday, no new patients had been reported since Sept. 25. Read more from the AP. Doctor Mike on improving trust in public health As anyone who attended the STAT Summit last week heard, YouTuber Doctor Mike had some spicy takes on content produced by medical authorities like the AMA. Today, STAT’s Alex Hogan — who spoke with Mike Varshavski on stage — has a new video out with more of the physician and content creator’s perspective on how medicine can build a better social media strategy. Varshavski started his channel in 2017 because he felt there was “a lack of evidence-based voices online,” he said. “It created this gap that was filled by grifters, by snake oil people, people who were selling all sorts of miracle cures. And we weren’t there to combat that.” Watch the latest video in Alex’s STATus Report series. And if you get to the very end, you may catch a brief glimpse into STAT’s second annual karaoke night … After initial excitement, research says this long Covid treatment doesn’t work In early 2021, STAT’s Matt Herper wrote about the excitement surrounding a drug commonly used to treat gout that could potentially reduce the risk for hospitalization from Covid-19. But experts cautioned that the data was too limited to draw conclusions. Within about a year, data confirmed that the drug, colchicine, was not, in fact, protective for patients with acute Covid-19 infections. Yesterday, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found similarly underwhelming results for the same drug when used to treat the symptoms of long Covid. Advertisement Despite the mechanisms that made it a “biologically plausible” candidate, the study found that participants who took the drug didn’t have better functional capacity or respiratory function than those in the placebo group. Their inflammatory markers and symptoms like depression, fatigue, or shortness of breath were also comparable. (For more context on the drug: The FDA approved colchicine in 2023 as an anti-inflammatory for heart disease, but physician uptake has been slow. Meanwhile, the same drug has been impossible to access for people with chronic illnesses like familial Mediterranean fever in Gaza, as a Palestinian writer explained in a First Opinion essay last month.) How to talk about uncertainty When it comes to Covid, there’s one discussion that never seems to get less heated: where did the virus come from? In a new First Opinion essay, two Harvard public health professors emphasize that there are important lessons to be learned from “the short but dramatic history” of the Covid origin question. “We think students (and maybe all of us) benefit from exposure to the arguments of those who believe passionately that they know something, even as passionate advocates reach very different, often irreconcilable conclusions — and even if they are partisan,” the authors write. Read more about how and why they’re teaching today’s public health students about this contentious debate. Clues that RFK Jr. and others might hate Don’t tell health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about this one: “colorful food additives.” And back in 2020, plenty of folks took issue with this one: “Masks and globes for safety, for short.” Complete this week’s mini crossword. What we’re reading
