Health

In case you haven’t listened to the most recent episode of Decoder, Hsiang, who is now the United States Digital Service administrator, told us the inside story of how she helped fix the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov a decade ago. Read the full interview here, or listen to the podcast here.

And even if your state has protections, you’re still not safe:

The US Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of two gene-based therapies for sickle cell disease, one of which uses the genome editing technology CRISPR. It’s a big milestone, but access to the therapies for now will still be very limited and expensive, the New York Times explains.

Keith Berman, who claimed he wasn’t taking compensation in his role as CEO, actually splashed out a bunch of company money on himself. Also, he claimed that he could test for covid in 15 seconds. Also also, my guy used a “fake persona to repeat false and misleading statements to investors on internet message boards.”

The US government is once again offering a round of four at-home covid tests you can get for free. You can place an order directly from the USPS website, which will start shipping the week of November 27th.

Americans have a worse opinion of science now than they did before the covid-19 pandemic. It doesn’t come as a surprise after all the disinformation that’s been swirling around since then. Now we can see how much trust in science has eroded in the latest survey by the Pew Research Center. The number of participants who say science “has had a mostly positive impact on society” fell from 73 percent in 2019 to 57 percent today.

Bloomberg has a sprawling piece chronicling the history of Apple’s efforts to expand into health care. One revelation is this:

The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says it “won’t happen” in 2024 and “possibly” won’t arrive in 2025, either. That’s not a huge surprise — my colleague Victoria Song wrote a piece in March about the challenges facing noninvasive blood glucose monitoring, so it’s not surprising that the technology might be very far away even for Apple.

The government just extended the shelf life of some at-home tests in addition to announcing it’ll offer them for free again earlier this week. That means you might be able to use the tests you ordered last year, even if the kit “expired” in the past month. Just look up your kit in this table and click on the “extended expiration date” link to find out how much longer it’ll last.

The Withings Body Scan Connected Health Station is an extra as hell scale. It’s got a handle for 6-lead EKGs and can purportedly take segmented body fat scans. As in, differentiate how much fat you carry in your arms versus legs, etc. Withings also claims the scale’s EDA sensors can measure your foot sweat to gauge your nerve health. Wild.

Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.

“We were never meant to see our faces this much,” argues a Dazed essay. The increase in video conferencing may also mean an increase in body dysmorphic disorder, one survey of more than 7,000 people suggests. (The survey also found an increased use of fillers in people aged 18 to 24.) Personally, I find it helpful to turn off self-view in video calls and insist on phone calls as often as possible.

You won’t have to listen for long to hear who it is.

Have you ever wondered why celebrities’ teeth all look the same? It’s veneers, and this Cronenberg-esque piece highlights the problems with treating the body as a platform — and the TikTok account of a dentist devoted to calling veneers out.

After the FDA approved Pfizer and Moderna’s newly formulated covid vaccines on Monday, the CDC signed off on both shots today, stating “vaccination remains the best protection against COVID-19-related hospitalization and death.” The new vaccines will become available later this week,

A peer-reviewed survey study published earlier this month in PLOS One found that, for healthcare workers, nose-picking increases covid infection risk, and the risk increases with frequency (go nose mining more, and infection is more likely) (via This Week in Virology).

The VC firm tried to sell stakes in 258 companies in June, The Information reports, citing anonymous sources. Those stakes were worth $312 million in total, and it’s not clear if they sold. Patreon was among the companies whose stakes were up for grabs, but about 40 percent of the firms were biotech or health.

There are plenty of pollution blind spots that ground monitors miss. So NASA launched a powerful new instrument in April to track air pollution from space. The new tool, called TEMPO, monitors three smog-forming pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. NASA released the first data maps from TEMPO today. They show pollution building up over major cities in North America, including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC.