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good morning. STAT’s Breakthrough Summit West is today! It’s never too late to participate virtually. We have a packed agenda, including speakers such as former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, OpenEvidence founder Zachary Ziegler, and 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki. And of course, I have many talented STAT colleagues.
Ebola updates: travel bans and outdated vaccines
According to a CDC order issued yesterday, the Trump administration is barring foreign travelers from entering the United States who have been to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, or South Sudan in the past 21 days. The ban, the first imposed by the United States in response to the Ebola outbreak, will remain in effect for 30 days. For more information, including the latest information on American doctors confirmed to be infected, read this article by STAT’s Annalisa Merelli and Helen Branswell.
Meanwhile, experts are exploring possible strategies to contain the outbreak, which is already the fourth largest on record. The World Health Organization and expert scientists are debating whether existing vaccines against different strains of Ebola are useful. However, as Helen reports in her latest article, decisions regarding the use of this drug will be left to the affected countries. “It’s damned if you get it, damned if you don’t cause a situation,” said Darryl Falzarano, a virologist who worked on animal studies showing the vaccine had some potential for cross-protection. Read more from Helen about the possibilities.
Finally, at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this morning, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus opened his remarks with an update on the outbreak, which has more than 500 suspected cases and more than 130 deaths. He outlined a number of reasons for concern, from cases among health workers to infections in urban areas, and noted how conflict in the region has escalated in the past two months. “More than 100,000 people are newly displaced. You know what displacement means in an Ebola outbreak,” Tedros said.
Tedros said the Ebola cases and recent hantavirus infections on cruise ships show “why we need an international response to international threats” and why the world “needs the WHO”. However, with the United States withdrawing from the WHO under the Trump administration, the agency is working to reduce its budget.
Supreme Court rejects price negotiation challenge
Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit against the Medicare drug price negotiation program, dealing a major blow to industry litigation efforts against the program. The decision was not necessarily surprising, but the justices did not provide a reason for their decision. STAT’s John Wilkerson has the details.
$1,000
That’s how much the average deductible in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace increased from 2025 to 2026, according to a new KFF analysis. This is an increase of approximately 37% from $2,759 to $3,786.
After enhanced tax credits established during the pandemic expired last year, more people opted for plans with lower monthly bills and higher out-of-pocket costs. Enrollment in these “bronze” plans increased from 7.3 million to 9.2 million, while enrollment in “silver” plans, which have higher monthly costs and lower deductibles, fell significantly from 13.7 million to 9.8 million.
By the end of the year, total marketplace registrations could be 21.5% lower than last year, according to the analysis. Initial estimates only considered people who did not sign up or were not automatically re-enrolled. As mentioned previously in this newsletter, we need to see how many people drop out if they can’t pay their premiums. Reread this excellent commentary by Wilkerson for an overview of the likely impact of the expired subsidies.
Drinking during pregnancy is more common than believed
The first public health advisory in the United States regarding drinking alcohol during pregnancy was issued in 1977. Since then, rates of alcohol use among pregnant people have declined sharply in most cases. Over the past decade, that rate has actually started to rise. By 2024, more than one in eight pregnant adults will report drinking alcohol in the past month. In the latest episode of The Deadliest Drug, STAT’s Isabella Cueto discusses the results of an exclusive STAT analysis of drinking and pregnancy data from 2011 to 2024.
“I wonder why no one is talking about something so commonplace,” said Vincent Smith, who helps supervise a neonatal intensive care unit in Boston. “I was shocked.”
Scientists and health experts understand that exposure to alcohol in the womb can cause a variety of harms, but it’s less clear how much alcohol is needed to cause those harms. Where things seem to get particularly complicated is in the opaque zone. Read more about Cueto’s data and the attention gap, the challenges of diagnosing fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and the cultural conversation surrounding “light drinking.”
More children with autism are receiving leucovorin
Prescriptions for leucovorin among children with autism have skyrocketed since last spring, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open. Federal health officials and President Trump first touted generic drugs as potential treatments for autism in September. Prescription rates were already increasing at the time following CBS coverage of the drug, but government attention further increased the attention it received.
While previous studies have found an increase in prescribing to children in general, the new paper uses large-scale data from the Epic system to examine trends specifically among children diagnosed with autism. In 2023 and 2024, the monthly leucovorin prescription rate for children with autism remained stable at 34 per 100,000 clinical encounters. In August 2025, the number rose to 335 per 100,000 people, and in November it rose to 835.
FDA officials have since retracted their statements about the drug’s potential, acknowledging that there is limited evidence on both its effectiveness and safety. Still, prescription rates remained high at the beginning of 2026.
Suffering from “ghost approval”
Peyton Herres, a heart transplant recipient, has health insurance on paper. But in real life, she lives in an environment she calls “ghost approval.” This means that even though the medicine she needs to keep her body from rejecting the transplant has technically been approved or applied, she is still having trouble getting it.
There is always a reason for difficulty. Either the drug requires prior authorization, it needs to go through a specialty pharmacy, or, most commonly for her, the drug is not approved by the FDA for that use.
“That’s why I started using the term ‘ghost approval,'” Jerez writes in a new First Opinion essay. “Because it feels like there’s enough to refer to, but not enough to actually depend on.” Read more about her experience, including seeking help from places like Facebook and people like Mark Cuban.
what we are reading
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An HIV-free generation is closer than you think, Vox
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How we can’t forget the babies who died from vitamin K deficiency, ProPublica
- Colorado Supreme Court upholds transgender youth in battle against Colorado Children’s Hospital, Colorado San Francisco
- New study finds abortion bans limit miscarriage treatment, news on 19th
- Opinion: Britain embraces Massachusetts’ experiment on tobacco control – just as state may back out of it, STAT
