Debate recap, SCOTUS decisions, gun violence, bird flu, and more.

Happy Friday, everyone! We’re coming to you this week chock-full of debate coverage, myriad SCOTUS rulings, and much more. There’s no time to waste, so let’s hop to it.… 

All eyes on the first 2024 presidential debate 

For the most part, substantive discussions on health policy between President Biden and former President Trump were overshadowed by mistakes, errors, and blatant falsehoods in Thursday night’s presidential debate.

Sarah Owermohle and Rachel Cohrs Zhang have the full story. 

During the debate, Biden and Trump were each given the chance to speak to a kitchen-table issue plaguing the nation: the addiction and drug overdose epidemic that claims over 110,000 American lives each year.

One word was conspicuously absent from both of their answers: “treatment.” 

Lev Facher has more. 

Major Supreme Court decisions 

The Supreme Court made some big decisions this week on three separate cases that many Americans have been paying close attention to. 

On Tuesday, in the case of Murthy vs. Missouri, the majority of the court found that the government did not violate First Amendment rights by asking social media giants to remove or limit coronavirus misinformation. Read more on that here. 

Then on Thursday, the Supreme Court released an opinion allowing emergency abortions in Idaho but avoiding the larger question of state abortion bans. Someone made a big mistake the day prior, though, when a version of the opinion was inadvertently posted to the Supreme Court’s website.

Also on Thursday, the court rejected Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy plan, whereby the Sackler family sought to contribute up to $6 billion in exchange for immunity from further lawsuits. Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, now has to negotiate a new settlement with states, cities, counties, and Native American tribes. 

And then there’s today. 

Federal agencies’ longtime authority to regulate industries was significantly weakened by a Supreme Court ruling this morning. The 6-3 decision will ripple across government agencies that have broadly interpreted the powers handed to them by Congress since a 1984 decision known as Chevron.

The U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic also got politically messy. A Supreme Court ruling today could further frustrate government responses to public health emergencies.

Gun violence a public health crisis

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has officially declared firearm violence a public health crisis in the United States.

In a new advisory, Murthy calls attention to the health toll of gun violence and lays out a roadmap of research and policy interventions to curb its effects.

The bird flu response 

We are three months into the bird flu outbreak among dairy cattle in the U.S. How is the response going? 

Well, many experts STAT spoke to said they're concerned that the U.S. doesn't really know how far and wide the virus has spread among those animals. 

Michigan has been a model for other states to follow in the way it has responded to the virus on its farms. Now the state is launching a new effort to detect silent bird flu infections in farmworkers.

Americans are drinking a lot 

New data show that Americans are drinking a lot more in recent years. And experts acknowledge that alcohol-related health problems are rising fast. 

We really need to change the conversation about alcohol in the United States,” said George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The World Health Organization is concerned about alcohol-related deaths beyond the U.S. too. Overall, the agency attributed 2.6 million deaths to alcohol in 2019, representing 4.7% of all deaths worldwide. 

That number is “unacceptably high,” according to physician-researcher and WHO official Vladimir Poznyak.

Author picks

This one was published over the weekend but it is (in my humble opinion) too good to leave out of this week’s newsletter. Our colleague Brittany Trang spoke with internet celebrity Hank Green about his comedy special “Pissing Out Cancer” which was released last week. The two talked about why we react to cancer differently than chronic diseases, what jokes got cut from his show, and plenty more. Ryan here, to say you should watch this fun clip and read their full conversation too. 

Alexander here. My author’s pick this week is a story from our colleague Usha Lee McFarling on how the National Academies proposes reimagining health care to fix “fundamental flaws” that underlie inequity. 

“The current system, by its very design, delivers different outcomes for different populations,” said Victor J. Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine in a statement.  

The nation’s long-standing racial and ethnic health inequities will not improve unless Congress steps in to provide affordable health insurance for all and federal agencies start enforcing existing laws against discrimination and improve collection of racial and ethnic data, according to authors of a new report released this week. Read the full story.