politics

Did Trump use Eli Lilly’s obesity drug? Democrats are asking

Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images

The fallout from STAT reporter Lizzy Lawrence’s scoop continues.

Democratic lawmakers are publicly asking questions about the 79-year-old patient who received special access in April to retatrutide, Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity drug, and are pressing the Trump administration on whether the person is the president.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) sent a letter yesterday to health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeking the patient’s identity, while Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) suggested at a press conference that “side effects” of the drug may have led Trump to cancel the signing of a bipartisan housing bill.

Lizzy dropped a bombshell on Tuesday that Lilly and the Food and Drug Administration offered retatrutide to a patient — whose age and health demographics resemble the president — via the FDA’s “compassionate use” program. Read more.

MAHA

Supreme Court rules in weedkiller cancer case

In a blow to the Make America Healthy Again movement, the Supreme Court ruled that the maker of Roundup weedkiller cannot face failure-to-warn lawsuits in state courts, because federal regulations have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label.

The ruling announced yesterday is expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging that agrochemical manufacturer Bayer failed to warn people that the product could cause cancer. The company disputes the cancer claims but previously set aside $16 billion to settle cases, and earlier this year it proposed a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. It also removed glyphosate as an ingredient from Roundup in the U.S.

The victory is in line with the public views of the Trump administration, but it exposes the cracks between the MAGA and MAHA movements, as the latter has sought to rein in pesticide use. Read more.

GENES

An interesting month for the ‘baby designer’ crowd

A new genome-editing tool used in early embryos has illuminated the role of a key gene overseeing the first stages of human development — and heightened the ongoing debate about whether such tools could or should ever be used to make a baby.

The new research, published yesterday in Nature, revealed that next-generation genome-editing tools are more precise and less destructive than earlier forms of the revolutionary CRISPR technology, suggesting that an embryo can tolerate editing and still develop to the point whereby it could be implanted in a uterus.

Which is ethically tricky, to say the least.

We’re not yet at gene editing’s all-brakes, no-gas moment. There are some technical hurdles scientists will need to work out. But STAT’s Megan Molteni and Andrew Joseph deliver an expert dive into the new paper and several others in recent weeks that have reignited the long-standing ethical debates around embryonic gene editing. Read more.