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Well folks, we made it to the last issue of Morning Rounds for 2025. I feel so lucky to be part of the team here at STAT, and I’m grateful to you for reading along this year. I’m off for a bit — send me your New Year’s resolutions and the stories you want to see in 2026 for when I get back.
The newsletter will return on Jan. 5. Until then, go to our homepage to read the latest news. There’s still plenty going on.
The Trump admin is dismantling AI guardrails
If 2025 made one thing clear, it’s that ambitions around AI are advancing rapidly. Technology companies are unleashing a wave of products that promise to automate everything from the documentation of patient-doctor conversations to disease diagnosis and the interpretation of medical images. And while the Biden administration proposed a cautious approach to the use of AI in health care, President Trump has taken a vastly different angle.
Trump’s health agencies have swiftly adopted artificial intelligence and other technology products and dismantled guardrails designed to protect patients. Some experts are worried. Public health professor David Blumenthal feels that the health care sector is being asked to “set aside our concerns about potential risk to individuals and individual patients in the battle for dominance of the world.”
Read more from STAT’s fantastic health tech team about the Trump administration’s approach to regulation and what changes to watch in the year ahead.
5.3%
That’s how much an American household’s grocery spending shrinks within the first six months of one person in the home taking a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Wegovy. In higher-income households, that decrease was 8%, according to a study published last week in the Journal of Marketing Research. Savory snack spending was reduced 10%.
The paper linked survey data on GLP-1 use to transaction records from tens of thousands of households. Of course, questions about who can afford these medications remain prevalent as we head into a new year with fewer insurers covering them.
Ask these questions before making vaccine changes
2025 has been the worst year in decades when it comes to measles cases in the U.S. And while most of the public continues to see vaccination as the best way to protect against measles, a new poll shows that there has been a drop in the perceived safety and effectiveness of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, in addition to the shots for flu and Covid-19.
About 86% of people would recommend that someone in their household who was eligible for the MMR vaccine get the shot, according to a survey of more than 1,600 people in November by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. That’s a small but significant decline from the 90% who said they’d recommend the shot at this time last year. The declines are similar for other vaccines.
Vaccine policy is a key part of the Trump administration’s agenda. But in a new First Opinion essay, public health expert Sarah Despres argues that there are four questions that all policymakers — regardless of their position on vaccines — should be prepared to answer if they are considering changing vaccine requirements. Read more for those questions.
In memory of a young dad who shared his experience living with brain cancer
STAT’s Andrew Joseph first spoke with Adam Hayden for a 2018 profile of the young father, just a couple years after he’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Hayden devoted himself to advocacy on behalf of people with brain tumors, and was always open in his writing and on social media about his illness.
When Hayden entered hospice care at home in the Indianapolis suburbs last month, Drew, who had kept in touch with him over the years, proposed another profile. “I’ll always yap,” Hayden said. As Drew put it, Hayden would start TikTok videos speaking in the lighthearted tone that might suggest he bought a new pair of sneakers — not that he was going to dive into his “scanxiety” or the costs of his terminal illness.
Hayden died over the weekend. I urge you to read Drew’s beautiful first-person piece about Hayden’s clear-eyed advocacy and what the last nine years meant to him and his family.
What lizards taught one scientist about men
As a urologist — and therefore a “protector of the prostate” — Abraham Morgentaler was nervous to begin administering testosterone therapy to cisgender men without severe hypogonadism. At the time, in the late 1980s, nobody was providing such care, due to worries around prostate cancer. But his patients were desperate, and Morgentaler was open to the possibility that everyone was wrong.
“For many of us, once we leave medical school and residency, our attitudes are often formed and set, and our beliefs about certain things are well established,” Morgentaler told STAT’s Annalisa Merelli.
Read the conversation that Nalis had with Morgentaler to learn how testosterone originally fell out of favor in medicine, how it came back, and what a castrated lizard had to do with it all.
What we’re reading
How systemic failures turn state mental hospitals into prisons, NPR
FDA approves pill version of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, possibly widening access, STAT
Older Americans quit weight-loss drugs in droves, New York Times
Pharmaceutical industry evades drug price transparency, again, STAT