First Opinion Podcast

For several years now, newspapers have been moving away from a longstanding tradition: endorsing candidates for political office. But Scientific American is bucking the trend. In 2020, for the first time, the 179-year-old magazine endorsed Joe Biden for president. They followed suit this year, endorsing Kamala Harris. Both times, the move spurred a great deal of discussion about scientific objectivity, journalistic objectivity, and the point of endorsements. To learn more about the decision to endorse and the process behind it, Torie spoke with Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth and opinion editor Megha Satyanarayana (formerly of STAT).

Every four years, someone says “This is the most important election ever.” But it’s hard to question the long-term impact Election Day 2024 will have — from the top of the ballot on down.

So the first five episodes of the fall 2024 season of the “First Opinion Podcast” will grapple with the campaign and its intersection with health, medicine, and the life sciences. I’ll speak with experts on issues that have come up on the campaign trail, topics that candidates should focus on, and what a second Trump or first Harris administration might hold. Think of it as “First Opinion Podcast Hits the Trail,” perhaps, except I’m staying home in the swing state of Pennsylvania fending off campaign texts.

For the debut episode, I spoke with Kathleen Kelly Daughety, vice president of campaigns and civic engagement for Inseparable, a mental health advocacy organization with a strong focus on policy.

For scientists and medical professionals well versed in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, it is often too easy to write off the concerns of people who fear them, or feel they have been injured by them. But vaccine expert Kizzmekia S. Corbett-Helaire argues that professionals should be more empathetic when it comes to listening to these concerns, and that understanding them may help developers make better vaccines.

Corbett-Helaire, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, joins "The First Opinion Podcast" this week to discuss her experience helping roll out the first Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic. She also addresses her desire to close the gap between public health experts trying to end disease and people who genuinely fear harm from vaccines.

In a special edition of the "First Opinion Podcast," STAT executive editor Rick Berke and senior writer Helen Branswell interviewed the country’s former top infectious disease expert about some of the insights and revelations from his new memoir, "On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service." Conversation topics include when Fauci knew that Covid-19 was a real threat; when AIDS activist Larry Kramer called him "the consummate manipulative bureaucrat" in an interview with STAT; how quickly national health risk can skyrocket when it comes to pathogenic viruses; and which former president Fauci has the most affection for.

While the bogus science of eugenics — the idea that the idea that the human race can be improved through selective reproduction — has been nearly universally discredited, remnants of this belief system are still alive and well in modern research. One of the most glaring examples of this is the work of academic psychologist Richard Lynn. Two recent First Opinion authors, Rebecca Sear and Dan Samorodnitsky,  join the podcast this week to talk about Lynn’s explicitly racist research, how it is still being cited in medical journals to this day, and their efforts to get his papers and those citing them, retracted from the scientific literature. 

It has been two years since the Supreme Court made the historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had protected the right to abortion in the United States. Since then, 21 states have severely restricted or outright banned access to abortion care.

Diana DeGette, a Democrat who has represented Colorado's 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives since 1997, and who has co-chaired the House's Pro-Choice Caucus since 2000, joins the podcast this week to discuss how the Supreme Court's 2022 decision has affected American health care and politics. She believes the decision has actually awakened voters to the idea that they need to protect their access to health care.

Millions of people around the world are living with long Covid, a potentially debilitating and medically perplexing condition. Rachel Hall-Clifford is one of them. As a medical anthropologist, she’s well suited to understand the condition. But as a mother, wife, friend, researcher, and teacher, it drags her down, just as it does so many others.

This week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast" explores the issue of medical debt, which burdens as many as 40% of U.S. adults. They collectively owe more than a whopping $200 billion. Many organizations and even federal and state governments have established debt relief programs to tackle the problem. Such programs make intuitive sense. But they may not work and, in some cases, could even harm the mental health of some individuals on the receiving end. That's the surprising takeaway from a study that Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote about in a First Opinion essay and talked about with STAT's Pat Skerrett on the podcast. They were joined by Allison Sesso, the CEO of Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit organization that helped sponsor the study.

The medications methadone and buprenorphine are considered “gold standards” for the treatment of opioid use disorder. They are so effective, in fact, that they are considered nearly curative for people that use them as prescribed. Unfortunately, a multitude of social and physical barriers to access means that only about 20% of people that need them have access to these treatments. That access is even harder for pregnant people, who face additional stigmas and challenges.

Judith Cole, a nurse practitioner, and addiction psychiatrist Arthur Robin Williams join the podcast this week to speak about these specific challenges, including the reality that federal law allows for child protective services to be called when people receiving legal effective treatments for addiction have given birth. Despite medications like methadone being fully safe during pregnancy, they continue to carry a stigma that can result in trauma for both birth parents and newborns.

When it comes to childhood and young adulthood, most people in the U.S. think of carefree times of life with few major responsibilities. But for a small subset of young people, these years also mean caring for loved ones. Harvard medical students Kimia Heydari and Romila Santra both have firsthand experience being young caregivers, and spoke with "First Opinion Podcast" host Pat Skerrett about the unique challenges of taking care of family members at ages when few of their peers had similar experiences.