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**STAT Celebrates 10 Years**
Did you know? Yesterday marked STAT’s official 10-year anniversary! The site was launched on November 4, 2015.
Stories from that first day included:
– A man infected with tapeworm cancer
– Findings that doctors who order more tests may face fewer lawsuits
– A comparison between the opioid crisis in the U.S. and Ireland
We’re proud to still be here, delivering critical news on health and life sciences every day. Interested in subscribing? Sign up today!
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**A White House Deal and a Bidding War**
The Trump administration is nearing deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to lower the prices of their weight loss drugs, sources familiar with the talks told STAT. The agreement is expected to include Medicare coverage for these drugs, which hasn’t previously been available.
The companies have been close to a deal for weeks, one lobbyist familiar with the negotiations said.
Meanwhile, a bidding war between Pfizer and Novo Nordisk over the obesity startup Metsera continues to escalate. For background: Pfizer initially announced plans to acquire Metsera about a month ago, but in a surprise move last week, Novo Nordisk announced an attempt to outbid Pfizer.
Yesterday, Metsera announced that both companies have upped their bids, with Novo’s offer coming in higher, valuing the company at up to $10 billion.
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**Children’s Hospital Lobby Broadens Its Scope**
The Children’s Hospital Association (CHA), representing more than 200 hospitals and spending millions on lobbying each year, announced a new messaging strategy yesterday.
The group will begin broadly promoting the health of American children and highlighting the importance of pediatric health to the country.
This move comes at a time when many long-revered health institutions, including children’s hospitals, have faced scrutiny from the Trump administration. However, according to Matthew Cook, the organization’s CEO, these changes were conceived before the election.
“You’re going to see a bolder CHA,” Cook told STAT’s Daniel Payne.
Read more about how the new strategy aligns with the Make America Healthy Again movement, and where the group is pushing back against the administration.
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**It’s All In Your Head: This Week’s Mini Crossword Puzzle**
That’s one clue in this week’s mini crossword puzzle at STAT. Need a hint? We’ve published hundreds of stories about this subject over the years — start here, here, here, here, and here.
Try the puzzle and see how many you can solve!
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**Why Doctors Might ‘Fake’ CPR**
Loyal readers may recall a First Opinion essay from this summer that illuminated the practice of the “slow code,” where doctors perform a half-hearted attempt at CPR to limit prolonged suffering for patients unlikely to survive, while avoiding conflict with grieving families.
In the latest installment of STAT’s popular STATus Report video series, host Alex Hogan speaks with the authors about this phenomenon, which they describe as both ethical and essential.
Part of why doctors might feel this way is that real-life CPR is nothing like what’s portrayed on TV and in movies. It can be a brutal, painful procedure that often leaves patients with broken ribs or a cracked sternum.
Watch the video to learn more about this under-discussed practice, enjoy insightful conversation with the experts, and stay for a long-overdue critique of the CPR depicted in the ’90s television series *Baywatch.* As Alex says, if you want CPR to be effective, you can’t “David Half-Asselhoff” chest compressions.
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**The Long-Term Risks of Spinal Injuries**
Healthy people who suffer traumatic spinal injuries are at significantly greater risk for long-term chronic health conditions—including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood clots, diabetes, and neurological and psychiatric conditions—compared to their uninjured peers, according to a study published yesterday in *JAMA Network Open.*
Researchers analyzed nearly 30 years of data from two hospital systems. They included more than 2,700 people who were healthy and without comorbidities before their injury, matching them with control group patients of the same age, sex, and race.
The study also found an increased risk of death after a spinal injury, especially among those with multiple chronic conditions such as cardiac diseases, depression, substance misuse, and dementia.
The authors note that long-term consequences like these remain understudied. Notably, these associations persisted across different demographic groups, suggesting that traumatic spinal injuries independently influence chronic disease risk.
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**What We’re Reading**
Stay tuned for more updates and in-depth analyses every weekday with STAT’s Morning Rounds.
https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/05/health-news-fake-cpr-trump-drug-pricing-deal/