'We Should Follow That Signal': What We Heard This Week

"There is some signal there and we should follow that signal." -- John Carrino, MD, MPH, of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, in an FDA advisory committee meeting that supported RP1 (vusolimogene oderparepvec), a twice-rejected melanoma drug. "This showed us there is nothing stable." -- Konstantin Dragnev, MD, of Dartmouth Cancer Center in New Hampshire, on slowing federal support for National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers. "He is calling me before this committee to get me to say something -- anything -- that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars.'" -- Anthony Fauci, MD, responding to Sen. Rand Paul, MD (R-Ky.), during a tense Senate hearing on Fauci's COVID-19 pandemic response. "You don't know if you're also just increasing your risk of developing a melanoma." -- Michael Christopher, MD, of Ironwood Dermatology in Arizona, discussing unregulated melanotan II peptide injections. "Love it or hate it, CPT [Current Procedural Terminology] is very ingrained in our system." -- David Glaser, an attorney with Fredrikson & Byron law firm in Minneapolis, discussing ideas to possibly eliminate CPT coding. "When people feel that they have to run instead of walk to get their work done or to help in an emergency, they're more likely to slip and fall or cut themselves." -- Max Blumberg, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, discussing the effect of staffing shortages as 10,000 attending physicians across the University of California system push to unionize. "This would be like your professor grading your term paper on an early draft you had never even submitted." -- Linda Marbán, PhD, CEO of Capricor Therapeutics, disputing the FDA's statistical analysis plan for the company's Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug. "We are still kind of in our infancy in behavioral health." -- Taft Parsons III, MD, chief psychiatric officer at CVS Health/Aetna, at an HHS roundtable on mental healthcare best practices. "The main message for clinicians is to act early." -- Nitipong Permpalung, MD, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, on trial findings supporting early use of remdesivir (Veklury) in kidney transplant recipients with COVID-19.