Opinion: How the Amish think about vaccines, health care costs, and much more

OpinionFirst Opinion Podcast How the Amish think about vaccines, health care costs, and much more The growing Amish population has large implications for public health Manage alerts for this article Email this article Share this article By Torie BoschJune 6, 2026 Editor, First Opinion Torie Bosch[email protected]Torie Bosch is the First Opinion editor at STAT. Below is a lightly edited, AI-generated transcript of the “First Opinion Podcast” interview with Cory Anderson and Braxton Mitchell. Be sure to sign up for the weekly “First Opinion Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get alerts about each new episode by signing up for the “First Opinion Podcast” newsletter. And don’t forget to sign up for the First Opinion newsletter, delivered every Sunday. Torie Bosch: Last fall, there was a flurry of interest in the Amish and health after President Trump repeated a common claim among vaccine critics: that the Amish don’t vaccinate and don’t get autism. It’s much more complicated than that, though — and it’s far from the only interesting and consequential question about the Amish and public health.Advertisement Welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.” I’m Torie Bosch, editor of First Opinion. First Opinion is STAT’s home for big, bold ideas from health care providers, researchers, patients, and others who have something to say about medicine’s most important and interesting topics. This season, we’re focused on the intersection of medicine and culture. Today, I’m speaking with Braxton Mitchell and Cory Anderson. Braxton is a professor of medicine and vice chair for research in the division of endocrinology, diabetes, and nutrition at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Cory is a postdoctoral researcher in population health and demography at Penn State University’s Population Research Institute. After a quick break, I’ll bring you a conversation about the Amish, public health, and why this is far from a niche topic.Advertisement Braxton Mitchell and Cory Anderson, welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.” Mitchell/Anderson: Thank you. Thank you, it’s good to be here. Bosch: To start this I’d love if we could define what “Amish” means. I think sometimes people use it in a monolithic sense or to refer to lots of different kinds of groups. So when we say “Amish” here, what does that mean? Whoever wants to answer it. Anderson: So we’re talking about a religious group that also has a strong ethnicity component. And in terms of a religious groups, Amish are Christian. They come out of a movement that’s now 500 years old called the Anabaptists. These were the people during the Protestant Reformation who thought the state church should actually be given to common people who wanted to join and be believers without the influence of the state. Now the Amish movement itself didn’t come about for another 200 years, but it came about within this Anabaptist thinking. They moved over to the United States in the 1700s, largely so that they could have their own free churches away from government persecution where they were not part of the state church. And since they’ve settled here, they’ve moved about to different states, started their own church communities. But this is also a group with a strong ethnic component. They came from regions of Switzerland and then the French-German border region. So they speak a particular language that is from Germany, that is, from that region of Europe, and they mainly marry within their own group. So they’re endogamous. So therefore they’ve got large kin networks among themselves. Over the past 80 years, there’s only been about 154 people from outside the Amish who have joined into the Amish. So this is primarily a group that is growing through their own internal large families. And yeah, so when we talk about the Amish, we’re talking about a Christian religious group and then like a German-Swiss derived ethnic group. Bosch: But they’re really not a monolithic group, right? There’s a wide variety of communities within the Amish, is that right?Advertisement Anderson: So there are six primary Amish denominations. So even though every church is going to do things a little bit differently, they do sort of rally around these six specific networks of recognized fellowship. Now, there might be small factions within those larger denominations, but other than that, you can look at any given population and say there’s diversity within and that goes for the Amish as well. And that diversity is from church to church, community to community, not just individual to individual. Bosch: How did you each get involved with studying the health of the Amish? Brackie, I’ll start with you there. Mitchell: Sure. So I’m a genetic epidemiologist by training, and I’ve been interested in the health of different populations. I was recruited to the University of Maryland in the year 2000 by my colleague Alan Shuldiner, who had just started some studies of diabetes in the Amish, and being geneticists, we were very interested in studying the Amish because of their history. It’s a founder population. The group we work with are the Lancaster Amish or Old Order. This is a group that came over, as Cory said, from the German-Swiss area in the early 1700s [and] settled in Lancaster. It was a relatively small number of people that came. We think it was maybe on the order of 500, 600. There are now 43,000 Amish in Lancaster County [Pennsylvania], but they’re essentially all descendants of those original 500 or 600 people. So that means that there’s rather limited genetic diversity. People had been studying genetics of diseases in the Amish, in Lancaster Amish before, but mainly focused on childhood rare recessive diseases. We thought that looking at adults and some of the more common diseases that we might be able to pick out genetic components of diseases like diabetes, osteoporosis, and we’ve expanded the sets of disorders that we’ve been looking at over the years. Bosch: And Cory, how did you get involved in this research? Anderson: So I came to health-focused research among the Amish and other related plain Anabaptist groups, just through a broad interest in the population. I actually came to a plain church closely related to the Amish when I was 18 years old, made the decision to join it from a non-plain background and after several years within the group, began to realize that there was a lot more going on within this group than I was catching or picking up on. I also wanted to understand the history of the people better, the culture, how people think through decision-making. And ultimately that led me to pursue graduate studies in sociology and with a particular focus on the plain people.Advertisement And so through that effort, I tried to read every a peer-reviewed article or research piece that’s ever been published about the Amish and then to do syntheses of what people were finding. And the biggest area of research was on Amish health practices. And I’ve completed recently, with the assistance of an undergraduate student that I worked with, … a series of articles that synthesize, one, Amish physical health conditions. Another synthesizes the Amish health culture. Another looks at Amish and mental health. Another looks just at the trajectory of health research among the Amish. And so these articles just pulled together everything we know, except the very, very dense, thick genetic studies, which were a little bit over my head. Some of them might be over Brackie’s head too, though there’s probably not a lot that’s over his head in the medical literature. So I synthesized all of this work, and at the same time I accepted a postdoc at Penn State. I had built a database of the Amish population based on their own Amish Population Registries and have a database of around 55,000 Amish households with vital statistics in it. And now I’m publishing some demography research. One article recently published found that the total fertility rate [TFR] of the Amish across the board is 6.1. So, put it in layman’s terms, we could pretty much expect that Amish women will have 6.1 children and that’s probably actually one of the lowest TFRs that I’ve ever seen in the literature, but it’s still impressively high. And with a life expectancy of 81 years for the Amish, which we also calculated, I mean, this just suggests a very rapidly growing population, I think it’s going to be critical. As this population continues to grow and move into new areas across the U.S. and Canada, especially rural areas, we’re going to see some transformation going on across North America, especially at depopulated rural areas where land use is going to change. Maybe some of the way public funds are being channeled is gonna to change. Political groups are really, really, really going to be targeting the Amish, especially the Republicans, since the Amish like religious freedom and also free market. And those two tend to land on the Republican side, so the Republicans are going to keep putting more money into getting these people out to the polls, even though they’re mostly resistant to voting, not entirely, but mostly.Advertisement And then on the health side of things, when there’s outbreaks and those outbreaks are occurring among the Amish, this is going to be increasingly more of a public health discussion among this population. Preliminary population projections that- co-author Stephanie Thiehoff from Germany and I recently calculated from the Amish population database suggests that if the Amish just keep their 6.1 TFR and their retention rate of 85% of their people, which is what they do, they’re going to be close to 2 million Amish by 2075. Currently there’s around 400,000. In 2010 there was around 250,000. If we really drop the TFR down and we increase attrition, even then we’re looking at 1.2 million by 2075. The situation with the biggest population drops, we’re still looking at three times more Amish by 2075 than right now. So public health is going to have to talk about the Amish more and more, especially if their health profiles are going to continue to differ from non-Amish populations. Bosch: That’s so fascinating. As a Pennsylvanian, I feel like sometimes I hear people say that it’s a dying way of life, but it’s really quite the opposite. It’s a thriving way of live. Anderson: Yes, and people wonder how is this possible? And I don’t always have the answers. Mitchell: Cory, a number I hear a lot is that the Amish population doubles in size about every 20 years. Is that in line with what you’re finding? Anderson: Yeah, we could calculate that from our database, and it’s a little bit above 20. It’s hard to even bring that number down now given the sheer population momentum. I mean, we used to see these numbers among frontier populations in North America, but this has been just persistent. This has continued across big occupational changes among the Amish, big geographical shifts. And this is just the TFR. … There’s pockets of Amish that have much higher TFRs than this. Mitchell: In Lancaster, the average number of children in an Amish family is about seven. I think our record holder is maybe 18 or 20.Advertisement Anderson: So in the database I have, there is one woman who had 21 children, an amazing thing. Four of them had 20, one had 21, but that one who had 21 had them between two husbands. Bosch: Wow. That’s good for her. So I got in touch with both of you back in September after a press conference in which President Trump repeated a really common talking point about some vaccine critics, which is that the Amish don’t vaccinate and they, quote, “don’t get autism.” So of course, this is far from the only interesting element about the Amish and public health. But I do want to talk a little bit about that. So Brackie, you wrote about what we do and don’t know about the Amish autism rates in the First Opinion essay that we ran back in October. So to start with simply, do some Amish people get autism or no? Mitchell: Absolutely, they do. We don’t have any good numbers on what the percentage, what the proportions are. As you know, there’s a lot of discussion in the field about why autism seems to be on the increase as it’s due to changes in diagnostic criteria, which is what I think most people, most of the experts believe. But in the Amish population, it would be fascinating to study autism. In the Amish, because I think we would learn a lot of things. First of all, the Amish lifestyle is very different from the lifestyle of mainstream America in a lot of different ways. And some of these ways could be related to risk factors for autism. I mean, we know genetics is a huge risk factor, but there’s a lot speculation that there could be lifestyle factors as well. Vaccination is not one of them. Bosch: Yeah, so I guess the other simple question here is, do members of Amish communities vaccinate? Mitchell: Well, I can say in Lancaster, many do, many don’t. There’s no directive from the church bishops about this issue, so families just choose what they want. I was asking one of our Amish liaisons who worked in their clinic. And she said, “Well, of my six siblings, three of them had their kids vaccinated, and three of them didn’t.” And she said that’s probably par for the course.Advertisement Anderson: So the New Leaf Center in the Wayne County, Ohio, area has done a couple of studies with other co-authors that surveyed Amish on vaccination usage and they found their approach was somewhat a la carte to which vaccines they would accept. But there are going to be some groups of Amish which pretty much say, “we don’t vaccinate, we never really have, we don’t know why we would start doing it.” And if they were to start doing it, it could create a bit of what they might call a “chiss,” or a fuss, because someone’s doing things that we haven’t done. And what’s that going to do to our sense of “this is who we are and what we do”? Will it lead to a slippery slope? So there are some Amish groups which pretty much don’t vaccinate as a group together. I think the big takeaway from the comments that President Trump made about autism is that there are elements of the Amish lifestyle, whether that’s social or genetics, that do give them some resilience against some health conditions, but maybe make them more vulnerable to other health conditions. Whether autism is the right condition to focus on for that, I guess there’s not enough research to say with finality. We could say that there are some cases of autism and it may also be underreported or maybe culturally it’s just harder to detect or maybe there is something going on where the prevalence of autism could be lower. We just simply don’t know. But for example, there’s certain types of cancers that the studies have shown that the Amish have lower rates of, but there’s a few types of cancers they have higher rates of. Why is that? They have lower rate of asthma, some studies show, and maybe that’s because of exposure to barn dust. That’s been an interesting line of research that we’ve been following. And you could go on and on with the different health conditions. There are just things going on among the Amish that give them a bit of resilience and some things that make them a little bit more vulnerable.Advertisement Mitchell: I’m glad you made the point about the importance of their lifestyle and their culture, because I don’t want to give the impression that the Amish are mainly an interesting group to study because of genetics. That’s certainly true, but I do agree that we can learn an awful lot about some of the common conditions that the population suffers from. Looking at groups with different lifestyles, because we know lifestyles are really important for heart disease risk, diabetes risk, hypertension, etc. Bosch: And before we move on from this, I wanted to touch on maybe two other quick points related here. The first is the idea of culture and autism diagnosis. So Brackie, in your piece for First Opinion, you touched on this a bit, which is that, some of the ways we diagnose autism is related to cultural or social behaviors that might look very different among the Amish. Can you talk about that a little bit? Mitchell: Sure. One way that the diagnosis of autism has changed over the past 20 or 30 years is a recognition that autism is, I guess, a spectrum. It’s a continuum. At one point, when people thought about autism, they thought about severely affected individuals who had very severe impediments. Now it’s recognized that there’s much more to it than that. So that’s broadened the diagnosis. A lot of the diagnostic criteria now, for example, are looked for in school systems. Well, the Amish school system is very different than the school system of much of the rest of the country. There aren’t health experts in the school systems, there’s not really an opportunity to look for and make recommendations for about health conditions there. So I think that’s one example where it’s very clear that just the different cultures have a big bearing on how disorders like autism are diagnosed. Bosch: And then Cory, I just want to ask you briefly about your First Opinion essay from March in which you wrote really beautifully, I have to add, about how, and I want to make sure I’m phrasing this correctly because it’s a complicated topic, but how some of these religious objections to vaccination actually seem almost more cultural than religious. Am I explaining that correctly?Advertisement Anderson: You’ve kind of got the idea of it. And it’s amazing that given what our First Amendment includes, that an entity like religion exists there. And as I dug a little bit more into James Madison’s thinking behind that, since he was the primary architect of that passage, he really viewed any government that does not respect individuals’ allegiance to the highest governments. Whatever that might be in people’s minds, then that’s going to be an impressive government that comes down and overrules that connection that people have with whatever the highest government is in their mind. And I think that’s why this thing of religion is packed right in there with free speech, freedom of the press. People need the ability to express and be who they are in order for the government to truly represent the people’s interests. And indeed, the Anabaptists, I think where they were in Pennsylvania at that time when the First Amendment was penned, this was the exact reason that they had come to the colonies to start with, Pennsylvania in particular because of that ability to exercise their conscience freely and live peacefully their own religious beliefs. And so, then what really counts as religious objections to something that the government might require? There have been a lot of cases on that issue over the years and opinion has fluctuated. So one of the big questions about vaccinations these days is what’s religious about objection to vaccines? Maybe there’s some groups that specifically object to health interventions, but there’s this big gray area in between. That gray area comes down to, in my mind, a broader pattern of what we could say is sectarian religious thinking, thinking of religions that maybe have experienced some persecution in the past or maybe who have a doctrine of needing to be somewhat separate in mindset and in culture from whatever they view as popular culture around them at the time. That’s going to vary from group to group, but many of them will maintain this tension out of necessity to protect the purity of their religious belief. Well, the Covid vaccine was a highly politicized decision. Maybe it didn’t have to be, but in hindsight, it was. And given how much it became more than just a public health measure, it became a symbol of ideology, of alignment. And it didn’t convert perfectly into everyone’s mind that it was more than a public health measure. But in many people’s minds, it was more than a public health measure. And for those, some of those who were in sectarian or cautious religious groups, who maybe didn’t have a specific, um, “thus sayeth the Lord” about not having a Covid vaccine, they themselves thought of this in the context of perhaps an intellectual, medical elite class who had progressive leanings on other social issues, not just on medical issues, and that these were the voices that they were hearing from that were telling them to accept the vaccine, and their minds are thinking to protect the purity of our religious belief. They were not going to think about those terms, but I think that’s what we could reduce it all down to “need to not participate in this particular public health measure.” I will be quick to say that within some congregations, some people may have taken that stand and other people with very similar religious beliefs would have objected and promoted the Covid vaccine. So it was not just … wholesale reduction of certain religious groups. But, you know, in some of the research I’d done, I found that, yeah, the presence of evangelical Protestants in counties did predict a lower Covid vaccination rate. The presence of Amish in U.S. counties did predict a low Covid vaccination rate. So I think for the next public health crisis, we really need to rethink what happened and how a vaccine or a public health measure became politicized, and in my opinion, I think that comes down to trust in our institutions, but also trust in the pharmacy industry, which is profiting huge from some of these public health measures. And that might be coming at the cost of some people’s confidence in the messaging that’s coming out of this. Mitchell: Cory, my impression in at least the Lancaster community is that it was not a religious issue at all per se, that a lot of it was skepticism against the government. And I think there was a big disservice because there was the big movement to belittle vaccines and promote the view that this was government overreach. And I think this was a view that many Amish are very sympathetic to. Anderson: Yes, I agree. And it was the skepticism was iterative. It was not a given. Mitchell: But unfortunately, I think there’s been carryover of some of that beyond just the Covid vaccine. And now I think it’s hitting some of the childhood vaccines in a way that it wasn’t before. Anderson: Yes, and some of the researchers from New Leaf Clinic in their follow-up survey found that pretty much across the board on different vaccines post-Covid, there’s been more skepticism now among the Amish. Bosch: Well, I would love to keep talking about this topic, but since we’re running out of time, I want to move on to a couple of other really interesting elements in researching the Amish and health. So let’s talk a little bit about paying for health care. So do members of the Amish, are they covered by Medicaid or Medicare, or do they pay out of pocket? What’s the normal approach, keeping in mind that they’re, you know, diverse communities and such? Mitchell: In our community, they pay out of pocket. Amish do not like to sign up for government benefits. And that makes our work, I guess, a little more difficult. One, it’s knowing that Amish are going to have to pay out-of-pocket. The Lancaster community has set up their own Amish aid program, where they band together. They’ve also been very good about negotiating sort of Amish-friendly rates with local providers. But when we do our health surveys, when we return results from, whether it’s blood work, blood pressure, we had one study a while back where we were doing some imaging studies to measure coronary artery calcification. In the course of imaging, you sometimes pick up incidental findings and, well, there’s a little mass here, it’s probably nothing. In the real world, we would provide this for patients and they would go use their insurance, go get it looked at and, 99 out of 100 times it would be a normal variation, nothing to worry about. But if we were to do this in the Amish, we have to think about, “Well, what message do we want to deliver knowing that they are paying out-of-pocket for [follow-up care]?” So you have to think about things a little differently. Bosch: And so as you mentioned, there are some especially genetic diseases that are much more common among the Amish than in the sort of average American population, which comes with really high costs. You know, I’m thinking of, is it maple syrup urine disease? Mitchell: Yeah, that’s in the Mennonites, in the Mennonite community, but also in Lancaster, but that’s a good example. There are other disorders like that are in the Amish. Bosch: And so how, you know, what level of care is sort of generally accepted for these genetic diseases and how do they pay for it? Mitchell: Great, great questions. First, I want to give a shout-out for the Clinic for Special Children, which is in Lancaster, and whose mission is to diagnose and treat these rare genetic disorders in children. They have a lot of community support. They have a huge auction every year that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the mission. They’ve done a ton of good work. I think it’s always a challenge to pay for these. They’ve come up with some, they’ve developed some really neat screening tests where you can screen for multiple disorders on a single chip. They made this affordable for people and families to use. One way that they’ve used this is to, when they diagnose things in infancy, they have a couple of disorders where these are genetic defects involving nutritional enzymes. And if you know about it at the very beginning and you put people on a diet where they’re not ingesting that particular nutrient that can’t be metabolized, you can prevent all of the neurological support that come with this and the child could actually grow up to be healthy, but you have to start almost at day one. So they have a big push for those couple of disorders to really do this promptly. And that’s been a successful program. These are very rare disorders. In other cases, it’s been really helpful for the community to get a diagnosis on their newborn. And sometimes even if the diagnosis is terminal, it can give the family at least some opportunity to foreclosing where they don’t have to leave their newborn in the hospital for a month where it’s going to die a slow, painful death. They can take their infant home with them and have a short time with the infant before it dies. Anderson: Yeah, some of the reason for them not wanting to accept insurance is because they believe in helping each other and they simply don’t want outside organizations controlling that aid process. But like Brackie said, there’s still these clinics that pop up. He gave an example, one in Lancaster, I’d given one at the New Leaf (Center) in the Wayne-Holmes county area (of Ohio). But there’s other clinics throughout the United States, genetic-oriented clinics, that provide affordable care to Amish. And there’s other medical establishments that also provide affordable care to Amish, including birthing clinics, so you don’t have to go to a hospital, but you don’t have to just birth at home. You can go to this house-like setting where there’s midwives, licensed midwives to give births. When it comes to the financing, just like Brackie said, some Amish do have these aid plans that are settlement-specific. Those tend to be among the more progressive Amish who basically have created programs that look and act a lot like insurance where they pay in, and then they get out and there’s a deductible. But historically, and among many of the stricter Amish groups today, the pattern remains alms. When there’s a big medical bill, the deacon, or maybe some sort of committee, a small committee within the church, try to pull some funds together to pay for it. But imagine you’re in this situation, so you’ve got, oh, I don’t know, eight children, and the youngest one has leukemia, or at least something’s going wrong, so you don’t have insurance, but you also don’t really want to just run to the hospital for things and put this big bill onto the church that’s going to come when you go to the hospitals. Plus, when you go to the hospital … you kind of lose control and you don’t know what’s going on and you (don’t) know if these people will respect your beliefs or inquire about them. It’s just a different system. You’d just rather not go. So what do you do? Well, you start talking to other people: “Here are the symptoms in my child, what do I do?” And some of them might suggest, “Have you tried these supplements?” Amish take a lot of supplements. And it’s not just for specific illnesses, but it’s also just for chronic health problems and later life or just, I don’t know, they work their bodies pretty hard. So yeah, they take a lot of supplements. They go to chiropractors, probably more than the typical American would go to a chiropractor. So you give some supplements to the child with leukemia, doesn’t get better. They might take the child to some respected Amish person, maybe not locally, but colloquially, I will say is their doctor, whether that’s technically a doctor or not, I won’t touch that, but nonetheless, there are people who would have a little bit more say-so and be a little more respected for their opinions. And some of these people will actually work directly with medical doctors to ensure that they’re within what’s legally allowed. At that point, if things still aren’t getting better, they’re still not wanting to go to the hospital, there’s not a big crisis, maybe they’ve heard about a certain clinic somewhere and these are maybe run by non-Amish. Maybe they are run by Amish. Some of these ones that have been run by Amish are coming up in the news and are facing some penalties for practicing medicine. For them, they feel like they’re being persecuted by the establishment when they’re just trying to help people. I don’t know, I can’t speak for each individual, but that’s a mindset that may come up. So if you really decide you need some hospital care, maybe there’s a place in Mexico or Colorado where our people go, where our kind of people go and get treatments there. I mean, what’s so important is the networks within their advice. What we accept as medical care within our understanding. And then ultimately, OK, if worse comes to worse, take them to the hospital. But that child with leukemia might be there for five or six months getting treatment and walk out of there with a bill of $3 million. Who’s going to pay for that? So the government, some of these Amish will not, right to the bitter end, accept any government money. Even if they can’t pay the bill. What about some sort of nonprofit charity? Yes, some of them would accept that, but they don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people outside of their setting, or they also don’t know what they’re signing up for. “If we accept this money, does that give you a right to come in and start influencing our setting?” So the case that I gave you of a child with leukemia is a real case, but it’s also more than one person’s case. And so they come home, they can’t just give up the child to the state to let the state pay for it. That’s not allowed. So they come with a $3 million bill. And now let’s look at this from the hospital’s perspective. How do they get their money? So the Amish will say, “We will pay what we can our entire life. We will pay what we can,” but this bill is never going to get paid. On the hospital then, OK, what options do you have? At the very strictest end of the Amish, they may not even have bank accounts. Now that’s not representative of Amish, but so you can’t just like reach into some people’s bank accounts. But the other hand, what assets do you take from them to pay for all of this? Probably the main thing of value they hold is going to be their land and their house. So let’s treat this child, save her life, send her home. And then get a lien on the property and put it up for auction to pay for this bill. OK, so this is the dilemma that people are in. And I think when it comes to hospital financing, insurance financing, this is already a huge conversation in our country and it’s been for a long time, but it’s cases like these with the Amish and this population again is growing, that’s going to bring some of these big questions about payment to the forefront. A $3 million bill almost assumes that the hospital is going to get sued for doing something wrong. The Amish are not going to sue you for doing wrong even if you did something wrong. So they’re kind of paying in. Now that’s paying into a bill for costs that the hostel doesn’t even need to absorb. I want to say quickly that that case I gave maybe a bit more of the perfect storm case of the strictest Amish. But there could be like benefit funds and auctions that the Amish themselves will put on to try to pay for medical bills. And there’s constantly solicitations within Amish literature that say, “there’s this bill, there is this hospital bill. Can you please help and pay for it?” So yeah, some of them are rather ingenious about covering these bills, but it’s not easy. Bosch: Now, and I would love to keep talking about this. I sort of think STAT needs a podcast on the Amish and health, just as there’s so many elements here, but unfortunately we have to wrap up. Braxton Mitchell and Cory Anderson, thank you so much for coming on the “First Opinion Podcast” today. It was fascinating. Anderson: You’re welcome. I’m so glad you invited us. That was fun. Happy to be here. Bosch: And thank you for listening to the “First Opinion Podcast.” It’s produced by Hyacinth Empinado. Alissa Ambrose is the senior producer, and Rick Berke is the executive producer. You can share your opinion on the show by emailing me at [email protected]. And please leave a review or rating on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Torie Bosch, and please don’t keep your opinions to yourself. public health, Vaccines Submit a correction requestReprints Torie Bosch Editor, First Opinion Torie Bosch is the First Opinion editor at STAT. Newsletter Weekly alerts when a new episode drops from STAT’s First Opinion podcast Recommended First Opinion June 6, 2026 I led the U.S. CDC response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. The new outbreak needs massive, immediate, meticulous action First Opinion June 5, 2026 If Americans risk their lives fighting Ebola overseas, they deserve the right to come home Advertisement First Opinion June 5, 2026 How living and practicing medicine abroad complicated my beliefs about universal health care systems First Opinion June 4, 2026 Grail’s multi-cancer early detection trial was negative. But as an oncologist, I see more to this story First Opinion June 4, 2026 Lawmakers promised cancer patients would be protected from Medicaid cuts. Now CMS says otherwise Subscriber Picks