Decedent Keon McDaniel was in his 6th week of Basic Military Training, experienced a "medical emergency" and transported to Brooke Army Medical Center. He died 4 days later in the hospital. The Air Force is conducting a "comprehensive medical review".
As of now, almost 300 recruits have been sickened by the flu.
>The two academic authors of the article by Jayne et al., Avacopan for the Treatment of ANCA-Associated Vasculitis, N Engl J Med 2021;384:599-609,1 request retraction of the article because, according to an ongoing Food and Drug Administration investigation conducted after publication, and without the knowledge of these two authors, the primary end-point assessments in nine patients were readjudicated after database lock and trial unblinding. This was not disclosed in the article and is inconsistent with proper research conduct. The editors therefore retract the article.
Notably, the EMA yesterday recommended removing marketing approval for avacopan for this reason. The main safety concern has been around hepatotoxicity including reported fatal cases of vanishing bile duct syndrome.
FDA roster (lists all panelists and their business addresses): https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/pharmacy-compounding-advisory-committee/pharmacy-compounding-advisory-committee-roster
Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/peptides-fda-rfk-jr-drugs-wellness-dc3eeb67358373d580529c50784af109
Comments
Par for the course for RFK Jr. to include, on an FDA panel focused on peptides, a lot of folks with financial investments in the peptide industry. Public comments are due July 9th (https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/july-23-24-2026-meeting-pharmacy-compounding-advisory-committee-07232026).
Some of the more egregious conflicts of interest on the panel (quotes from AP and the clinic pages -- partial list)
Gabriel Alizaidy MD MS = "charges $500 for 'peptide and hormone' consultations, including advice on 'where to safely get each peptide or compound.' Alizaidy promotes BPC-157, GHK-Cu and other peptides to thousands of followers through his accounts on Instagram and TikTok. His website contains the disclaimer that each consultation 'is educational in nature and does not constitute medical care, diagnosis, or treatment.'" [Associate Press]
Senator Robert Harshbarger III = "a Tennessee state senator who has multiple connections to the industry. Harshbarger is a pharmacist at his family’s business, Premiere Pharmacy, which sells compounded medications for weight loss, longevity, pain and other conditions. His mother, Rep. Diana Harshbarger, is also a pharmacist and a Republican member of U.S. Congress from Tennessee. Last year she sent a letter to Kennedy calling on him to relax FDA restrictions on a half-dozen peptides." [Associated Press]
Melissa Loseke DO = part of a family practice that offers hCG injections and "biomedical hormone replacement" [clinic]
Haleem Mohammed MD MBA = "runs clinics in Florida that sell injections of peptides, vitamins, testosterone and weight loss medications. The business is part of a national chain of clinics dubbed Gameday Men’s Health. The company’s website states, 'compounded medications offered through our services are not FDA-approved, and the FDA does not verify their safety.'" [Associated Press]
Gerald E. Morris MD MPH ABOM = practices at a clinic that includes ipamorelin [clinic]
Joshua Starbuck MD IFMCP = practices at a clinic that offers "Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Hormone Replacement Therapy, Peptide Therapy, Shiftwave Chair, IV Nutrient Therapy, Genomic Testing, V02 Max, cutting-edge diagnostics, biomarker-driven supplementation, Red Light Therapy and much more!" [clinic]
Kris Wusterhausen DO = "Elite Practitioner with Prodrome Science, helping patients take proactive control of their brain health through plasmalogen science and cutting-edge preventive strategies." [clinic]
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/121949
While IPV (domestic violence) is a major public health issue, any implementation of AI must be done with care -- running even a machine learning program will do more harm than good if patients do not opt in. It also implies a false negative setting in which some patients who are classified at a higher risk of IPV would receive education than those who do not. Yet another reason to have an IRB (which includes someone who survived IPV) insert itself into AI implementation in healthcare.
Overall it is the name of the current game for medical school and residency applications to build a research portfolio. TriNetX is just one tool for retrospective cohorts and (the fast publication) in a way is indicative of the quality of peer review, especially when considering limitations like the collider bias and immortal time bias. No different than say using Cosmos with an "easy mode button"
Texas Tribune: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/22/texas-childrens-hospital-brain-death-testing-annelise-camp/
Case
2-year-old girl and her parents were at a family gathering on Memorial Day 2026. The girl walked into the hotel pool without a life jacket and drowned. Relatives performed CPR, and the girl was taken to Texas Children's Hospital in west Houston, with return of spontaneous circulation an hour after drowning. Three days after admission, the child's pediatricians had exhausted all interventions and advised her parents about brain death testing.
The parents sued Texas Children's to prevent this testing, to give the girl more time to recover, and to transfer the patient to another facility (i.e., right to try) so she can receive investigational treatments like hyperbaric oxygen and stem cell infusion. Additionally, in court documents, the parents state that brain death testing is against their religion. Texas Children's, for their part, reached out to 36 facilities for transfer -- 35 declined, and the one pending hospital required brain death testing. Additionally, on June 6, Texas Children said that "[f]urther testing will help guide care and there are no imminent plans to end care regardless of results. In fact, there is a June 11 hearing planned to discuss next steps together with the family, unless transfer occurs before then. Out of respect for the family’s privacy, we are unable to comment further."
Now state politicians (including Steven Toth [running for Congress this November] and Ken Paxton [also running for Congress]) and pro-right-to-life groups like Texas Right to Life have stepped in because they believe that as long as the patient has a heartbeat, they have the right to life.
Comments
What a terrible situation for the patient, her parents, and Texas Children's. I hope the parents are confiding in the Texas Children's chaplain to navigate this situation. I hope for all to recognize that futile life support takes ICU resources like ventilators and beds for other sick children, and I hope that the politicians don't use this case to bolster their election campaigns for this November.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/states-embracing-ai-help-manage-173005151.html
Some states roll out chatbots to answer Medicaid beneficiaries' eligibility questions (e.g., Florida and SNAP, New Hampshire and unemployment claims). It is also under plans to assist with verifying eligibility based on the One Big Beautiful Bill's work requirements for Medicaid. Oversight is difficult when algorithms are behind proprietary red tape.
Commentary
Algorithms are based on the training data that they are fed -- it can perpetuate the same human biases inherent in the data reporting. Additionally, the cost of a confabulated denial can lead an eligible person to lose out on Medicaid coverage that they need.
The US is investigating Germany for their "persistent underpayment for innovative pharmaceutical products." If found at fault, the US could impose higher tariffs on Germany.
Notably, "innovative pharmaceutical products" is not specified and vague. That could mean anything from generics to bispecific antibodies to gene therapies with a lipid nanoparticle under development
Futurism: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/woman-death-hospital-brazil-ai-icu-beds
The original article in Portugese: https://g1.globo.com/mg/zona-da-mata/noticia/2026/06/11/psicologa-morre-apos-5-dias-de-espera-por-leito-em-mg-familia-contesta-novo-sistema-de-regulacao.ghtml
Summary (based on the English translation as reported by Futurism)
32 year old woman in Brazil was hospitalized for gallstones, spends 5 days awaiting transfer to a larger hospital's ICU unit before dying. Family accuses the algorithm — Brazil’s State Regulation Operations Center (Core-MG) — of underestimating the patient's acuity and thus alleged to have played the deciding role on delaying transfer to an ICU bed.
English translation of the family's statement:
>"What we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill. The one who has to accept whether a patient is seriously ill is no longer the doctor who is there experiencing that reality with the patient, it’s the Core. She would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8. So she couldn’t progress properly in the system because a patient at 8, a patient at 6.9 would jump ahead of her. And the system wouldn’t accept increasing her severity level within the system because of the tests that were constantly feeding it data. My sister, other people, are not just numbers, they are not just protocols, they are not just a CPF [Brazilian tax ID number] thrown into the system. They have families, they had dreams, they had a whole life ahead of them."
Official statement by the Deputy Secretary of Health (English translation)
>"Core provides a bed map that is updated three times a day. With this, it will be possible to have much more control over the process and generate better data on the clinical condition and needs of each person waiting for a bed."
Comments
I wish I'm able to read the original Portugese article (and I'm not going to use any translation software so as to avoid mistranslating the reporter's meaning). To my knowledge, this is the first time a patient's family is accusing an artifical intelligence system in contributing to a patient's death. Although the type of AI used in Brazil's hospital system is not an LLM (actually more akin to an EHR algorithm based from RegulaRN), it very well may be an LLM. Apparently the algorithm failed to get updated with lab values. The model used by Brazil appears to be proprietary and thus a black box for many of us. And algorithms are not going to have the right answer for the individual person as they cannot physically examine and assess the patient at the bedside.
https://abcnews.com/Health/flu-outbreak-air-force-recruits-joint-base-san/story?id=133994394
As George Washington found out, the principles of vaccinations applies to protect your regiment from sickening your troops. And that's what makes Hegseth short-sighted on his move to remove the flu vaccination mandate. Especially if some of these recruits suffer the feared complication of myocarditis from the real influenza.