Lilly's coming for your favorite peptide-pushing wellness influencer's plug
and you can eat lettuce again
Hi, happy Sunday. Today I offer you a Pulse Check roundup you can read casually to fight off Sunday Scaries or whatever your Sunday evening brings.
2,566 kids have been diagnosed with measles in the US, year-to-date. This is the highest annual total since 1991 (coinciding with lower MMR vaccination rates). 169 of those cases were hospitalized. Unlike last year, no one has died yet in 2026 (*knock on wood). I anticipate a rise in new cases following this week’s Executive Order (EO) on childhood vaccines calling for splitting the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, and rubella, btw), among other things.
Trump holds the discredited view that combination shots cause autism and splitting them up is safer. While unlikely to yield tangible policy change, the EO gives the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 90 days to show how it plans to offer deconstructed MMR vaccines (i.e., separate-disease vaccines).
The catch? We don’t make single-antigen vaccines for MMR, so it would require years of research and development to bring them to market. For now, vaccine policy is mostly left to State jurisdiction, and kids can still access vaccines on the American Academy of Pediatrics schedule. We can thus assume the executive order is a last-ditch effort to throw MAHA a bone before midterm elections, but this will only further fuel misinformation and risk kids’ lives (in my opinion!!). In my day job, I have to think about how we can make it easier for patients to get their drugs. Splitting and spacing vaccines makes it harder for kids to get life-saving preventive care, so I would not endorse this in a dosing/formulation team meeting.
If you’re wondering, “What the fuck is she talking about?” Separating the MMR vaccine into three separate shots shots shots shots shots shots shots:
leaves unnecessary opportunity for infection with the other diseases between doses
uses more healthcare re$ource$$$/clinic bandwidth/family time-off and ups logistical friction by requiring two (2) additional visits where one (1) would have sufficed
makes it easy to forget follow-up appointments (decreasing adherence)
causes immunity gaps and risks outbreaks
requires three (3) needle pricks for the sweet bébé when the alternative is one (1)
A new Yale School of Public Health study found universal healthcare could save the United States $1 trillion and 114k lives a year. That’s about a 20% reduction in healthcare spending per year. ICYMI: I wrote about why the US doesn’t have universal health care last year. Linked below if you’d like a refresher:
Lettuce is so back! The best-by dates for the lettuce of concern have passed, and they should be out of circulation by now. Further, new cyclospora infection rates are down, so we’re back to standard risk levels for eating leafy greens (lettuce, parsley, cilantro), berries, etc. Lettuce resume leafy green consumption! I ordered a lettuce with ramp vinaigrette to pair with our three pastas at I Cavallini last night and ate a quinoa taco salad at Chloe’s while writing this to celebrate.
You may want to hold it on the spicy margs, however. A crop of Silanoan Jalapenos was linked to a Salmonella outbreak. To be safe, avoid pre-packaged and fresh jalapeños from Hannaford, HEB, Kroger, Stop and Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods.
Lilly says, “If you see something, say something!” and sued 6 black-market reta retailers. They didn’t come to play. Retatrutide is GLP-1’s hotter, more powerful little sister that acts on GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon receptors—a promising triple threat. Eli Lilly is studying the drug for obesity, Type II Diabetes, and other conditions and plans to submit for FDA approval in Q1 of next year.
Yet, early peptide adopters are procuring reta of questionable origin “for research purposes only” and injecting themselves with substances that may be contaminated, mislabeled, or something else entirely. People either don’t trust the health care system and/or are too impatient to wait for the regulatory process to do its job. Lilly has its eye on the more than 14,000 international posts, ads, websites, and product listings for reta, and reported 200 of them to the FDA (the Big Drug Daddy). The press release’s call to action urges people to report “illegal retatrutide products to law enforcement, drug and pharmacy regulators, and the Lilly Answers Center at 1-800-LillyRx.”
That’s all for now.
Miss you already.
xxsem
Disclaimer: Of Note is a personal passion project and does not represent the views of my employer or anyone I’ve ever affiliated with, ever. Thank you!