ALT An excerpt from the story reads "Still, the fact that the mutations occurred at all is a reminder that H5N1 is a dangerous virus for people, one that could potentially trigger a pandemic if it acquired the capacity to easily infect people, flu virologists say. “By no means is this Day 1 of a pandemic. There’s no indication … of human-to-human spread, which is all good. But this is exactly the scenario that we fear,” Scott Hensley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told STAT in an interview."

ALT A screenshot of a paragraph from STAT's story on UnitedHealth reads “'The corporation views patients as entities that have money attached to their bodies,' said Michael Good, a retired physician who worked at a Connecticut practice where UnitedHealth tested older patients with the device, called QuantaFlo. 'They want to use the clinicians to mine the money that lies within the bodies of the patient.'”

ALT A screenshot of a paragraph from STAT's story on UnitedHealth reads "Central to these tactics is UnitedHealth's unrivaled leverage over physicians, whose diagnoses help determine how much private insurers get paid for covering older adults. Dozens of former doctors and employees at UnitedHealth medical practices told STAT how they became enmeshed in UnitedHealth's strategy to make their patients seem as sick as possible. Doctors said the company had a fixation with medical coding to generate more revenue encouraging clinicians through bonuses and performance reviews to identify more health problems in patients, even if those conditions seemed dubious."

ALT A Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich in a pink backdrop

ALT An illustration shows the point of view from behind a crowd of people, only the outlines of their head and shoulders can be seen in a shadowy light as they stand behind a fence looking at opened capsules with pills on the ground. Text in the foreground reads "A STAT Investigation: The War On Recovery. How the U.S. denies lifesaving medications to people with opioid addiction"

ALT A teal graphic for STAT Connect reads “A Chat Live With Nick St. Fleur on the 2023 STAT Summit and Color Code”

ALT A bottle of water, a potato, a coffee cup, and an almond, all with headsets and microphones on, sit in chairs on a stage. Illustration by Alex Hogan.