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DeSantis, wife to sit down with NBC’s Dasha Burns in first network interview since campaign reboot

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, will sit down with NBC’s Dasha Burns for the governor’s first formal network since his campaign’s “reboot,” the network announced Sunday.

NBC News said the interview will air Monday on the “Today” show and “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.” Additional segments will also air throughout the day on MSNBC and NBC News NOW, according to the network. 

Florida’s first lady has played a central role in her husband’s campaign for the White House, having joined him for various appearances on the campaign trail. Her presence has drawn both praise and criticism in parts of the news media. 

NBC News wrote in a statement that the interview “will take place amid questions about the strength of his candidacy, ongoing attacks from the former president, and as he attempts to shift from campaigning as an incumbent governor to an insurgent candidate.”

Ron DeSantis plans to target ‘ineffective programs’ at universities by putting them on the hook for student loans

During a Never Back Down town hall on Saturday in Cedar Rapids, Ron DeSantis said he had a plan to target “ineffective programs” at universities.

DeSantis, delivering familiar remarks blasting Joe Biden administration proposals to discharge certain student loans, said students were “sold a bill of goods” by universities that steered them into programs without economic utility.

“We’re going to make the universities responsible for backing the student loans and guess what will happen? They’re not going to want to do zombie studies if the student isn’t going to be able to be gainfully employed and then they’re going to get stuck with the loan.”

“So you’re going to see big changes as a result of that. We need to stop subsidizing ineffective programs at these universities and we need to get this right,” DeSantis said. “And I think that that’s going to make a big, big difference.”

The real costs of the new Alzheimer’s drug, most of which will fall to taxpayers

The first drug purporting to slow the advance of Alzheimer’s disease is likely to cost the U.S. health care system billions annually even as it remains out of reach for many of the lower-income seniors most likely to suffer from dementia.

Medicare and Medicaid patients will make up 92% of the market for lecanemab, according to Eisai Co., which sells the drug under the brand name Leqembi. In addition to the company’s $26,500 annual price tag for the drug, treatment could cost U.S. taxpayers $82,500 per patient per year, on average, for genetic tests and frequent brain scans, safety monitoring, and other care, according to estimates from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, or ICER. The FDA gave the drug full approval July 6. About 1 million Alzheimer’s patients in the U.S. could qualify to use it.

Patients with early Alzheimer’s disease who took lecanemab in a major clinical trial declined an average of five months slower than other subjects over an 18-month period, but many suffered brain swelling and bleeding. Although those side effects usually resolved without obvious harm, they apparently caused three deaths. The great expense of the drug and its treatment raises questions about how it will be paid for, and who will benefit.

Off Miami, scientists put corals to a heat-stress test. It’s survival of the fittest

With a gentle pat, Wajahat Shera cemented a four-inch staghorn coral fragment onto a patch of seafloor two miles east of Key Biscayne — one of many planted Friday as part of an unusual undersea experiment being run by University of Miami scientists.

These corals, previously collected from a range of reefs off South Florida, are being put to a critical heat-stress test. Some likely won’t survive the high ocean temperatures off the state that threaten to devastate much of the natural reef tract. But if some do — and that’s the hope — it could help identify coral types more likely to endure future climate change.

Putting corals in harms way is the opposite of what scientists, agencies and volunteer divers have been doing for the last month. They’ve been evacuating thousands of growing coral fragments from offshore nurseries where the scientists had planted them months or even years before. They’ve been placing them in onshore tanks, building a sort of Noah’s Ark for coral species to preserve their genetic diversity in case heat-caused mass bleaching events wipe out entire reefs in Miami-Dade County as they have already in the Keys.