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Tag: United States

Long Covid Is Real — And It’s Changing an Entire Generation

Hundreds of thousands of kids in America are struggling with an illness that many doctors and schools refuse to recognize

In January 2020, just weeks before the NBA shut down and Costco shelves emptied and Tom Hanks got sick, Joy Corbitt’s only brother died in his mid-forties with symptoms of Covid. Which meant, from the pandemic’s earliest days, Joy was taking no chances.

She’d heard that Black and brown people like her seemed to be getting sick and dying at higher rates than other Americans. And that kids were either not getting sick, or getting less sick, or getting sick in ways we didn’t really understand. So, when it came to protecting her then-14-year-old daughter Lia, the North Carolina mother was vigilant.

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Trump Rattles Vaccine Experts Over Aluminum

Federal health officials are examining the feasibility of taking aluminum salts out of vaccines, a prospect that vaccine experts said would wipe out about half of the nation’s supply of childhood inoculations and affect shots that protect against whooping cough, polio and deadly flu.

The review at the Food and Drug Administration began after President Trump listed aluminum in vaccines as harmful during a press briefing about the unproven link between Tylenol and autism.

Aluminum salts have been in vaccines since the 1920s and are added to enhance the immune-stimulating effect against the virus or bacteria covered by the inoculation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has been a longtime critic of aluminum in vaccines, which he has suggested is linked to autism.

Vaccine experts said the tiny amount of aluminum salts in vaccines — often measured in the one-millionth of a gram — has a long track record of safety and is essential to generating lasting immunity from disease. Developing vaccines without aluminum salts, they said, would require an entirely new formulation from scratch.

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Chaos following mass firings, rehirings at CDC

Late Friday night more than 1,000 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were sent an email saying they had been let go due to reduction-in-force (RIF) efforts at the end of the second week of the federal government shutdown.

Some, however, were mistakenly fired and were rehired the next day, according to sources close to the situation.

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They Fought Outbreaks Worldwide. Now They’re Fighting for New Lives.

The Trump administration’s new global health strategy, released last month, lists its most important goal as outbreak prevention and response, both to protect Americans and to safeguard the economy.

Containing the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a decade ago cost the United States $5.4 billion globally and more than $70 million domestically, the strategy report notes, adding, “As we have unfortunately seen all too frequently, an outbreak anywhere in the world can quickly become a threat to Americans.”

Yet, the freeze on America’s foreign aid in January disrupted many programs that extinguished outbreaks. Citing “waste, fraud and abuse” at federal agencies, the administration also laid off thousands of scientists, including many who worked on preventing and containing infectious diseases.

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Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error

The Trump administration on Saturday raced to rescind layoffs of hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were mistakenly fired on Friday night in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.

Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

After The New York Times reported the dismissals, two federal health officials said on Saturday that many of those workers were being brought back. The officials spoke anonymously in order to disclose internal discussions.

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Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

Dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including “disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists and the entire Washington office — were notified late Friday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s latest round of federal layoffs.

It was unclear on Friday how many C.D.C. workers were affected. But it was the latest blow to an agency that has been wracked by mass resignations, a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters in August and the firing of its director under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Layoff notices landed in the email inboxes of C.D.C. employees shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, notifying employees that their duties had been deemed unnecessary or “virtually identical” to those being performed elsewhere in the agency. Scientists, including leaders, in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention and global health were among those affected.

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Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.

The writers are all former U.S. surgeons general.

As former U.S. surgeons general appointed by every Republican and Democratic president since George H.W. Bush, we have collectively spent decades in service as the Nation’s Doctor. We took two sacred oaths in our lifetimes: first, as physicians who swore to care for our patients and, second, as public servants who committed to protecting the health of all Americans.

Today, in keeping with those oaths, we are compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation. Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored.

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COVID vaccines may have averted thousands of hospital stays in infants, pregnant women over 18 months

A US modeling study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025.

The Stanford University–led research team analyzed COVID-NET surveillance data on COVID-19 hospitalization rates in infants younger than 6 months and incidence data on pregnant women aged 18 to 49 years under a relative risk of 2.65. The aim was to estimate the health impact of vaccination during pregnancy, mainly during the second or third trimester.

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No evidence that Tylenol causes autism, say Health Canada, World Health Organization

ORONTO – Health Canada, the World Health Organization and Canadian autism experts say there is no evidence that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism.

Health Canada and the WHO issued statements last night and this morning in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s unproven claim linking the drug — whose generic name is acetaminophen — to the disorder.

Health Canada says acetaminophen is a “recommended treatment of pain or fever in pregnancy” and “has been used safely by millions of Canadians for decades, including during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.”

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Trump makes unfounded claims about Tylenol and repeats discredited link between vaccines and autism

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday used the platform of the presidency to promote unproven and in some cases discredited ties between Tylenol, vaccines and autism as his administration announced a wide-ranging effort to study the causes of the complex brain disorder.

“Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the unwieldy White House news conference, also urging mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen. He also fueled long-debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism in the U.S., without providing any medical evidence.

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Viewpoint: Four tips for understanding this week’s ACIP meeting

The last meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June abandoned the use of its rigorous evidence-to-recommendation framework for making vaccine policy decisions, which structures decisions around key factors, including the balance of benefits and harms, the type or quality of evidence and health economic analyses, among other elements. The meeting also included new members making inaccurate statements about both vaccine safety and efficacy and included a presentation by a well-known anti-vaccine advocate that was filled with errors.

Now, the committee is set to include even more vaccine skeptics when it meets later this week, according to published reports, including multiple anti–COVID mRNA vaccine activists. (On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed five new ACIP members.)

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Video | How Trump’s cuts to the CDC could threaten Canadians’ public health

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has long been a global leader in disease tracking and evidence-based medical guidelines, but recent funding cuts and firings have caused many to wonder whether the institution is still a trusted source. CBC’s Nisha Patel breaks down how some of those changes could put Canadians at risk.

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Kids with COVID had a 50% to 60% higher risk of depression, anxiety in 2021, researchers say

Relative to uninfected children, COVID-19 patients aged 8 to 17 years were at a 49% higher risk for new-onset depression or anxiety in 2021, rising to 59% in those with severe illness, according to a University of Utah study published this week in PLOS One.

The researchers mined the Utah All Payers Claims Database to explore the link between COVID-19 infection, illness severity, and risk of depression and anxiety among 154,565 school-aged youth who had private insurance or Medicaid coverage. The average participant age was 10.8 years in 2019, when the study period began, and 48% were girls.

Key contributors to mental illness among children include the pandemic’s direct impacts on daily life, such as school closures, isolation from peers, and disrupted family routines, the authors noted.

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Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

Amber Vigh had taken the usual precautions when bringing her nine-year-old son, Carter, to summer camp in July 2023. There were no fires near their home in British Columbia, Canada. Her air quality app showed low levels of pollution. She could not smell any smoke.

Carter, a music-loving Lego enthusiast who had asthma, brought along his smiling shark tooth-patterned emergency kit that held an inhaler, allergy pill and EpiPen. When smoke did roll in from the north, Vigh took him indoors.

But at home that evening, Carter began to cough uncontrollably. Vigh and her husband, James, followed the doctors’ checklist – emergency inhaler, drink of water, steroid inhaler – and gave him a bath to cool down. Then, “all of a sudden, he started coughing again like crazy”, said Vigh.

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Six Nobel laureates speak out against Trump: ‘The closest analogy is with the Hitler regime’

In recent weeks, EL PAÍS contacted most of the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine from the United States over the past 20 years with a questionnaire about Donald Trump’s policies on science, research, and health. The vast majority are established researchers — some even retired — who should not fear retaliation; but only a handful of them agreed to respond.

“Why am I sad?” writes Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “We came to the U.S. when I was 11. Even as my parents could not work making full use of their training and talents, the country gave their child, me (and my sister, born here), a chance to get an education and to do wonderful research with talented coworkers from all over the world. If the Trump policies are carried through, the full flow of what I experienced will be very unlikely in the generation of my scientific grandchildren.”

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Florida plans to become first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Florida plans to become the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates, a longtime cornerstone of public health policy for keeping schoolchildren and adults safe from infectious diseases.

State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who announced the decision Wednesday, cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.

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We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health

We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.

What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced.

Secretary Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven “treatments” while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

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CVS and Walgreens Clamp Down on Covid Vaccines in Many States

CVS and Walgreens, the country’s two largest pharmacy chains, are for now clamping down on offering Covid vaccines in more than a dozen states, even to people who meet newly restricted criteria from the Food and Drug Administration.

On Thursday, Amy Thibault, a spokeswoman for CVS, said the vaccine was not available at pharmacies in 16 states, citing “the current regulatory environment” and emphasizing that the list could change.

On Friday, CVS issued an update: It could administer vaccines in 13 of the 16 states, and in the District of Columbia, to people who had obtained a prescription from a doctor or other medical provider. (As of Friday morning, its online scheduling tool still did not allow anybody to book an appointment in those places; Ms. Thibault said an update was in progress.) In Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, CVS still cannot offer the shots at all, Ms. Thibault said.

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