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.
Comments closedWe 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.
Comments closedCVS 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.
Comments closedHealth Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum.
She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines — or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events.
Dr. Monarez’s refusal to do so led to an extraordinary standoff on Thursday that paralyzed the nation’s health agency, which is still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month that killed a police officer and terrified employees.
Comments closedSusan Monarez, PhD, was fired late yesterday as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after clashing with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine policy.
The White House fired her after Monarez refused to resign, and the action kicked off a mass resignation wave of three of the CDC’s top officials: Debra Houry, MD, MPH, the CDC’s chief medical officer; Demetre Daskalakis, MD, MPH, head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Daniel Jernigan, MD, MPH, head of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Earlier this week Jennifer Layden, MD, PhD, who led the Office of Public Health Data, also stepped down.
Comments closedThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official tasked with overseeing the nation’s vaccine policy resigned from his post Wednesday, shortly after the White House fired the agency’s director.
Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, cited his philosophical differences with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that “challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people,” adding, “Enough is enough.”
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which he also posted on social media.
Comments closedThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory group has long had a work group in place to review the latest COVID-19 vaccine science, including weighing the risks and benefits, but a newly constituted group will launch a sweeping new review of the vaccines led by a member who has opposed COVID vaccines.
The Brownstone Institute on August 22 reported that Retsef Levi, PhD, one of seven members appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been appointed to lead the COVID vaccine review. On August 20, the CDC posted updated terms of reference for the COVID vaccine work group, which is lengthy. Some of the topics include impacts from repeated boosting and mapping policies in other countries.
Levi does not have a biomedical degree or clinical medicine experience. He has a doctorate in operations research and is a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan School of Management. On social media, Levi has called mRNA vaccines dangerous and said they should be removed from the market.
Comments closedFor the first time in Quebec, a person has contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a tick-borne disease that is potentially fatal, a doctor stated on Monday. The patient, recently infected in Estrie, has nevertheless responded well to treatment and has now recovered.
As milder temperatures favour the proliferation of ticks, we expect to see more and more cases in the coming years in Quebec, says Dr. Alex Carignan, infectious disease microbiologist and professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke. “It is concerning, because it is an infection with significant severity.”
The disease, which is treated with antibiotics, can lead to death if not properly managed. The first symptoms, which appear a few hours or days after a person is bitten, include a high fever, headache, muscle aches, and skin lesions in the form of small red spots.
Comments closedEli Lilly said Thursday that it would increase the prices of medicines in Europe and other developed markets “in order to make them lower” in the U.S., an apparent response to the Trump administration’s calls to do so. It singled out the list price of its popular weight-loss drug in the U.K. as part of that effort.
The announcement is among the first moves by a major drugmaker to raise prices abroad in order to lower them in the U.S., in line with President Trump’s agenda. But it’s not clear if these actions would actually increase the amount of revenue that Lilly earns abroad, since governments and private providers that cover drugs often negotiate discounts off the list prices. Lilly did not immediately announce any new price reductions in the U.S.
Comments closedA grassroots organization of health professionals have released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The report from Defend Public Health, a new organization of about 3,000 health professionals and allies, is an attempt to get ahead of misinformation and lack of information from health officials.
In an effort to keep making progress in public health, Defend Public Health’s report was slated to coincide with that of the anticipated second US report to “make America healthy again” (Maha). The first Maha report was released in May, and a second report was expected this week – but amid turmoil at the health agencies, it has reportedly been delayed for several weeks.
Comments closedTORONTO – Canadian doctors and scientists say Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s defunding of mRNA vaccine research and development projects will have negative health effects in Canada and around the world.
“I think that Canadians do need to understand that this and a lot of the changes that Kennedy is making to vaccination policy in particular are definitely going to affect Canadians,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization.
Unlike other vaccines, mRNA vaccines can be made very quickly. They can also be easily modified to fight new viruses and adapt to changing strains — something that we saw as new variants emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rasmussen said.
Comments closedIn what experts say will hobble pandemic preparedness, US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yesterday announced the dismantling of the country’s mRNA vaccine-development programs—the same innovation that allowed rapid scale-up of COVID-19 vaccines during the public health emergency.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine-development contracts totaling just under $500 million, including an award to Moderna/University of Texas Medical Branch for a vaccine against the H5N1 avian flu now sweeping the world. That grant was terminated in late May.
Contracts awarded to Emory University and Tiba Biotech were cancelled, and agreements with Luminary Labs, ModeX, and Seqirus have been scaled back.
Comments closedWASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects, totaling $500 million, to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted.
Kennedy’s decision to terminate the projects is the latest in a string of decisions that have put the longtime vaccine critic’s doubts about shots into full effect at the nation’s health department. Kennedy has pulled back recommendations around the COVID-19 shots, fired the panel that makes vaccine recommendations, and refused to offer a vigorous endorsement of vaccinations as a measles outbreak worsened.
Comments closedThe bird flu virus that has beset dairy farms since early last year may be spreading through the air in so-called milking parlors and through contaminated wastewater, as well as from milking equipment, scientists have found.
The Department of Agriculture has said that the virus spreads primarily from milking equipment or is carried by dairy workers and vehicles traveling between farms.
But in the new study, scientists found live virus in the air of milking facilities, suggesting that cows and farmworkers might have become infected by inhaling the pathogen. The virus may also spread by water used to clean cattle barns or contaminated with discarded milk.
Comments closedCancer survivors infected with COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic had a higher risk of dying from dormant cells reawakening, Colorado researchers found, though they don’t know whether people who get the virus now face the same risk.
Experiments in mice found that genetically modified animals were more likely to have signs of metastatic cancer in their lungs if infected with flu or COVID-19 than engineered mice that researchers didn’t give a virus, said James DeGregori, deputy director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center in Aurora.
That finding launched an international partnership to determine whether the same thing happened in people, he said.
Comments closedDr. Vinay Prasad, the controversial critic of the US Food and Drug Administration who took a top role at the regulatory agency in May, has resigned less than three months into the job.
“Dr. Prasad did not want to be a distraction to the great work of the FDA in the Trump administration and has decided to return to California and spend more time with his family,” a spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services told CNN on Tuesday.
Prasad, a hematologist oncologist, was named head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in early May, giving him purview over vaccines and biologic medicines. He was subsequently also given the role of FDA chief medical and scientific officer. Like a number of Trump administration health appointees, Prasad had been a harsh critic of the government’s response and vaccine policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Comments closedVANCOUVER — British Columbia’s health minister says the province has received almost 780 job applications from qualified American health professionals as part of its recruitment campaign.
Josie Osborne says more than 2,250 doctors, nurses and other health professionals have signed up for webinars and expressed interest in working in B.C. since March.
Bylaw changes implemented by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. this month mean U.S.-trained doctors can become fully licensed in B.C., without further assessment if they hold certifications from various American medical boards.
Osborne says that means Canadian doctors trained in the U.S. can “come home” and the path also becomes easier for American physicians.
Comments closedJOHANNESBURG (AP) — Just a week had remained before scientists in South Africa were to begin clinical trials of an HIV vaccine, and hopes were high for another step toward limiting one of history’s deadliest pandemics. Then the email arrived.
Stop all work, it said. The United States under the Trump administration was withdrawing all its funding.
The news devastated the researchers, who live and work in a region where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world. Their research project, called BRILLIANT, was meant to be the latest to draw on the region’s genetic diversity and deep expertise in the hope of benefiting people everywhere.
But the $46 million from the U.S. for the project was disappearing, part of the dismantling of foreign aid by the world’s biggest donor earlier this year as President Donald Trump announced a focus on priorities at home.
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