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Tag: United States

B.C. health minister praises U.S. recruitment, says 780 applications in 2 months

VANCOUVER — 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.

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US aid cuts halt HIV vaccine research in South Africa, with global impact

JOHANNESBURG (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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‘Tremendous uncertainty’ for cancer research as US officials target mRNA vaccines

As US regulators restrict Covid mRNA vaccines and as independent vaccine advisers re-examine the shots, scientists fear that an unlikely target could be next: cancer research.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have shown promise in treating and preventing cancers that have often been difficult to address, such as pancreatic cancer, brain tumors and others.

But groundbreaking research could stall as federal and state officials target mRNA shots, including ending federal funding for bird flu mRNA vaccines, restricting who may receive existing mRNA vaccines and, in some places, proposing laws against the vaccines.

The Trump administration has also implemented unprecedented cuts to cancer research, among other research cuts and widespread layoffs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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FDA approves Moderna COVID vaccine for kids under 12 at higher risk

Vaccine maker Moderna announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted full approval of its Spikevax (mRNA-1273) COVID vaccine for children 6 months to 11 years old. But, because federal officials in May restricted its recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines to adults 65 and older and to people of all ages who are at increased risk for severe disease, Spikevax will be available only to kids in that age range who are at higher risk.

“COVID-19 continues to pose a significant potential threat to children, especially those with underlying medical conditions. Vaccination can be an important tool for protecting our youngest against severe disease and hospitalization,” said Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, MBA, MEng. “We appreciate the FDA’s diligent scientific review and approval of Spikevax for pediatric populations at increased risk for COVID-19 disease.”

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Chagas disease–carrying kissing bugs establish new base in Florida homes

Kissing bugs that carry the parasite for Chagas disease, a potentially serious tropical condition, have established a base in Florida, researchers say.

Chagas disease, which is rare in the United States, can cause a brief illness or remain latent for years before causing symptoms. If untreated, it can become a chronic condition that damages the heart, brain, and other organs.

Scientists from the University of Florida (UF) and Texas A&M University collected more than 300 kissing bugs, or triatomines, from 23 Florida counties—one third of them from people’s homes—from 2013 to 2023. The team analyzed the bugs’ stomach contents to determine the source of their last meal and whether it contained the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite implicated in Chagas disease.

Their findings were published this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

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Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A.

The reckoning that Robert Califf spent years warning about began, as so many things seem to these days, on social media. It was October 2024. His tenure as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration was winding down, and he was starting to imagine a happy retirement surrounded by grandchildren when he noticed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking aim at his agency, and the 19,000 or so people who worked there, on X.

“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

It was a confused, almost comically pompous declaration, Califf recalls thinking, and it ought to have been the least of his concerns. Kennedy had not yet been tapped to serve as anything, let alone the highest health official in the land. Still, it struck a nerve. More and more, people seemed to clamor for things that were unproven, to question things that were and to express not only mistrust but outright hostility toward the doctors, scientists and civil servants trying to separate one from the other. That hostility was being nourished by exactly the kind of mis- and disinformation Kennedy was espousing. It was easy to paint the F.D.A. as a supervillain (an aggressive suppressor of sunlight, vitamins and exercise, to borrow Kennedy’s language), in part because the truth was so much more complex.

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Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice

Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.

The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.

Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort.

“The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”

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Measles cases surge to record high since disease was declared eliminated in the US

Falling childhood vaccine coverage and a large, smoldering outbreak that was kindled in an undervaccinated pocket of West Texas have driven the United States to a troubling new milestone: There have been more measles cases in the US this year than any other since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago.

There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles reported in the US in 2025, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation. Just halfway through the year, the case tally has already surpassed the last record from 2019, when there were a total of 1,274 cases.

Experts say this year’s cases are likely to be severely undercounted because many are going unreported. Three people have died from measles this year – two children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated – matching the total number of US measles deaths from the previous two and a half decades.

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Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’

For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger.

When nurses Patricia Chubb, 70, and her mother, Charlotte Mae Rohrbaugh, 98, joined the fledgling Harvard University-led Nurses’ Health Study in 1976, they had no idea it would last for nearly 50 years.

“It’s probably the longest, if not one of the longest, prospective health care studies for women that’s ever been done,” said Chubb, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They picked nurses to do the study because they know how to answer health questions correctly and can draw their own blood and the like — it’s very cost-effective.”

Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.

Yet all of that priceless data may soon be discarded due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard over what Trump claims is a failure to protect Jewish students during campus protests.

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We will not stay silent on vaccines, say leaders of five major U.S. medical associations

The authors are the presidents of American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Let us introduce ourselves. We are the doctors you trust with your health and the health of your family across every stage of life, from the first checkups in infancy and childhood, to health care during pregnancy and adulthood, through management of chronic illness and aging. We are family physicians, pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, OB-GYNs, and infectious disease experts. Our commitment is not to politics, but to the absolute well-being of our patients and populations, and to providing them with best evidence-based health care.

We have an urgent, united message: Immunizations work, they are very effective and safe, and they save lives. Vaccines are among the most rigorously studied and effective tools in public health. Through widespread immunization, we have eradicated debilitating and fatal diseases that once caused serious illness, hospitalization, and death for millions of people.

But today, that legacy is at serious risk.

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Childhood vaccines were a global success story. Misinformation and other obstacles are slowing that progress, a study shows

Routine vaccines have prevented the deaths of about 154 million children around the world over the past 50 years, a new study shows, but efforts have been slowing recently, allowing for the growth of some vaccine-preventable diseases. This backslide could lead to many more unnecessary illnesses and deaths without an increased effort to vaccinate children and counter misinformation.

The report, published Tuesday in the medical journal The Lancet, says that over the past five decades, the World Health Organization’s Expanded Programme on Immunization has vaccinated more than 4 billion children. This doubling of global coverage of vaccines has prevented countless cases of tuberculosis, measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

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Viewpoint: CDC’s upcoming vaccine advisory meeting set up to sow distrust in vaccines

This week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is likely to mark its end—for now—as a vaccine advisory body.

Regardless of which party controlled the White House and who served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ACIP—a federal advisory committee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—held meetings that included presentations of vetted, evidence-based data and used a structured framework for moving from scientific evidence to vaccine recommendations.

Based on what we have learned about the new committee members appointed by the secretary, the meeting agenda and presenters, however, the purpose of the meeting appears to be an opportunity to deemphasize vaccine benefits—many of which are largely invisible to the public and taken for granted—and emphasize the potential risks of vaccines.

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The U.S. is cutting billions from science. Canadian researchers say it’s time to step up

Scientists in Canada are scrambling. Over the past few months, the U.S. government has cut billions of dollars in funding from scientific research as part of sweeping cost-cutting measures.

“It’s really shocking. It’s really like this big cloud over science,” Kate Moran, CEO of Ocean Networks Canada, told Quirks & Quarks. Ocean Networks Canada participates in a project called the Argo system, an international program that collects information from on and under the ocean using a fleet of robotic instruments that drift with the ocean currents.

But that program, which is led by researchers in the U.S., could be at risk.

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‘I Think He Is About to Destroy Vaccines in This Country’

I think we are on the verge of losing vaccines for this country, from this country. And the reason is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold up a paper, in the next four or five months, that says it’s aluminum in vaccines that are causing a whole swath of problems, including autism. I think he is about to destroy vaccines in this country. I do.

— Paul Offit
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Canada’s top doctor Theresa Tam leaving position when term ends June 20

TORONTO – As Dr. Theresa Tam prepares to leave her position next week, Canada’s top doctor says it’s more important than ever for Canada to stand up for science and combat disinformation.

She’s held the role of chief public health officer for eight years, but became a household name in the last five years as she led the country’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her term ends June 20 and she doesn’t have another job lined up, Tam said in a wide-ranging interview Friday that touched on her desire to be remembered for more than COVID, her passion for health equity and the musical side of her the public hasn’t seen.

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How Kennedy’s Purge of Advisers Could Disrupt U.S. Vaccinations

With two extraordinary moves, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has upended the certainty that American children will always have cost-free access to lifesaving vaccines.

For decades, a little-known scientific panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended which shots Americans should get and when. The group’s endorsement means insurance companies must cover the costs and helps states decide which vaccines to mandate for school-age children.

The panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also determines which shots are provided for free through the Vaccines for Children program, which serves about half of the children in the United States.

On Monday, Mr. Kennedy, long a vaccine skeptic, fired all 17 members of A.C.I.P., claiming that the group was rife with conflicts of interest and that a clean sweep was needed to restore public trust. Mr. Kennedy also reassigned C.D.C. staff scientists who oversee the panel’s work and vet its members.

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RFK Jr. names new members of CDC’s vaccine advisory panel

WASHINGTON — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday unveiled the names of the eight new members who will sit on the panel of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy, and said they would review the current vaccine schedule, as well as evaluate new shots.

The new members include several well-known critics of vaccines.

“The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians,” Kennedy wrote in a post on X.

The appointment comes just days after Kennedy dismissed every member of the committee, calling for a “clean slate” with new members. The committee is scheduled to hold a meeting later this month.

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Kennedy dismisses entire US CDC vaccine panel, replacing all 17 members

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) – Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired all members sitting on a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and is reconstituting the committee, his department said on Monday.

Kennedy removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement, and is in the process of considering new members to replace them.

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