When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last month that lifesaving humanitarian work would be exempt from a freeze on foreign aid, global health workers breathed a collective sigh of relief.But a new directive has put such exemptions on hold.Several senior employees at the U.S.A.I.D. Bureau of Global Health received an email Tuesday telling them to “please hold off on any more approvals” pending further directions from the acting chief of staff, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.Senior officials at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance received similar instructions during a meeting this week, according to a person familiar with what transpired.For weeks, U.S.A.I.D. officials and the organizations, contractors and consultants who partner with them have struggled to continue the kind of work that Mr. Rubio promised to preserve — “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and substance assistance.”Some waivers have been issued to programs that fall under Mr. Rubio’s definition of “lifesaving” aid, but the payments system called Phoenix that U.S.A.I.D. relies on to disburse financial assistance has been inaccessible for weeks. That means even programs that received waivers have struggled to continue, according to multiple employees of U.S.A.I.D. and the partner organizations that rely on the funding they distributed.The State Department did not reply to a request for comment for this article.On Tuesday, Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur empowered by President Trump to combat the agency, told reporters in the Oval Office that the administration had “turned on funding for Ebola prevention and for H.I.V. prevention.” But in reality, the Ebola funding and virtually all of the H.I.V. prevention funding remains frozen, according to two U.S.A.I.D. employees and several aid groups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

NHS leaders have acknowledged a recovery plan for dentistry in England, launched by the previous Conservative government a year ago, has comprehensively failed.

Obsessing over the past is taking over my life.At 60-something, I am often troubled by regret over interactions with my three children when they were young. During their preteen and teen years, I would lose my temper as a result of their doing something I now recognize as insignificant. For example, my son accidentally threw away $10 in change when he was getting ice cream with his friends, which resulted in my screaming at him in anger.I am a surgeon, and I’ll think about my ridiculous behavior at various times — sometimes when I’m operating on a patient — and have an overwhelming sense of regret.Can you suggest any strategies to resolve this problem?As an aside, my father bailed out on our family when I was 8. We were moving to a foreign country, and he never came to the airport. As you can imagine, my subsequent relationship with him was spotty and dysfunctional.From the Therapist: Regret is as painful as it is common; however, it can also be a positive force, depending on how we respond to it. It can shackle us to the past, or it can serve as an engine for change.So, let’s look at what you can do with yours.First, some context. We all come into parenting informed by the parenting we received. Regret around parenting mistakes cuts especially deep because most parents enter that role intending to create the best possible childhood for their children, and vowing not to repeat the missteps of their own parents. But as you wrestle with your regret, try to remember that there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. Healing from past parenting mistakes is a process that starts with self-compassion and leads to self-awareness and intentional repair — with oneself and, when possible, your children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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As of Tuesday, 22 children and two adults had been infected, all of whom were unvaccinated, local officials said.A worsening measles outbreak has taken root in Texas, sickening two dozen and hospitalizing nine on the western edge of the state, where childhood vaccination rates have dwindled in recent years.As of Tuesday, 22 children and two adults had been infected, all of whom were unvaccinated, local health officials said. The outbreak comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a staunch critic of childhood vaccines, has been nominated to be the country’s next health secretary, causing public health experts to worry that similar upticks of preventable illnesses will become more frequent.“There’s a feeling this is going to be more and more common,” said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease expert at Duke University.The Texas outbreak has so far been limited to residents of Gaines County, which borders New Mexico and has roughly 20,000 residents. Last year 82 percent of kindergarten students received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, according to state data. That figure is roughly 10 percentage points lower than the average vaccination rate in Texas public schools and far below the federal target of 95 percent for measles vaccination.Vaccination rates have been declining nationwide since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and now sit below 93 percent. An estimated 280,000 kindergartners in the United States do not have documentation of an M.M.R. vaccine, according to federal data.Texas public schools require children to have received certain vaccines, including the M.M.R. shot, but parents can apply for an exemption for “reasons of conscious,” including religious beliefs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent the first day of his back-to-back confirmation hearings deftly avoiding questions about his views on vaccines. On the second day, when a prominent Republican senator insisted there was no link between vaccines and autism, Mr. Kennedy shot back that a new study “showed the opposite.”“I just want to follow the science,” Mr. Kennedy declared.Following the science has been a familiar refrain for Mr. Kennedy, whose confirmation as health secretary appears all but assured in a vote expected Thursday. But the exchange in the Senate raises questions about just what type of science Mr. Kennedy is consulting. It foreshadows how, if confirmed, Mr. Kennedy could continue to sow doubts about vaccines.Academics have pounced on the study that Mr. Kennedy cited during the hearing, shredding it as methodologically faulty and biased. The study emanated from a network of vaccine skeptics who share some of Mr. Kennedy’s views — an ecosystem that includes the author of the study, the editor of the journal that published it and the advocacy group that financed it.“We authors were delighted and honored that R.F.K. Jr. referred to our work in his confirmation hearing,” the study’s lead author, Anthony Mawson, said in an email. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.Dr. Mawson, an epidemiologist, said he first met Mr. Kennedy at an autism conference in 2017. Mr. Kennedy cites Dr. Mawson’s research 33 times in his 2023 book, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.”His study was rejected “without explanation” by several mainstream medical journals, Dr. Mawson said. So he turned for advice to Andrew Wakefield, the author of the 1998 study, now retracted, that sparked the initial furor over vaccines and autism. Mr. Wakefield encouraged him to submit the study to a new journal called Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The No. 2 official at the National Institutes of Health abruptly resigned and retired from government service on Tuesday, in another sign that the Trump administration is reshaping the nation’s public health and biomedical research institutions.The official, Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, a dentist and researcher, was long considered a steadying force and had weathered past presidential transitions. In a letter that Dr. Tabak sent to colleagues on Tuesday, he did not give a reason for his decision. One person familiar with the decision said Dr. Tabak had been confronted with a reassignment that he viewed as unacceptable.“It has been an enormous privilege to work with each of you (and your predecessors) to support and further the critical NIH mission,” Dr. Tabak wrote.Dr. Tabak resigned at a turbulent time for the institutes, the nation’s premier biomedical research industry, composed of 27 separate institutes and centers that study and develop treatments for diseases like cancer and heart conditions as well as infectious diseases like AIDS and Covid. The N.I.H. spends roughly $48 billion a year on medical research, much of it in grants to medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.President Trump’s decision to slash billions of dollars in N.I.H. grant funding has sparked a bitter court battle. And the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and the president’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H.Mr. Kennedy has said he would cut 600 N.I.H. jobs.The N.I.H. said it would soon have a statement about Dr. Tabak’s decision.Dr. Tabak was not well-known to the public. But his decision to leave is surprising, and destabilizing for an agency that is on the political hot seat. He was viewed as someone who could work across party lines; he had survived the presidential turnovers of both parties and had indicated he expected to stay on after Mr. Trump was elected in November.Ordinarily, Dr. Tabak would have ascended to the job of acting N.I.H. director during the transition from one administration to the next. But the Trump administration installed another researcher, Matthew Memoli of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as acting director. Dr. Memoli criticized Covid vaccine mandates, as did Mr. Kennedy.As acting director of the N.I.H. last year, Dr. Tabak pushed back against Republicans’ assertions that a lab leak stemming from U.S. taxpayer-funded research might have caused the coronavirus pandemic. He told lawmakers that viruses being studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to the one that set off the world’s worst public health crisis in a century.Ellen Barry