Scientific meetings were canceled, and research data on the bird flu outbreak was delayed, amid confusion over the directive.The Trump administration, moving quickly to clamp down on health and science agencies, has canceled a string of scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including upcoming reports focused on the nation’s escalating bird flu crisis.Experts who serve on outside advisory panels on a range of topics, from antibiotic resistance to deafness, received emails on Wednesday telling them their meetings had been canceled.The cancellations followed a directive issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, who prohibited the public release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by a presidential appointee or designee, according to federal officials and an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.The directive enjoins the public release of “regulations, guidance documents, and other public documents and communications,” including any “notice,” “grant announcement,” news releases, speaking engagements or official correspondence with public officials, until they have received approval.The new stricture applies to messages to email groups and to social media posts, and included a ban on announcements to The Federal Register, without which many official processes cannot continue. Some notices sent by the Biden administration in its final week were quickly withdrawn.The cancellations and communications crackdown sent a chill through employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the broader scientific community. The directive was first reported by The Washington Post. 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., President Trump’s pick to be health secretary, is keeping his financial stake in major litigation against Merck over a widely used vaccine given to young people, according to ethics records made public Wednesday and court documents. That conflict of interest could raise questions for lawmakers as Mr. Kennedy aims to run agencies that regulate the drug maker.The ethics records said Mr. Kennedy would continue to collect fees for cases in which he referred clients to Wisner Baum, a law firm suing Merck over Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, and is administered to adolescents to prevent cervical and other cancers later in life.The arrangement has earned Mr. Kennedy, one of the nation’s fiercest vaccine critics, more than $2.5 million in recent years, according to records filed with federal election officials for his presidential run and with the Office of Government Ethics as part of the confirmation process.A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.The first of many lawsuits claiming that young people were harmed by the vaccine is on trial in Los Angeles Superior Court. Mr. Kennedy has used X, the social media platform, to promote the claims; in 2022 he posted a video to recruit additional plaintiffs. Merck said the allegations have no merit.In the ethics records, Mr. Kennedy wrote that he is entitled to receive 10 percent of fees “awarded in contingency fee cases referred to the firm.” The records, which noted that he is not a lawyer in any of the cases, said he would retain a financial interest in cases even if confirmed, as long as the cases do not involve the government, such as those brought through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.Wisner Baum has paid Mr. Kennedy about $856,000 in 2024 and $1.6 million the year before, financial records filed with the government show. It was not clear from the records how much of that money came from cases involving Merck. Mr. Kennedy has also worked with Wisner Baum on other litigation, including cases related to the pesticide Roundup.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.

5 hours agoJoanna MorrisBBC News, North East and Cumbria

GoogleA cancer patient has spent more than 14 years receiving unnecessary chemotherapy, hospital bosses have admitted.

6 hours agoRachel StonehouseBBC West Investigations

BBCLives are being lost and families torn apart because of “woefully inadequate care” for people with eating disorders, according to a group of MPs.

More than 130 people used the UK’s first drug consumption clinic in the facility’s first week.

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO).

President Trump moved quickly on Monday to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation’s standing as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic.In an executive order issued about eight hours after he took the oath of office, Mr. Trump cited a string of reasons for the withdrawal, including the W.H.O.’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and the “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms.” He said the agency demands “unfairly onerous payments” from the United States, and complained that China pays less.The move was not unexpected. Mr. Trump has been railing against the W.H.O. since 2020, when he attacked the agency over its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and threatened to withhold United States funding from it. In July 2020, Mr. Trump took formal steps to withdraw from the agency. But after he lost the 2020 election, the threat did not materialize. On his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2021, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. blocked it from going into effect.Leaving the W.H.O. would mean, among other things, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have no access to the global data that the agency provides. When China characterized the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in 2020, it released the information to W.H.O., which shared it with other nations.More recently, the W.H.O. has become a target of conservatives over its work on a “pandemic treaty” to strengthen pandemic preparedness and set legally binding policies for member countries on surveillance of pathogens, rapid sharing of outbreak data, and building up local manufacturing and supply chains for vaccines and treatments, among others.Talks on the treaty broke down last year. In the United States, some Republican lawmakers viewed the agreement as a threat to American sovereignty.Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University who helped negotiate the treaty, said that a United States withdrawal from W.H.O. would be “a grievous wound” to public health but an “even deeper wound to American national interests and national security.”Founded in 1948 with help from the United States, the World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations. Its mission, according to its website, is to “confront the biggest health challenges of our time and measurably advance the well-being of the world’s people.”That includes bringing aid to war-torn areas like Gaza and tracking emerging epidemics like Zika, Ebola and Covid-19. The annual budget of W.H.O. is about $6.8 billion; the United States has typically contributed an outsize share.According to Mr. Gostin, it will take some time for the United States to withdraw. A joint resolution adopted by Congress at the agency’s founding addressed a potential withdrawal, and requires the United States to give a year’s notice and pay its financial obligations to the organization for the current fiscal year.

A host of hospital building projects in England are being delayed with some having to wait up to 14 years before work starts, the government says.