Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.Much of Mr. Siri’s work — including the polio petition filed in 2022 — has been on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit whose founder is a close ally of Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Siri also represented Mr. Kennedy during his presidential campaign.Mr. Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said that he does not want to take away access to any vaccines. But as he prepares for his confirmation hearing and plans a fresh health agenda, his continuing close partnership with Mr. Siri suggests that vaccine policy will be under sharp scrutiny. It is a chilling prospect to many public health leaders, especially those who recall the deadly toll of some vaccine-mediated diseases.At the Trump transition headquarters in Florida, Mr. Siri has joined Mr. Kennedy in questioning and choosing candidates for top health positions, according to someone who observed the interactions but insisted on anonymity to disclose private conversations. They have asked candidates about their views of vaccines, the person said.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.

Scientists are concerned that the H5N1 virus could set off another human pandemic. But it is already putting species under pressure in the wild.Every spring, more than 200,000 northern gannets — stocky seabirds with dazzling white feathers — journey to the coast of eastern Canada. There, they blanket oceanside cliffs and rocky outcroppings, breeding in enormous colonies before flying back south for the winter.But in May 2022, as many females were getting ready to lay their eggs, the birds began dying in droves. “Thousands of northern gannets started to wash up on our shores,” said Stephanie Avery-Gomm, a seabird biologist and research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.The culprit: a bird flu virus, known as H5N1, that had recently arrived in North America. Over the months that followed, the virus raced through the region, killing tens of thousands of northern gannets.The carnage was “devastating,” Dr. Avery-Gomm said. “You have to harden your heart to work on this kind of scale of mortality.”Since a new version of H5N1 emerged in 2020, scientists have become increasingly concerned that the virus might set off the next pandemic, infecting people around the globe. But for the world’s wild birds, the prospect of a deadly, uncontained outbreak is not theoretical. The virus has already decimated avian populations around the globe, with body counts that can sometimes be staggering: an estimated 24,000 Cape cormorants killed in South Africa, more than 57,000 pelicans reported dead in Peru.“The scale of the mortalities is truly unprecedented,” said Johanna Harvey, an avian disease ecologist at the University of Maryland. “There’s nothing comparable historically.”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.

Most Americans, including doctors, have no memory of the devastating diseases that routinely threatened children until the 1960s.Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s picks for the government’s top health posts have expressed skepticism about the safety of childhood vaccines. It’s a sentiment shared by a growing number of parents, who are choosing to skip recommended shots for their children.But while everyone seems to be talking about the potential side effects of vaccines, few are discussing the diseases they prevent. It has been half a century or more since many of the inoculations became routine in the United States, and the experience of having these illnesses has been largely erased from public memory. Questions today about the risk-benefit ratio of vaccines might just be a product of the vaccines’ own success.Here is what people should know about six once-common illnesses that vaccines have contained for decades.MeaslesMeasles, a viral infection often spread by a cough or sneeze, is extraordinarily contagious: Nine out of 10 people around an infected person will catch measles if they have not been vaccinated. Measles can be contracted in a room up to two hours after a person with the disease has left it.Measles is not a mild illness, particularly for children under 5. It can cause a high fever, coughing, conjunctivitis and rashes, and if it leads to pneumonia or encephalitis — brain swelling — it can quickly become lethal. Before the vaccine was licensed in the United States in 1963, almost every child had contracted measles by age 15. Tens of thousands of measles patients were hospitalized each year, and between 400 and 500 of them died.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.

Sir Chris Hoy, six-time Olympic cycling champion, says there needs to be more conversations about health between men.

Richard DonaldsonA man who has been fighting

BBCDiary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett is amplifying harmful health misinformation on his number-one ranked podcast, a BBC investigation has found.

Getty Images”If I see someone tapping their fingers on a desk, my immediate thought is to chop their fingers off with a knife,” an anonymous patient confides to a researcher.

She was among hundreds of women who said they were coerced into sterilization at a California hospital in the 1970s. The lawsuit led to state and national reforms.Dolores Madrigal, the lead plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit brought by Latina women in California who said they were coerced into unwanted sterilization during childbirth at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1970s, died on Nov. 9 in Las Vegas. She was 90.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son Oren Madrigal.Ms. Madrigal was among several hundred Spanish-speaking women who said they were pressured into signing consent forms — written in English — agreeing to have their fallopian tubes tied during cesarean section deliveries. Ten of them filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County-U.S.C. Medical Center in 1975.The sterilizations occurred amid political hysteria about overpopulation: In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon had established the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, led by John D. Rockefeller III. The plaintiffs argued that the hospital, which received state and federal funding for family planning programs, was trying to lower the birthrate of Mexican American women — a charge hospital administrators and medical staff denied.After a bench trial in 1978, Judge Jesse W. Curtis Jr. of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled against the plaintiffs, writing in his decision that their “ability to understand and speak English is limited,” that the case was “essentially the result of a breakdown in communications” and that “one can hardly blame the doctors.”Ms. Madrigal’s experience showed otherwise, her attorneys had argued, and ultimately led to state and national reforms, including mandatory waiting periods for the procedure, known as tubal ligation, for women in labor, and requirements that doctors provide patients with consent forms in their native language.The coerced sterilizations brought news coverage and protests by women. Here, a 1977 poster advertises a public hearing and rally.Rachael Romero, San Francisco Poster Brigade, 1977We 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 government has said the first victims of the infected blood scandal will receive final compensation payments this week.

Hospitals in England are being hit by a “tidal wave” of flu and other winter viruses, NHS bosses say.