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Getty ImagesFormer professional darts champion Kevin Painter has thrown arrows almost every day for 40 years.

Vaccines today are more efficient and contain far fewer stimulants to the immune system than some used decades ago. It’s an idea as popular as it is incorrect: American babies now receive too many vaccines, which overwhelm their immune systems and lead to diseases like autism.This theory has been repeated so often that it has permeated the mainstream, echoed by President-elect Donald J. Trump and his pick to be the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is, like, 38 different vaccines and it looks like it’s been for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kennedy on a call in July. “And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically — I’ve seen it too many times.”On Sunday, Mr. Trump returned to the theme, saying Mr. Kennedy would investigate whether childhood vaccines caused autism, even though dozens of rigorous studies have already explored and dismissed that theory.“I think somebody has to find out,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”But the idea that today’s vaccines are overtaxing children’s immune systems is fundamentally flawed, experts said. Vaccines today are cleaner and more efficient, and they contain far fewer stimulants to the immune system — by orders of magnitude — than they did decades ago.What’s more, the immune reactions produced by vaccines are “minuscule” compared with those that children experience on a daily basis, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford University who advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines.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.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a survivor of polio, issued a pointed statement in support of the polio vaccine on Friday, hours after The New York Times reported that the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has petitioned federal regulators to withdraw the vaccine from the market.Without naming Mr. Kennedy, Mr. McConnell suggested that the petition could jeopardize his confirmation to be health secretary in the incoming Trump administration.“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” said Mr. McConnell, who is stepping down as his party’s Senate leader next month but could remain a pivotal vote in Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”Mr. Kennedy has said he does not want to take away anyone’s vaccines. His lawyer, Aaron Siri, filed the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit run by Mr. Kennedy’s former communications director. Mr. Siri is advising Mr. Kennedy as he vets candidates for the Department of Health and Human Services.Mr. McConnell, 82, of Kentucky, contracted polio as a child, more than a decade before the vaccine became widely available. When his left leg was paralyzed, his mother took him for treatment in Warm Springs, Ga., at the same treatment center frequented by another famous polio survivor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Although Mr. McConnell eventually recovered, the lingering effects of the disease followed him into adulthood, leaving him with a wobbly, uneven gait. He has spoken often of the experience.“From the age of 2, normal life without paralysis was only possible for me because of the miraculous combination of modern medicine and a mother’s love. But for millions who came after me, the real miracle was the saving power of the polio vaccine,” Mr. McConnell said.

A senior partner has also pleaded to obstruction of justice after destroying company documents.McKinsey & Company has agreed to pay $650 million to settle a Justice Department investigation of its work with the opioid maker Purdue Pharma. A former senior partner, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying internal company records in connection with that work.At the center of the government’s case was McKinsey’s advice that Purdue Pharma should “turbocharge” sales of Purdue’s flagship OxyContin painkiller in the midst of an opioid addiction epidemic that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. More than two dozen McKinsey partners consulted for Purdue over roughly 15 years, earning the firm $93 million.The settlement stemmed from charges brought by the U.S. attorney’s offices in Massachusetts and the Western District of Virginia.McKinsey has in recent years settled government investigations in this country and overseas by paying hundreds of millions of dollars while not admitting any wrongdoing. That is no longer true.McKinsey issued a statement on Friday apologizing for its work with the opioid maker“We are deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma and the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client,” the consulting firm wrote. “We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma. This terrible public health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm.”Mr. Elling’s decision to plead guilty to destroying internal company records follows an announcement this month by federal prosecutors that another former McKinsey senior partner, Vikas Sagar, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with paying bribes to secure South African government contracts for the firm. McKinsey had earlier fired Mr. Sagar.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.

A lawyer working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has asked the F.D.A. to withdraw approval of the current shot because it hasn’t been tested against a placebo. Scientists say such a test would be unethical.On the day in 1955 that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was pronounced “80 to 90 percent effective” against the form of the disease that caused paralysis, 500 medical scientists and 150 reporters jammed into an auditorium at the University of Michigan for the announcement. Pots clanged, horns honked and factory whistles blew around the country.In the seven decades since, polio — a disease that once killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world each year — has been vanquished in the United States.A lawyer advising Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the current polio vaccine, a successor to the Salk vaccine, because it has not been tested against a placebo.Experts say the move would be disastrous, because the polio virus is still around.“We would have big outbreaks of polio,” warned Dr. Walter Orenstein, who ran immunization programs for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the late 1980s and 1990s. Because some people infected with polio are asymptomatic, Dr. Orenstein said, the virus could spread through the population unnoticed — until people started getting paralyzed.The Salk vaccine was tested against a placebo in 1.8 million American first- and second-grade schoolchildren in a so-called double-blind placebo-controlled trial — the gold standard in American medicine, in which half the study subjects get an inert vaccine and doctors, parents and patients did not know who got which.Salk himself objected to the use of a placebo during the clinical trial; he couldn’t imagine depriving a child of a lifesaving vaccine. As the petition before the F.D.A. notes, the current vaccine, manufactured by Sanofi, was not tested against a placebo; scientists and doctors almost universally agree that withholding a lifesaving vaccine would be unethical.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.

A 2022 legal settlement established requirements to protect the health of minors detained at segments of the southern border. It ends nine days after Donald Trump takes office.A court-ordered system for protecting the health of children detained at the southern border, put in place two years ago after several children died in custody, is set to expire nine days after Donald J. Trump takes office with plans to intensify the deportation of migrants.The system, part of a July 2022 legal settlement between the government and lawyers representing migrant children in custody, set detailed protocols for detaining minors at Customs and Border Protection facilities in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso sectors. It required agents to provide them with access to emergency care and basic hygiene items — showers, toothbrushes and blankets for sleeping, for example. It forbade agents to separate children from their parents for extended periods of time.At the center of the reform was a new position: an independent pediatrician who was assigned to visit the facilities and work with staff members to improve them. That monitor role is set to phase out even sooner than the overall agreement, on Dec. 27.Despite notable improvements, reports from the pediatrician — the so-called juvenile care monitor — showed that the conditions still sometimes fell short. Now, medical experts worry that, with the settlement expiring and the monitoring role set to disappear, conditions could worsen under an administration far less friendly to immigrants.“This is not a bureaucratic shift — this should be everyone’s concern,” said Marsha Griffin, a pediatrician practicing on the southwest border who has visited the facilities. “This is a law enforcement agency with a law enforcement mentality, tasked with running a trauma-informed day care center. You just feel like screaming. Someone needs to watch them.”A spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection said that the agency had undertaken “extensive measures” in the past two years to “significantly expand and enhance its support efforts” for all people in custody — and particularly for children. She said the agency developed trauma-informed behavioral health training for employees, for example, and worked to better integrate pediatricians into the medical care process for minors in custody. It also issued a formal policy to define when agents could separate children from their parents.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.

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.