Publisher Health

2 hours agoBen ChuBBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

11 hours agoJamie CoulsonHealth Correspondent

3 hours agoAsha PatelBBC News, Nottingham

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

4 hours agoSophie Hutchinson & Philippa RoxbyHealth correspondent

10 minutes ago

34 minutes agoAsha PatelBBC News, Nottingham

Health experts see his retreat from international cooperation as disrupting the safe-keepers of one of the world’s deadliest pathogens.President Trump’s order that the United States exit the World Health Organization could undo programs meant to ensure the safety, security and study of a deadly virus that once took half a billion lives, experts warn. His retreat, they add, could end decades in which the agency directed the management of smallpox virus remnants in an American-held cache.Health experts say discontinuation of the W.H.O.’s oversight threatens to damage precautions against the virus leaking into the world, and to disrupt research on countermeasures against the lethal disease. They add that it could also raise fears among allies and adversaries that the United States, under a veil of secrecy, might weaponize the smallpox virus.“I’ve been in that lab,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the American cache resides. “Imagine a submarine inside a building and the people walking around in spacesuits. It looks like something out of a movie.” To reduce smallpox risks and misperceptions, Dr. Frieden added, “we need to open ourselves up to inspection.”On Monday, Daniel R. Lucey, a Dartmouth medical professor, posted an article on the blog of the Infectious Diseases Society of America warning that Mr. Trump’s W.H.O. exit could imperil “smallpox virus storage, experiments, reporting and inspections.”A half century ago, the W.H.O. purged the smallpox virus from human populations after the scourge had killed people for thousands of years. Dr. Frieden called it “one of the greatest accomplishments not just of medical science but global collaboration.”While the germ was eradicated in people, two repositories were preserved to allow study of the virus should it re-emerge: one in Atlanta, the other in Russia. To curb leaks, both caches are stored in special labs classified as Biosafety Level 4, the highest tier of protection.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.