President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order calling for revamped childhood vaccine recommendations that promote his long-held but discredited theory that childhood shots should be spaced out into separate medical visits.
The number of measles cases in the U.S. has surpassed the record-breaking tally for all of 2025, with five more months of 2026 still to come.
Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die. ... Many more babies survive the bleeding but suffer massive brain bleeds and lasting injuries.
The mother of a 10-year-old girl who died from complications of measles has urged parents to have their children vaccinated amid a surge of cases.
Renae Archer was too young to have the MMR vaccine when she caught the infection at just five months old.
A decade later, she was diagnosed with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a very rare brain disease. She died in 2023.
Her mother Becky believes Renae might not have caught measles if more people had inoculated their children.
The measles outbreak in South Carolina is “accelerating” with no end in sight following Thanksgiving and other large gatherings, state health officials said Wednesday.
As of Wednesday, 111 measles cases had been reported in what’s known as upstate South Carolina — an area in the northwest of the state that includes Greenville and Spartanburg.
As you walk down a particular hallway on the seventh floor of the Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C., you'll find a line of photographic portraits of all the people from years past who have led the Public Health Corps at the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
Only one of those portraits is of a transgender person: Adm. Rachel Levine, who served for four years as President Biden's assistant secretary for health. She was the first transgender person to win Senate confirmation, and her portrait has been displayed in the hallway since soon after she was confirmed in 2021. The role is a four-star admiral position in charge of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service.
Levine's official portrait was recently altered, a spokesperson for HHS confirmed to NPR. A digital photograph of the portrait in the hallway obtained by NPR shows that Levine's previous name is now typed below the portrait, under the glass of the frame.
Robert F Kennedy Junior has claimed that circumcision raises a child's risk of being diagnosed with autism.
Speaking at today's televised cabinet meeting, the Health and Human Services Secretary said: 'There's two studies which show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they were given Tylenol.
Doctors in the US will soon be advised not to prescribe the pain reliever Tylenol to pregnant women, US President Donald Trump said, citing a disputed link between the drug and autism.
Trump made the announcement on Monday in the Oval Office alongside Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
The US president claimed that taking Tylenol, known as paracetamol elsewhere, "is no good" and that pregnant women should only take it in cases of extreme fever.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects, totaling $500 million, to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is winding down its mRNA vaccine development activities under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the agency announced Tuesday.
“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. The winding down will include the cancellation of some contracts, he added.
“BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality-control program for testing fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.
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The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products..
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A March meeting of outside advisers to the United States Food and Drug Administration to discuss the composition of flu vaccines for this fall’s flu season has been canceled, a member of the advisory committee told CNN.
The meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC, is held every March “to pick flu strains, because it’s a six-month production cycle for a vaccine released in September,” Dr. Paul Offit, a member of VRBPAC, told CNN Wednesday.
A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — a nd at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.
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According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.
