Tag: vaccination

RFK Jr. vowed to upend American health care. It’s happening faster than expected.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Five months later, federal health officials, industry executives and the public health community say they’re more worried than ever.

Kennedy in his first seven weeks atop the Department and Health and Human Services has dramatically reshaped the U.S. health apparatus, eliminating entire agency divisions, abruptly shifting policy priorities and leaving the sprawling department in what six current and former employees described as an unprecedented state of upheaval.

The health secretary and his team forced out top scientists in charge of developing new vaccines and evaluating the safety of medicines, stripping away centuries of collective expertise and institutional knowledge. Government offices that manage key functions like ensuring safe drinking water and alerting Americans to contaminated drugs have been decimated.

In the meantime, Kennedy appointees have sought greater control over scientific decision-making in agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration — going against longstanding norms and roiling a health sector that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy.

“It’s a mess,” said one former senior HHS official granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. “What was once a very robust place to work, that was trying to lead on innovation, is gone. It’s just gone.”

The rapid overhaul, punctuated by last week’s mass firing of 10,000 employees, has left the HHS workforce traumatized and the broader health community in deep distress, according to interviews with nine current and former health officials, as well as five other public health experts and industry officials, most of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.”

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““They got rid of all the people who made the place work,” said one health official. “It doesn’t seem to be achieving their aims. Unless their aim was just to cause chaos and torpedo morale.””

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/09/rfk-revamp-health-hhs-00280101

Two infants die of whooping cough in Louisiana as cases climb nationally

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Experts say they see peaks and valleys with these kinds of illnesses over the years, but there have been about 6,600 cases already in 2025, almost four times the number at this point last year.”

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“Concerned about increasing cases, experts are urging vaccination.
The US had more than 200,000 cases of whooping cough every year before the vaccine was introduced. By 1948, the vaccine was widely used, and infection rates began to drop.”

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“Boosters are recommended because protection from the vaccine can fade over time, which may be one reason for the ongoing outbreaks.

Declining vaccination rates are another reason. The percentage of US kindergartners who received the DTaP vaccine has steadily declined over the past five years, leaving thousands vulnerable to infection.

Organizers within the state say that although many people have become hesitant about vaccinations, another issue is a lack of access.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-infants-die-whooping-cough-205515737.html

‘He needs to do much more’: RFK Jr.’s measles response under scrutiny

Posted on by Lone Candle

““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.

“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”

Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.

“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”

Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.

As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.

“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””

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“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952

First death reported in Texas measles outbreak

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The first death has been reported in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, according to a press release sent out by the Texas Department of State Health Services Wednesday.
The victim was an unvaccinated child who was hospitalized in Lubbock last week.

The outbreak, starting in late January, has 124 confirmed cases, the majority of which are either children, unvaccinated people, or both. Eighteen people have been hospitalized, the state health department said.”

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“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last measles death in the United States was reported a decade ago in 2015. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which the CDC attributes to its vaccination program.

Vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in Texas have dropped slightly in recent years following the Covid-19 pandemic.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/26/texas-measles-outbreak-rfk-jr-00002698

The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Measles, mumps, and polio are supposed to be diseases of the past. In the early to mid-20th century, scientists developed vaccines that effectively eliminated the risk of anyone getting sick or dying from illnesses that had killed millions over millennia of human history.
Vaccines, alongside sanitized water and antibiotics, have marked the epoch of modern medicine. The US was at the cutting edge of eliminating these diseases, which helped propel life expectancy and economic growth in the postwar era.”

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“As long-accepted, lifesaving public health measures increasingly become politically polarized, routine vaccination rates are rapidly declining in much of the US. In the 2019–2020 school year, three states had less than 90 percent of K–12 students vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. By the 2023–2024 school year, 14 states had fallen below that threshold. The number of states with more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated — the preferred level of coverage to prevent outbreaks — dropped from 20 to 11 during that same period.

It is no surprise then that the number of US measles cases more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. Nobody has died of measles in the US since 2015, but if vaccination rates continue to decline, this highly contagious disease (one person can infect more than a dozen other people) will spread with increasing ease, which raises the risk that American kids could die.

We know how to prevent that. We’ve had remarkably safe, effective shots for decades. We just need to keep using them.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/386215/trump-rfk-jr-vaccines-health-measles-chart

One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”

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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””

https://reason.com/2024/11/01/one-more-damned-time-vaccines-do-not-cause-autism/

What you need to know about the new Covid-19 vaccine

Posted on by Lone Candle

“This updated version of the vaccine does not target the now-dominant KP.3.1.1 strain, and instead focuses on that variant’s immediate predecessors, including a strain known as KP.2. That strain was more prevalent when work began on the new formulation; long development times make it difficult for drug makers to pivot to target each new variant.
“Evolution doesn’t stop and let us catch up,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Vox. “Evolution is always moving, and there’s some unpredictability of where the virus may go.”

Still, scientists believe the new drug will provide the public with at least some increased measure of protection against severe sickness, including against the latest variants. And it could offer some protection against infection since it targets the close relatives of the current dominant variant.”

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“The CDC recommends that everyone age 6 months and up get one dose of the new vaccine, regardless of their previous vaccination status, and has stressed the importance of high-risk individuals keeping up with the latest vaccines. Other countries like Canada and the UK recommend that only those with high risk of hospitalization, serious illness, or death from the virus get inoculated.”

https://www.vox.com/public-health/368590/covid-shots-vaccine-mrna-pfizer-biontech-moderna-cvs-flirt-walgreens

Trump’s campaign against public health is back on

Posted on by Lone Candle

“People are already losing trust in vaccines: Only 40 percent of Americans believe it is extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated, down from 64 percent in 2001. It is perhaps the most worrying trend in public health right now.
We have the tools to stop many infectious diseases — if we take advantage of them. Trump’s words are making it less likely that people will.”

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“Meanwhile, measles cases in the US matched their 2023 total over just the first few months of 2024. A local outbreak in Oregon has seen nearly two dozen cases since June; at least two people have been hospitalized.

A disease that was once effectively eradicated in the US — and which school mandates helped to stamp out — is mounting a comeback.

Donald Trump could choose to wield his tremendous influence to try to restore people’s faith in vital public health measures. He did it, if half-heartedly, during the pandemic and it had the desired effect. Instead, he’s stoking doubts about the value of vaccines, and courting the dangers vaccine hesitancy brings.”

https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/366472/2024-election-donald-trump-vaccines-schools