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      The Guardian view on supporting vaccines: humans can work miracles – so why wouldn’t we? | Editorial

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      It is easy to become so used to scientific and social advances that we take them for granted. But sometimes we should pause to celebrate – to feel genuine awe – at the wonders that we have seen. Amid all the wars, the disasters and the crimes of the last half century, we have witnessed nothing short of a miracle.Vaccination, in addition to clean water, sanitation and improved nutrition, has been one of the greatest contributors to global health. It is responsible for much of the astounding fall in child mortality, which plummeted by 59% between 1990 and 2022. It has saved more than 150 million lives, mostly of infants, since the Expanded Programme on Immunisation was launched by the World Health Organization in 1974. Initially designed to protect children against diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, polio and measles, the scheme has since been extended to cover more pathogens. Then, in 2000, came the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), a public-private organisation that provides financial and technical support for vaccination in poorer countries and negotiates with manufacturers to lower costs.The results have been remarkable. Prevention is better – and cheaper and easier – than cure. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. Almost all the world is now polio-free. Cases of many other diseases have been slashed. Much more can be done: an estimated 5 million children have been protected against malaria since routine vaccinations were launched a year ago. And from a scientific perspective, we are entering a golden age of vaccines.Yet this is a dangerous moment in other ways. The climate crisis is spurring disease outbreaks. Conflict has dramatically increased the number of unprotected children. Vaccine scepticism has grown. Now cuts to funding threaten to turn the clock back. The trashing of USAid will hinder delivery and has halted a groundbreaking programme to create new malaria vaccines. Robert F Kennedy Jr – who once claimed that “no vaccine is safe and effective” and who tried to persuade the US government to rescind authorisation for the coronavirus vaccine at the height of the pandemic – was confirmed this week as health secretary.Now the UK, one of Gavi’s founding donors and the country which has given most to its core programme, is considering a significant cut to its support. This would be a grave error. While some aspects of Gavi’s approach have faced sensible scrutiny in the past, it has vaccinated over 1 billion children and done so cost-effectively: 97 pence in every pound it is given goes on vaccine programmes. Its success is also evident in the number of countries which have graduated from being beneficiaries to paying their own way; some, including Indonesia, are becoming donors in turn. And Gavi’s stockpiles help to keep people safe in wealthier countries too, as well as ensuring that poorer nations are healthier and more stable.For all these reasons, Gavi has long enjoyed bipartisan support in the UK, which has given it more than £2bn over the last four years. Now, more than ever, its funding must be sustained. The world is full of apparently intractable conflicts and complex moral dilemmas. Few decisions are truly simple for governments. But this one is a no-brainer. It should astonish us that we can so easily save lives. It should be self-evident that we must continue to seize that opportunity. More

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      Judge pauses Trump’s order restricting healthcare for transgender youth

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      A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s recent executive order aimed at restricting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people under age 19.The judge’s ruling came after a lawsuit was filed earlier this month on behalf of families with transgender or non-binary children who allege their healthcare has already been compromised by the president’s order. A national group for family of LGBTQ+ people and a doctors organization are also plaintiffs in the court challenge, one of many lawsuits opposing a slew of executive orders Trump has issued as he seeks to reverse the policies of former president Joe Biden.Judge Brendan Hurson, who was nominated by Biden, granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order following a hearing in federal court in Baltimore. The ruling, in effect for 14 days, essentially puts Trump’s directive on hold while the case proceeds. The restraining order could also be extended.Trump’s executive order “seems to deny that this population even exists, or deserves to exist”, Hurson said.Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing federally run insurance programs to exclude coverage for gender-affirming care. That includes Medicaid, which covers such services in some states, and Tricare for military families. Trump’s order also called on the Department of Justice to vigorously pursue litigation and legislation to oppose the practice.The lawsuit includes several accounts from families of appointments being canceled as medical institutions react to the new directive.Attorneys for the plaintiffs argue Trump’s executive order is “unlawful and unconstitutional” because it seeks to withhold federal funds previously authorized by Congress and because it violates anti-discrimination laws while infringing on the rights of parents.Like legal challenges to state bans on gender-affirming care, the lawsuit also alleges the policy is discriminatory because it allows federal funds to cover the same treatments when they are not used for gender transition.Some hospitals immediately paused gender-affirming care, including prescriptions for puberty blockers and hormone therapy, while they assess how the order affects them.Trump’s approach on the issue represents an abrupt change from the Biden administration, which sought to explicitly extend civil rights protections to transgender people. Trump has used strong language in opposing gender-affirming care, asserting falsely that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex”.Major medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics support access to gender-affirming care.Young people who persistently identify as a gender that differs from their sex assigned at birth are first evaluated by a team of professionals. Some may try a social transition, involving changing a hairstyle or pronouns. Some may later also receive puberty blockers or hormones. Surgery is extremely rare for minors. More

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      Judge blocks Trump from cutting billions in medical research funding

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      A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked Donald Trump’s administration from cutting scientific research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after 22 mostly Democratic-leaning states sued.The Trump administration sought to impose a 15% cap on “indirect costs” for grants – money that goes toward overhead, such as keeping the lights on in labs or maintaining advanced equipment. On Tuesday, major universities filed a second lawsuit, calling the administration’s actions “flagrantly unlawful” in a complaint.“A cut to [indirect costs] for NIH grants is a cut to the medical research that helps countless American families whose loved ones face incurable diseases or untreatable debilitating conditions,” a group of university associations said in a statement.Indirect costs, “are the real and necessary costs of conducting the groundbreaking research that has led to so many medical breakthroughs over the past decades”, they said.Speedy court action to block the proposed cuts comes at a time when the Trump administration is teasing the idea of ignoring courts, prompting fears of a constitutional crisis.“To hand his billionaire backers another tax cut, Trump tried to slash funding for critical disease prevention research, including for pediatric cancer,” Ken Martin, Democratic National Committee chair, said in a statement.“We aren’t going to sit back as Trump goes after America’s kids.”The NIH is an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services. With a budget of $48bn, it is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research, with impacts that ripple across the scientific world.NIH grants fund a vast array of science, especially including early stage research that leads to blockbuster drugs. The agency’s grants have contributed to many of the drugs Americans are now familiar with, including statins such as Lipitor and curative hepatitis C drugs such as Harvoni.NIH-funded basic or applied research has also contributed to 386 of the 387 drugs the Food and Drug Administration approved between 2000 and 2019, and more than 100 Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists based on NIH-funded work.In one of the first social media posts since Trump’s inauguration, the NIH said that the 15% cap on indirect costs would save $4bn per year, and singled out Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins as spending too much on overhead.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough the NIH’s budget is less than 1% of all federal spending, the scientific agency has become a target of the Trump administration, and cutting the NIH serves multiple aims.The move comes ahead of an expected debate to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. The cuts helped billionaires pay less in taxes than the working class for the first time. An extension is expected to add to a huge budget deficit.Many of Trump’s supporters also criticized the NIH following the Covid-19 pandemic, and laid out plans to dramatically reorganize it in Project 2025. Additionally, cutting NIH grants hits American universities, including many elite research institutions, in their pocketbooks. The administration has repeatedly attacked such universities as bastions of liberalism.This is not the first time Trump proposed cutting scientific research. In 2017, his budget attempted to slash scientific research funding.Within scientific circles, many agree the NIH could benefit from reform. However, many also argue the process needs to be transparent and involve stakeholders. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has mass appeal despite his extreme ideas. This theory explains why | Darren Loucaides

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      “Back at home in the United States, the newspapers are saying that I came here today to speak to about 5,000 Nazis,” Robert F Kennedy Jr told a large crowd in Berlin. Estimated at 38,000 people, the crowd was a mix of hippies, anti-war types, Green party voters and anti-vaxxers, rubbing shoulders with a smattering of skinheads. It was late August 2020 and a group called Querdenken had rallied this motley crew together in defiance of Covid-19 restrictions.“Governments love pandemics,” Kennedy said. “They love pandemics for the same reason they love war – it gives them the ability to impose controls that the population would otherwise never accept.”Last month, in Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as the US secretary of health and human services, Kennedy was questioned on having previously compared the Center for Disease Control’s work to that of “Nazi death camps”, calling Covid-19 a bioweapon genetically engineered to target black and white people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, and blaming school shootings on antidepressants. “He has made it his life’s work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids life-saving vaccines,” said the Democratic senator Ron Wyden. “It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power.”Kennedy has gone from courting the conspiratorial fringes of the internet to the halls of the White House. He could be confirmed within days. With hindsight, the Berlin speech he gave five years ago was the moment a dangerous new political phenomenon went global. It’s called diagonalism.Coined by the political theorist William Callison and the historian Quinn Slobodian, diagonalism describes the union of disparate groups across the political spectrum around a suspicion of all power being involved in conspiracy. Diagonal movements see big tech, big pharma, banks, climate science and traditional media as accomplices in totalitarianism, evidenced by Covid mandates through to innocuous intergovernmental proposals such as the “great reset” and 15-minute cities.For diagonalists, the control of electoral processes by powerful interests means that governments are de facto illegitimate. And so they advocate for distributed power – not to empower any community, but the individual. By definition they are susceptible to far-right radicalisation. Callison and Slobodian trace their use of the term back to Querdenken – which roughly translates as “lateral thinkers” – the group that organised the Berlin rally addressed by Kennedy.Kennedy recalled his uncle’s visit to the same city decades earlier, even repeating the historic line “Ich bin ein Berliner”. “And today again, Berlin is the frontline against global totalitarianism,” he said, before working through a bingo card of conspiracy theories. An extended “quote” Kennedy read from Hermann Göring’s testimony at the Nuremberg trials, including that “the only thing a government needs to make people into slaves is fear”, was copy and pasted across social media for months afterwards – even though there is no record of Göring saying those words.But Kennedy’s Berlin speech and the Querdenken rally itself were not merely notable for the controversy they caused. In drawing together veterans of anti-war and anti-globalist groups alongside health influencers, environmentalists and the far right, Querdenken became the blueprint for diagonal movements. Through its anti-power conspiratorial framing and the mirroring of methods used by decentralised grassroots movements, Querdenken was able to draw diagonal lines across pre-existing political allegiances, cultural divides and single issues, such as the climate or vaccines, to forge a mass coalition of support. Kennedy himself epitomises this new coalition – one that was nascent at the time, but is now at the heart of Trumpism.As a former environmental lawyer, Kennedy spoke with eloquence and passion in the past about corporations contaminating rivers and polluting the skies, the plight of asthma especially afflicting black people, and the existential threat of the climate crisis. In the Berlin speech, Kennedy mingled conspiracy theories with genuine concerns and anxieties held by the public. He said he saw “people who want leaders who are not going to lie to them, people who want leaders who will not make up arbitrary rules and regulations to orchestrate the obedience of the population. We want health officials who don’t have financial entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry, who are working for us and not big pharma.”In her book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes powerfully on how diagonal movements and influencers often identify real issues that progressives had grown timid about – the sway of oligarchical wealth over politics, the rise of digital surveillance, the impact of rampant capitalism on our mental and physical health. But instead of articulating the actual causes or plausible solutions, they have constructed bogus metanarratives. Rather than increasingly antidemocratic billionaires, it was an organised cabal of global elites, unaccountable deep-state bureaucrats who secretly ran the world – or, at the furthest end, blood-sucking satanists, as QAnon followers believed. A mirrorworld had emerged. And it is demagogues such as Trump who have benefited.“Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right, political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism,” says Klein, “folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing ‘wokeness’ and drumming up fears of migrant ‘invasions’. Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and to believe themselves to be) ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.”While the crowd that listened to Kennedy’s speech that day in 2020 was a heterogeneous mix, a few miles away, a mob of far-right activists and QAnon supporters tried to storm the Reichstag, home to Germany’s parliament, after one of their number falsely announced Trump was in Berlin to liberate the country. The violent scenes would be replicated in the more deadly assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. This was the extreme end of diagonalism exploding into life. (An investigation I led into Covid-sceptic groups found that by then, Querdenken and others had become obsessed with Trump – and gravely radicalised.)If Robert F Kennedy Jr is confirmed to Trump’s cabinet, a once-staunch environmentalist and defender of women’s reproductive rights turned conspiracy theorist and super-spreader of health misinformation will dictate health policy in the US. Diagonalism has ascended to the pinnacle of global power. The mirrorworld is becoming our reality.

      Darren Loucaides is a writer based in Barcelona and London

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      Did RFK Jr really drink fish medicine? He definitely has weird ideas about ‘making America healthy again’ | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is many things, but he is not a tropical fish. Someone should probably tell him this because he appears to be guzzling fish medicine. Last week, a video of RFK sitting on a plane and putting a strange blue liquid into his glass of water went viral. It’s not clear what he was taking, but online sleuths are convinced it was methylene blue, which is used to treat parasites in fish as well as aquatic ailments such as swim bladder disease.To be fair, methylene blue does have human uses – in the US, it is FDA-approved to treat a rare blood disorder. Over the last few years, however, it has been touted as a miracle drug in wellness circles and people have been using it off-label in the hopes of staving off everything from jet lag to ageing. “Looks like RFK Jr is in on one of the best-kept secrets in biohacking – methylene blue,” wrote one prominent wellness influencer after the viral video. “When used correctly, it’s a gamechanger for mental clarity and longevity.”That’s a stretch. While some studies show methylene blue may help with those things, self-medicating is a bad idea. Too much of the stuff can turn your urine blue, for one thing. More importantly, it can interact with certain medications, which can have serious consequences.We don’t know for sure that it was methylene blue. But we do know that Kennedy, who is a prominent anti-vaxxer, has a lot of strange – and arguably very dangerous – ideas about medicine. These may stem from some of his own health problems, including one issue he memorably said “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”. According to the New York Times, the worm may have actually been a “pork tapeworm larva”. Tapeworms aside, Kennedy’s wellness opinions would be entirely his business were it not for the fact that he is closing in on the role of secretary of health and human services and is poised to inflict his ideas on the rest of us, all in the name of a movement he has termed “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha). Like every Maga movement, this one is being aggressively monetised: Kennedy has applied to trademark Maha for use in marketing potential products including food supplements, vitamins and (oddly) vaccines.Some people are aghast at his ideas; others are ecstatic about the prospect of him upending the US’s approach to food and healthcare. There has been a lot of coverage about the “crunchy moms” who are quite justifiably horrified about all the rubbish that is in processed foods and are thrilled by the Maha agenda.It’s interesting, however, to see just how much of the discourse around Maha seems to focus on woo-woo-women and their silly little wellness ideas, because – as Kennedy demonstrates – it’s men who are increasingly dominating the alternative health (if you’re being diplomatic) or pseudoscientific quackery (if you’re not) space. That’s partly because Silicon Valley has rebranded being obsessed with your health as “biohacking”. Men who are into biohacking and longevity don’t casually take vitamin pills like the rest of us. No, no, they build supplementation protocols and personalised “supplement stacks”. Supplementing appears to have become an extreme sport among a certain type of wellness bro: the more pills you swallow, the more macho you are. Bahram Akradi, the 63-year-old CEO of a gym chain, for example, recently said he’s been taking “about 45 to 50” pills every morning for years. Meanwhile, Bryan Johnson, the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur who is spending millions of dollars trying to de-age himself, takes more than 100 pills a day. According to one interview, he wakes up at 4.30am and takes 57 pills, does some ab stimulation, then takes 34 more.Spending a fortune on experimental pills, and not even the fun kind, is about as stupid as it sounds. I don’t know what Akradi has been taking, but for about five years Johnson was downing a pill called rapamycin that had been found to extend the lifespan of mice. But Johnson is not a mouse and he recently quit taking it because another study found it might increase ageing in humans. I think Alanis Morissette would call this ironic, don’t you think?Anyway, the upshot of all this is that the takeover of the US government by weirdos with dangerous ideas continues apace. Meanwhile, remember that you are not a mouse or a fish, and design your “supplementation protocol” accordingly. More

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      Trump administration to cut billions in medical research funding

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      The Trump administration is cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding for universities, hospitals and other scientific institutions by reducing the amount they get in associated costs to support such research.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that it was reducing the amount of “indirect” medical research funding going to institutions, which will cut spending by $4bn a year.A limit of 15% of grants awarded to institutions will be allowed for associated costs such as buildings, equipment and support staff. This is a major reduction on what was previously allowed under the NIH grant system.“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” the NIH said in a statement on Friday. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”In the financial year of 2023, $9bn out of $35bn in awarded grants went to cover overheads, the NIH said, adding that the new rate will be more in line with requirements of private foundations.The move has been hailed by supporters of Trump’s attempts to slash government spending. The “department of government efficiency”, headed by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, welcomed the funding cut, tweeting that it was an “amazing job” by the NIH.However, researchers warned that the cut will imperil vital medical research. “This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” said Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, which represents universities and academic medical centers. “Reimbursement of facilities and administrative expenditures are part and parcel of the total costs of conducting world-class research.“America’s competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound. We urge NIH leaders to rescind this dangerous policy before its harms are felt by Americans.”Democrats also criticized the decision, which follows a broader freeze on some research grants imposed by the Trump administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact of the funding cut will “be nothing short of catastrophic for so much of the lifesaving research patients and families are counting on”, said Patty Murray, a Democratic senator.“Sick kids may not get the treatment they need. Clinical trials may be shut down abruptly with dangerous consequences. Just because Elon Musk doesn’t understand indirect costs doesn’t mean Americans should have to pay the price with their lives.” More

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      Be clear about what Trump and Musk’s aid axe will do: people will face terror and starve, many will die | Gordon Brown

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      An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or above could not have caused more carnage. Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people. Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.But while the Gaza plan is as yet only on the drawing board, USAid cuts – which will see funding slashed and just 290 of the more than 10,000 employees worldwide retained, according to the New York Times – have already begun to bite this week. We have seen the halting of landmine-clearing work in Asia, support for war veterans and independent media in Ukraine, and assistance for Rohingya refugees on the border of Bangladesh. This week, drug deliveries to fight the current mpox and Ebola outbreaks in Africa have been stopped, life-saving food lies rotting at African ports, and even initiatives targeting trafficking of drugs like fentanyl have been cut back. One of the world’s most respected charities, Brac, says that the 90-day blanket ban on helping vulnerable people is depriving 3.5 million people of vital services.One critical programme has been granted a limited waiver. Pepfar, created by Republican president George W Bush, offers antiretroviral prescriptions to 20 million people around the world to combat HIV and Aids. Its activities escaped the ban only after warnings that a 90-day stoppage could lead to 136,000 babies acquiring HIV. But it has still been blocked from organising cervical cancer screening, treating malaria, tuberculosis and polio, assisting maternal and child health, and efforts to curtail outbreaks of Ebola, Marburg and mpox.Not only does the stop-work edict mean that, in a matter of days, the US has destroyed the work of decades building up goodwill around the world, but Trump’s claim that America has been over-generous is exposed as yet another exaggeration. Norway tops the list as biggest donor of official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) at 1.09%; Britain is at just over 0.5%, albeit down from the UN target of 0.7%; but the US is near the bottom of the advanced economies at 0.24% – alongside Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is simply the size of the US economy – 26% of world output – that means that the 0.24% adds up to more aid than any other country. The US provided $66bn in 2023, making USAid a leader in global humanitarian aid, education and health, not least in addressing HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that USAid had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”. “I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap,” his press spokesperson added, with one of the president’s chief advisers Elon Musk calling the agency a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair,” he said. “We’re shutting it down.”View image in fullscreenIndeed, in a post on X last weekend, Musk shared a screenshot quoting the false claim that “less than 10 percent of our foreign assistance dollars flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities”. The implication is that the remaining 90% was diverted, stolen, or just wasted. In fact, the 10% figure is the proportion of the budget going directly to NGOs and organisations in the developing world. The remaining 90% is not wasted – instead, it comprises all the goods and services that USAid, American companies and NGOs, and multilateral organisations deliver in kind, from HIV drugs to emergency food aid, malaria bed nets, and treatment for malnutrition. It is simply untrue that 90% of aid falls into the wrong hands and never reaches the most vulnerable.In fact, the initial blanket executive order proved to be such a blunt instrument – the only initial exemptions were for emergency food aid and for military funding for Israel and Egypt – that it had to be modified to include exceptions for what the government called “life-saving humanitarian assistance”, although it stopped short of defining them. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot,” said a statement released by the state department. The new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, now wants his department to control the whole budget and close down USAid entirely. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Rubio asked in a statement that suggested that the America which generally worked multilaterally in a unipolar era is now determined to act unilaterally in a multipolar one.This new stance is not just “America first” but “America first and only” – and a gift to Hamas, IS, the Houthi rebels, and all who wish to show that coexistence with the US is impossible. The shutdown is also good news for China, whose own global development initiative will be strengthened as it positions itself to replace America. Desperate people will turn to extremists who will say that the US can never again be trusted. And by causing misery and by alienating actual and possible allies, far from making America great again, the cancellation of aid will only make America weaker.The tragedy for the planet is that US aid cuts come on top of diminishing aid budgets among the world’s richest economies, from Germany to the UK. International aid agencies are now so underfunded that in 2024, for the second consecutive year, the UN covered less than half of its humanitarian funding goal of nearly $50bn – at a time when increasing conflicts and natural disasters necessitate more relief donor grants than ever. Yes, we can discuss how greater reciprocity can create a fairer system of burden sharing – but further cuts in aid threaten more avoidable deaths, and a poorer world will ultimately make the US poorer too.US generosity is often seen as mere charity, but it is in the country’s self-interest to be generous because the creation of a more stable world benefits us all. We all gain if USAid can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine. Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes “America first” can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.

      Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010 More