Vaccination and Immunization

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    Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies

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    It’s such a bother when politicians have to go and complicate your clean narrative about why they’re succeeding.Last week, I spoke to Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado. Polis’s state was, if not a bright spot for Democrats, a less-dark one. In New York, Democrats lost 11 points off their 2020 margin; in New Jersey, 10 points; in Massachusetts, nine and a half points; in California, nine points (though votes are still being counted); in Illinois, seven points. In Colorado, the difference was two and a half points. What is Polis, who won re-election in 2022 by a 19-point margin, doing right?One answer — and this, to be honest, was the answer I’d gone looking for — is focusing relentlessly on the cost of living. “You can’t just do one policy and expect, somehow, people will know it,” Polis told me. “But they generally understand the drumbeat of 30, 40 things you’re doing, each of which reduces costs in a different way. And so that’s been our strategy: to flood the zone with this work to reduce costs.”Polis points with pride to his successful efforts to expand pre-K and kindergarten and get a public insurance option onto the Colorado health exchanges — but also to his rejection of proposals to add benefits that would drive up costs. He’s happy to brag about reducing the tax rate for both businesses and individuals, walking me through every decimal-point reduction he achieved, and the many bills he’s signed to make it easier to build homes.“When you say something a lot, it means you generally believe it,” Polis said. “So here’s a line I often use: We want the best solutions from the left and the right to save people money.”But during our conversation, and in the days after, another answer emerged — and for Democrats this one is a little more challenging. Polis is a dissenter from the trends that swept through Democratic governance during the pandemic. He was unusual among Democratic governors for the emphasis he put on both personal responsibility and personal liberty. Colorado opened early, sparking a tourism boom, and Polis tried to rely more on information than compulsion.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. More

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      How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Destroy One of Civilization’s Best Achievements

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      Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.His opposition to vaccines has attracted the most attention. He doesn’t say just that they merit closer scrutiny, as some “vaccine skeptics” claim. Last year he told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” When it later became expedient, he denied that he had ever said such a thing. The truth is that he has long promoted the lie that vaccines cause autism, and the extravagantly false claim that “researchers have done very little to study the health” of children after they get shots for once-common diseases.Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.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. More

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      Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Bizarre Health Claims

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      Seven years after Americans celebrated the licensing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to finance a nationwide vaccination program to stamp out what he called the “ancient enemies of our children”: infectious disease.Now Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s chief critic of vaccines — a public health intervention that has saved millions of lives — and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to become the next secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy calls himself a vaccine safety activist. The press calls him a vaccine skeptic. His detractors call him an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.Whatever one calls him, Mr. Kennedy is a polarizing choice whose views on certain public health matters beyond vaccination are far outside the mainstream. He opposes fluoride in water. He favors raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration deems risky. And he has promoted unproven therapies like hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. His own relatives called his presidential bid “dangerous for our country.”If there is a through line to Mr. Kennedy’s thinking, it appears to be a deep mistrust of corporate influence on health and medicine. In some cases, that has led him to support positions that are also embraced by public health professionals, including his push to get ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to obesity, off grocery store shelves. His disdain for profit-seeking pharmaceutical manufacturers and food companies drew applause on the campaign trail.People close to him say his commitment to “make America healthy again” is heartfelt.“This is his life’s mission,” said Brian Festa, a founder of We the Patriots U.S.A., a “medical freedom” group that has pushed back on vaccine mandates, who said he has known Mr. Kennedy for years.But like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy also has a tendency to float wild theories based on scanty evidence. And he has hinted at taking actions, like prosecuting leading medical journals, that have unnerved the medical community. On Friday, many leading public health experts reacted to his nomination with alarm.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. More

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      Polio Vaccination Underway in Gaza

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      Aid agencies said that children in some areas of northern Gaza where Israel is mounting an offensive against Hamas will miss the doses, compromising the effectiveness of the campaign.Thousands of children in Gaza City were receiving a second dose of polio vaccine this weekend in an effort that was delayed by intense Israeli bombardment and mass evacuation orders in northern Gaza, the United Nations and other aid agencies said.The second phase of the vaccination campaign was originally set to begin on Oct. 23 across the north of the territory, but it was postponed due to a lack of assurances about pauses in the fighting and bombardment to ensure the safety of health workers, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said in a statement on Friday.The first round of vaccinations in September took place across northern Gaza. Since then, the Israeli military has launched an intense offensive in northern Gaza against what it has said is a resurgence of Hamas in the area.A humanitarian pause for the second phase of the vaccination campaign was only assured for Gaza City, according to the U.N. agencies. They said that around 15,000 children under 10 in northern towns where the Israeli military has been carrying out the offensive over the last few weeks “remain inaccessible and will be missed during the campaign, compromising its effectiveness.”COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, said on Sunday that 58,604 children under 10 had been vaccinated in northern Gaza since the second phase of the campaign began a day earlier. It added that Israel would continue to work to “facilitate an effective vaccination campaign.”The Gazan Health Ministry confirmed the number of vaccinations, and the campaign was expected to continue through Monday.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. More

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      Rabies Death in Minnesota Linked to Exposure to Bat, Officials Say

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      The death, which was reported on Friday, is only the fifth fatal human rabies case in Minnesota since 1975, health officials said.A patient who was exposed to a bat in western Minnesota this year died from rabies this week, becoming the fifth person since 1975 to die from the treatable disease in the state, health officials said on Friday.The Minnesota Department of Health said in a statement that it was still investigating the death, and did not explicitly say that a bat had caused the rabies but confirmed that the patient was exposed to a bat in July.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the patient’s rabies diagnosis earlier this month. The Minnesota Department of Health said there was not a public health risk.Fewer than 10 rabies deaths are reported annually in the United States, according to the C.D.C., and 70 percent of those deaths are attributed to exposure to bats.Previous human cases in Minnesota — all of which were fatal — were recorded in 1917, 1964, 1975, 2000, 2007 and 2021, according to the department.“If left untreated, rabies is almost always fatal,” the department said. “Rabies treatment has proven to be nearly 100 percent effective at preventing the disease after an exposure, but it must be started before symptoms of rabies appear.”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. More

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      W.H.O. Authorizes Mpox Vaccine, Clearing Way for Use in Africa

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      The decision is a crucial step in getting shots to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the center of the outbreak.The World Health Organization has given its authorization to a first vaccine to protect against mpox, a decision announced in such haste on Friday that it caught even the head of the company that makes the vaccine by surprise.The vaccine, made by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, has been approved by the regulatory authorities in Europe as well as the United States and other high-income countries since a global mpox outbreak in 2022. But low- and middle-income countries rely on the W.H.O., through a process called prequalification, to determine which drugs, vaccines and health technologies are safe and efficient uses of limited health funding, and the organization had declined to act until now.The W.H.O. had come under increasing criticism for declaring a global public health emergency for mpox last month without giving a vaccine that prequalification stamp of approval, or a more provisional form of approval called emergency use authorization. Bavarian Nordic first submitted its safety and effectiveness data on the vaccine, called Jynneos, to the W.H.O. in 2023. The W.H.O. had defended its slow pace of review, saying that it needed to subject the vaccine to careful study because it, and two others that have been used to protect against mpox, were originally designed as smallpox immunizations, and because delivering it in low-resource settings such as Central Africa would involve factors different from those relating to its use in high-income countries.But on Friday morning, the W.H.O. suddenly said it was authorizing the shot.“This first prequalification of a vaccine against mpox is an important step in our fight against the disease, both in the context of the current outbreaks in Africa, and in future,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general, said in a statement.Paul Chaplin, Bavarian Nordic’s chief executive, said he was among the many who had been caught off guard.“We’ve got there eventually — I don’t know quite how,” he said. “But it’s good news. It’s going to make the regulatory pathway much easier.”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. More

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      As Polio Vaccines Arrive in Gaza, Distributing Them Is the Next Challenge

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      Polio vaccines arrived in Gaza on Monday, kicking off an expansive effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said, after the first confirmed case of the disease in the territory in 25 years.The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, said it was bringing in 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine for children in Gaza in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, and other groups.The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed on Monday that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to launch the vaccination campaign for children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to vaccination centers in Gaza, where continued hostilities and bombardment have hindered humanitarian efforts during 10 months of war.The ministry warned that inoculations alone could not be effective, amid a lack of clean water and personal hygiene supplies, and issues with sewage and waste collection in overcrowded areas where displaced families were sheltering. It said medical teams would need to spread out across the territory, “which requires an urgent cease-fire.”Children walking near garbage and raw sewage at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al Balah in central Gaza this month.Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe W.H.O. chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement on Thursday that a 10-month-old child in Gaza had contracted polio and become paralyzed in one leg. The virus had been found last month in wastewater samples, but this was the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter-century.COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement on Monday that the vaccines had been delivered to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel. The agency added that the campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses” that it observes, which it said would allow Palestinians to reach vaccination centers.In June, Israel announced that it would observe partial daily suspensions of its military activity in areas of Gaza, calling them humanitarian pauses, saying they were aimed at making it safer for humanitarian groups to deliver aid in the territory. According to UNICEF, at least 95 percent of children will need to receive both doses of the vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease and reduce the risk of its re-emergence, “given the severely disrupted health, water and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip.”UNICEF and the W.H.O. in a statement called on “all parties to the conflict” to implement a weeklong humanitarian pause in Gaza to allow “children and families to safely reach health facilities” for the doses. The statement added that “without the humanitarian pauses, the delivery of the campaign will not be possible.”Philippe Lazzarini, the director of UNRWA, said on Friday that the agency’s medical teams would distribute the vaccines at its clinics and through its mobile health teams. He added that “delaying a humanitarian pause will increase the risk of spread among children.”Rawan Sheikh Ahmad More

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      Leonard Hayflick, Who Discovered Why No One Lives Forever, Dies at 96

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      A biomedical researcher, he found that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times before they age — which, he said, explained aging on a cellular level.Leonard Hayflick, a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times — setting a limit on the human life span and frustrating would-be-immortalists everywhere — died on Aug. 1 at his home in Sea Ranch, Calif. He was 96.His son, Joel Hayflick, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.As senescent cells accumulate, he posited, the body itself begins to age and decline. The only cells that do not go into senescence, he added, are cancer cells.As a result of this cellular clock, he said, no amount of diet or exercise or genetic tweaking will push the human species past a life span of about 125 years.This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.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. More

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      Fauci Speaks His Mind on Trump’s Rages and Their ‘Complicated’ Relationship

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      In a new book, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts a career advising seven presidents. The chapter about Donald J. Trump is titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.”Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cellphone to President Donald J. Trump screaming at him in an expletive-laden rant. He had incurred the president’s wrath by remarking that the vaccines under development might not provide long-lasting immunity.That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the brunt of the president’s rage,” Dr. Fauci writes in his forthcoming autobiography.Dr. Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Mr. Trump. But in the book, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he writes with candor about their relationship, which he describes as “complicated.”In a chapter entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Dr. Fauci described how Mr. Trump repeatedly told him he “loved” him while at the same time excoriating him with tirades flecked with four-letter words.“The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Dr. Fauci wrote. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive.)“I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”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. More