Subterms
Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by grief, fear and isolation, many of us wondered: When will things go back to normal? Could they ever? Today, for many, the coronavirus pandemic seems far away and foggy, while for others it’s as visceral […] More
We left a world we might not get back to. Many things that we took for granted never returned to their former levels, with no guarantee they ever will. The pandemic took a hammer to society and left us struggling to climb back from shutdowns, from fear and from illness. It can be easy, in […] More
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Friday. Mr. Nixon did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project. News of the study was first reported Friday morning by Reuters.In pursuing the study, the C.D.C. is defying the wishes of the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Senator Bill Cassidy, who said this week that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from research that might shed light on the “true reason” for a rise in autism rates.“It’s been exhaustively studied,” Mr. Cassidy, a doctor, said during the confirmation hearing for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health. “The more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.”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
After voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor and Republican of Louisiana, is embracing the “gestalt” of Kennedy’s measles response.Perhaps no vote was as agonizing for Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor, than his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Trump’s health secretary. Mr. Cassidy wondered aloud for days how Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s most vocal and powerful critic of vaccinations, might handle an infectious disease crisis.Now, as a measles outbreak rages in West Texas, Mr. Cassidy has found out. It all comes down, he said, to “the gestalt.”On Monday, days after the Texas outbreak killed an unvaccinated child, Mr. Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, was clipping down a Capitol corridor when he was asked about Mr. Kennedy. He pointed to a Fox News Digital opinion piece in which Mr. Kennedy advised parents to consult their doctors about vaccination, while calling it a “personal” decision.“That Fox editorial was very much encouraging people to get vaccinated,” he said.Reminded that Mr. Kennedy had described it as a personal choice, Mr. Cassidy thought for a moment. “If you want to like, parse it down to the line, you can say, ‘Discuss with your doctor,’” Mr. Cassidy said. “He also said, ‘We’re making vaccinations available. We’re doing this for vaccination. We’re doing that for vaccination.’ So if you take the gestalt of it, the gestalt was, ‘Let’s get vaccinated!’”Mr. Cassidy’s assessment — that the whole of Mr. Kennedy’s message was more than the sum of its parts — reflects how the measles outbreak has put a spotlight on how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox choice to run the country’s top health agency has brought a once-fringe perspective into the political mainstream, creating discomfort for some Republicans.As the founder and chairman of his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, and later as a presidential candidate, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly downplayed the benefits of vaccination. He has also repeatedly suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism, despite extensive research that has found no link.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
As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has spread to 99 people; 95 percent of those diagnosed with measles this year are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccine status, and the vast majority of those affected are under 19. The outbreak is concentrated in Gaines County, Texas, a rural area in West Texas with a disproportionately high level of religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccines — a whopping 47.95 percent of students from one of only three public school districts in the county claimed exemptions in the 2023-24 school year. The percentage of exemptions in all of Gaines County is nearly 14 percent, and that doesn’t include home-schooled children.Earlier this month, the Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said that the outbreak in Gaines County was mostly among the “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, whose members don’t get regular health care and don’t attend public school. “The church isn’t the reason that they’re not vaccinated,” Anton said in a news release. “It’s all personal choice and you can do whatever you want.”“Do whatever you want” might be good advice for choosing a fun new wallpaper, but it’s terrible advice for encouraging vaccine uptake.You might assume that many religious groups are doctrinally opposed to vaccination. Why else would the majority of states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions to school vaccine mandates? But that is not accurate. The Mennonite leadership, as Anton points out, is not against vaccines — and neither are most other major religious groups. The U.S. Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches made a statement in 2021 regarding the Covid vaccine that “our confession of faith and our current and historical practice do not provide the necessary rationale for granting a religious exemption based on the theological convictions of the denomination” (italics theirs).This isn’t the first time that undervaccinated religious groups have been at the epicenter of measles outbreaks. In 1991, a Philadelphia measles outbreak that killed nine people spread in two church communities that did not believe in any medical intervention. In 2018-19, an outbreak in Brooklyn took root among undervaccinated Orthodox Jews.As Caitlin Rivers points out in a recent guest essay for Times Opinion, routine childhood vaccines are still very, very popular in the United States. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is already going back on promises he made about vaccines during his confirmation hearing. Earlier he said he wouldn’t mess with the childhood vaccination schedule, and now he’s saying “Nothing is going to be off limits.”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
In a small study, patients with the syndrome were more likely to experience reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus and high levels of a coronavirus protein.The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study.Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood.The study was posted online Wednesday and has not yet been published in a scientific journal. “I want to emphasize that this is still a work in progress,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who led the work.“It’s not like this study determined what’s making people sick,” she said, “but it’s the first kind of glimpse at what may be going on within these people.”Independent experts noted that the findings were not conclusive on their own. Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny, they said.“One of the most important things is that we get some attention to really shine a light on this and try to understand exactly what it is,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. (Dr. Wherry has previously collaborated with Dr. Iwasaki’s team, but did not participate in this work.)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
There is very little that Americans can agree on these days. Half of people report that religion is very important to them, while more than a quarter say it’s not. Just under half of parents are satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, while the other half are not. Even sports, often considered America’s pastime, draw the interest of only a little over one third of Americans.But one thing nearly everyone agrees on? Vaccines are good.This simple fact has been overshadowed by fears about what will happen to vaccine policy under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy has a long history of vaccine skepticism, and critics fear his leadership could lead to interference with vaccine programs or even withdrawal of vaccines from the market. Such moves are already roiling some state health programs. In Louisiana, the Health Department will “no longer promote mass vaccination,” instead leaving vaccine education to medical providers.What has been overlooked in discussions about Mr. Kennedy’s future agenda is one key fact: Vaccines remain enormously popular. Given this broad support, politicians should think twice about targeting something so widely valued.Recent reports in the news media and medical journals highlight a decline in the proportion of kindergartners who have received the measles, mumps, rubella shot. In the last five years, national coverage has fallen to 93 percent, from 95 percent, and in some states like Idaho, it is as low as 80 percent. But while these numbers fall short of the national goal of 95 percent required to maintain herd immunity for measles, they remain a resounding show of confidence.This confidence extends not just to the M.M.R. vaccine. Some 92 percent of American children received the polio vaccine by age 2, and more than 90 percent were vaccinated against hepatitis B. And it’s not just because of school requirements. Nearly nine in 10 Americans — including 86 percent of Republicans — say the benefits of childhood vaccines outweigh the risks.Unlike children, who typically have regular checkups and managed vaccination schedules through their pediatricians, many adults don’t have a doctor checking in with them on immunization. Yet nearly eight in 10 adults have still received at least one Covid-19 vaccination. Four in 10 get the annual flu vaccine, which prevents severe illness but not infection. That number rises to 70 percent among older adults, the population most at risk. While there is room for improvement, these numbers are solid indicators that vaccines are in good standing.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
The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.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
