Move is dramatic departure for advisory group under Kirk Milhoan, who says he doesn’t like the term ‘established science’

All vaccine recommendations are being reconsidered by the US’s vaccines committee, according to its top adviser, who in recent interviews slammed vaccination requirements for attending school and said vaccines should be taken on the advice of an individual’s doctor.

The stance from Kirk Milhoan, chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), represents a dramatic departure for the group tasked with making US vaccine recommendations for decades, signaling an increasingly hostile approach from the Trump administration to routine vaccines.

The childhood vaccine schedule is undergoing radical changes under the purview of Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and longtime vaccine critic. Some of these changes are being led by his handpicked vaccine advisers, several of whom have expressed outsized fears of the very rare risks of side effects of vaccines compared with the benefits of protecting against illness, hospitalization and death supported by decades of evidence.

Flowers and candles laid by VA building in Washington as killing reverberates through nursing community

I recommend that you read the full article, but I have included excerpts of what I thought were the important sections:

A number of celebrities including Bella Hadid, Justin Bieber and Justin Timberlake claim to have Lyme disease, but some doctors worry this could mislead people into thinking they too could have the disease.

Lyme disease is a medically recognized infection that can cause pain, fatigue and muscle aches. But many celebrities — including Hadid, American singer Justin Timberlake and Canadian singer Justin Bieber — who claim they have Lyme appear, on a closer look, to be describing chronic Lyme disease, a condition that isn’t recognized by conventional medicine.

It's a controversial term used by some alternative practitioners to describe pain, fatigue and neurological symptoms they attribute to a persistent Lyme infection. Often, patients have never tested positive through a regulator-approved Lyme disease test.

Despite the shaky validity, identifying otherwise-unexplainable symptoms as chronic Lyme can seem like a path toward getting better, Dr. Paul Auwaerter, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told CBC News.

“They are looking for answers to something that many times they get short shrift from their regular physicians or from consultants.”

But experts warn that the world of private testing and treatment is largely unregulated — and can carry serious risk.

In one case, an attempt to treat chronic Lyme became life-threatening.

Feile O'Connell from Tofino, B.C. told CBC News she almost died after undergoing an unproven treatment in Mexico.

The 30-year-old said she’d been struggling to get help for ongoing severe fatigue and pain for years. She hasn't been able to work, and said the health-care system has let her down.

A doctor tested her for Lyme disease, but the result was negative. She said she kept trying to get answers from doctors, but only got the runaround.

"I can't even count how many specialists I saw,” she told CBC News. “They would say, 'I can't help you. This is all that I can do, so go back to your family doctor,' which I didn't have at the time... I kept being pushed back to square one."

As her symptoms worsened, she turned to a naturopath, paying for out-of-country blood tests that came back positive for Lyme disease, she said. (The Canadian medical system only recognizes Health Canada-approved test results.)

“I felt validated for the first time," O'Connell said.

After trying alternative treatments in Canada for months, in the summer of 2024 she ended up at Lyme Mexico, a clinic that claims to specialize in treating Lyme disease, run by Omar Morales. All in, she said her treatment and accommodations cost over $40,000.

“He’s selling hope,” she said. “All we want is to get better and he has the path.”

At Lyme Mexico, she said she received an intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) treatment, where the antibodies from donated plasma are used mainly to strengthen the immune system. She said this made her violently ill.

O’Connell said she ended up in a local intensive care unit with sepsis, a life-threatening condition caused by an infection. She later contacted the pharmaceutical company with the lot number of the product.

"We conclude that these units have been subject to a fraudulent transaction and there is a high probability that the unit administered to the patient has been falsified/manipulated,” CSL Behring stated in a letter to O'Connell.

In an email to CBC News, Lyme Mexico’s patient director Sandy Rodriguez said the clinic could not comment on individual cases due to privacy regulations.

“Lyme Mexico is a licensed medical facility, and all treatments are provided by qualified physicians under established safety and informed-consent protocols,” she wrote.

Asked for proof of those qualifications, the clinic wouldn’t provide them.

Several other patients who spoke to CBC News said they were satisfied with the care they received.

Unmet health-care needs

Time and again, what’s driving people toward the chronic Lyme industry is a lack of effective, long-term health care, said Saxinger.

“The thinner the medical system gets stretched, the less likely someone… is going to be able to get significant time from the routine medical system,” she said.

There’s also a need for more research into chronic illnesses to help those suffering, Auwaerter said.

“This has been quite an underfunded area for many years,” he said.

O’Connell, the woman from B.C., said she still has ongoing symptoms. She said she is still pursuing treatment for chronic Lyme disease, and is working with a naturopath who’s prescribed her antibiotics.

She said what would make a difference for patients struggling with chronic illness is more empathy and understanding from physicians.

“People are really cast aside when they have these mysterious chronic illnesses,” she said, “and they're just left to fend for themselves.”

A person’s lifespan may be up to 55% heritable, according to new research.

A person's genes play a far greater role in likely lifespan than previously thought, according to a major new study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Using data from human twin studies, an international team of researchers arrived at the conclusion that the genetic contribution to how long we're likely to live is as high as 55%.

This new finding is strikingly higher than previous estimates, which have calculated the role of genetics in lifespan could range from 6% to 33%. It’s likely to intrigue — and perhaps disappoint — the fast-growing community of longevity influencers and self-described biohackers touting longer lives through supplements and customized drug regimens.

A year into Trump’s second term, critics say the EPA is rolling back dozens of protections and giving a leg up to polluters

After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise – one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars and artificial intelligence.

When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be.

But in recent weeks, critics say the EPA has gone far further by in effect seeking to jettison its raison d’etre, forged since its foundation in 1970, as an environmental regulator. The EPA is poised to remove its own ability to act on the climate crisis and has, separately, unveiled a new monetary worth assigned to human lives when setting air pollution regulations. The current new value? Zero.

An American born in 2024 can expect to live to age 79, on average, an increase of more than half a year from 2023, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics released Thursday.

The average U.S. life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2024, according to the NCHS data, as the nation continued to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deaths from drug overdoses continued to decline.

The new high surpassesthe last peak in life expectancy in 2019, and it's the highest since the government started tracking this key measure of the nation's health and well-being in 1900.

https://archive.is/dxbpq

Suit against Debra Lynch is latest from Texas’s Republican attorney general amid ongoing attacks on abortion pills

As part of its ongoing crusade against abortion pills, Texas sued a nurse practitioner on Tuesday, accusing her of shipping pills into Texas in defiance of the state’s abortion ban.

The nurse practitioner, Debra Lynch, operates a Delaware-based group called Her Safe Harbor, which mails abortion pills to women living in states with abortion bans. Now, Texas wants a court to block Lynch from “performing, inducing or attempting abortions” in Texas, on the grounds that Texas law only permits physicians to facilitate abortions in cases of medical emergencies.

Groups like Her Safe Harbor have proliferated in the four years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, as Delaware and a handful of other blue states have enacted so-called “shield laws”. These laws typically aim to protect abortion providers from out-of-state prosecutions, lending legal cover to providers who ship pills across state lines.

California and Hawaii

Childcare workers push back on Trump administration’s ‘ridiculous’ narrative that programs are riddled with fraud

Billions of dollars of funding are at risk in Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois, and Colorado, each with state governments run by Democrats.

The claims of fraud that incited the freeze come in the wake of a viral video from a conservative influencer, who worked with Minnesota Republicans, who made claims about fraud at a Somali daycare center in Minnesota.

The allegations were debunked by media outlets which found no evidence of any of the childcare centers misusing federal funds.

Pharmaceutical company Moderna says it is scaling down its investments in late-stage vaccine trials amid growing opposition to immunizations from U.S. officials.