The CDC says its tally of US measles cases is likely an undercount
Dr. David Sugerman, a senior scientist leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measles response, told a meeting of the centers' vaccine advisory committee that officials believe there's 'quite a large amount of cases that are not reported and underreported.'
'In working very closely with our colleagues in Texas; in talking with families, they may mention prior cases that have recovered and never received testing, other families that may have cases and never sought treatment,' he said Tuesday.
Sugerman also noted that most of the nation's cases have been driven in undervaccinated communities like the Lone Star State's Gaines County. The county accounts for nearly 65 percent of the state's cases.
The agency has deployed more than a dozen people to the state, and is sending more this week.
'This reallocation, or what Dr. Sugerman called scraping, is not unique to this outbreak or a direct result of current initiatives to restructure CDC. When outbreaks occur, the agency must reallocate resources from other programs to respond,' the CDC told The Independent on Thursday.
Right now, the CDC reports that there are more than 700 cases across the U.S., although it only updates its tally once a week.
In Texas, the state's health authorities said Tuesday that there were 561 cases confirmed there since January, as well as 58 hospitalizations over the course of the outbreak.
Two unvaccinated children who lived in the outbreak area have died.
Measles is prevented by getting doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine that provide decades-long immunity. But, convincing communities to get the vaccine or vaccinate their children has proven to be a major hurdle. Rising vaccine hesitancy has been reported across the nation.
'Parental vaccine hesitancy might be contributing to the low levels of influenza vaccination coverage, due to a higher degree of hesitancy among parents about influenza vaccine compared with other routine childhood vaccines,' researchers said last year in a study published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has endorsed getting the measles shots, he has also promoted some questionable alternative practices, claimed the vaccines were 'leaky' and said that the vaccines should not be mandated.
Experts have warned that casting doubts on vaccines could come with deadly consequences and reverse years of medical progress – especially with measles' continued spread. Sugerman said coverage with the vaccine has been decreasing since the pandemic.
'It is often said that the first responsibility of any government is the safety and protection of its people,' the journal Nature's editorial board said. 'That alone should be reason enough for policymakers to encourage people to get themselves and their children vaccinated. Vaccines save lives, and casting doubt on their safety could have dangerous and far-reaching consequences.'
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The Verge
an hour ago
- The Verge
RFK Jr.'s plan to put ‘AI' in everything is a disaster
In a 92-minute interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, RFK Jr. drilled down on his vision for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Artificial intelligence — arguably, a uselessly vague umbrella term — came up multiple times. (As did conspiracy theories and disinformation on vaccines and autism, the medical establishment, and covid-19 deaths.) As the head of HHS, Kennedy said his federal department is undergoing an 'AI revolution.' He implored viewers to 'stop trusting the experts,' as highlighted by Gizmodo, and, presumably, put their trust into AI instead of decades of scientific consensus. He referenced that AI tools were being used to 'detect waste, abuse, and fraud' across the federal government — the tagline for Elon Musk's misguided and disastrous DOGE initiative that's already led to a scramble to rehire hundreds of wrongfully cut CDC employees. Kennedy also vaguely declared that the CDC will be using AI to 'look at the mega data that we have and be able to make really good decisions about interventions,' demonstrating how flimsy his grasp of AI is. Kennedy said that AI will rapidly accelerate the drug approval process at the FDA, implying it will fully replace animal testing. This is not entirely new, echoing an April announcement from Kennedy's Food and Drug Administration that the agency will be phasing out animal testing for some pharmaceuticals in favor of 'AI-based computational models' and other countries' safety data. That agency-level change followed the 2022 passage the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 under President Joe Biden, which repealed requirements for all new drugs to undergo animal testing. There is a lot of ongoing research into the potential for alternate approaches like organ-on-chip systems, organoid cultures, and AI models to supplement or reduce the amount of animal testing used in drug development. And computer modeling has long been a part of pharmaceutical evaluation. However, it's likely premature to claim that AI can wholly eliminate the need for animal models. 'There is currently no full replacement for animal models in biomedical research and drug development,' wrote the National Association for Biomedical Research in an April statement. Even more concerning were Kennedy's hints that the current Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is overseen by the CDC, is set to be overhauled and outfitted with AI. (He previously suggested automating the system in April.) VAERS is a first-line detection system for catching rare, previously undetected risks associated with vaccines that has often been misrepresented by anti-vaccine advocates. AI drug testing may sound unsettling, but it would be conducted by external researchers and drug makers. Pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to not release dangerous products because they lose money when they harm people; Kennedy wouldn't be so directly held to account. Misinterpretation of VAERS data at the institutional level could sow further distrust in public health and give Kennedy's newly appointed vaccine advisory committee ammunition to change vaccine recommendations, legitimize their fringe beliefs, and limit vaccine access. Anyone can report to VAERS (and certain providers are required to report) anytime a person experiences any negative health event in the aftermath of a vaccination. A report to VAERS does not indicate causality. 'There's nothing about VAERS that allows us to determine whether a vaccine caused the reported adverse event,' says Kawsar Talaat, an infectious disease physician and vaccine safety researcher at Johns Hopkins University. 'People report things like anger after vaccination,' she says, for which there's no biologically plausible mechanism relating back to immunization. Even more serious events, like death following a vaccination, overwhelmingly bear out to be unrelated to the shot itself. 'The thing about vaccines is they protect against preventable diseases, not everything else that occurs in life,' says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Yet even so, VAERS reports are followed up with CDC investigation through complementary programs like Vaccine Safety Datalink and the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project. The system has worked since its establishment in 1986 to generate hypotheses for potential vaccine side effects and even to detect very rare vaccine risks. For instance, VAERS did successfully pick up the myocarditis associated with mRNA covid-19 vaccines, which only showed up in about one per 30,000 doses, and the blood clotting associated with the Johnson & Johnson covid-19 shot, which affected about one in 250,000 people, Offit notes. 'You're not going to pick that up pre-licensure, so I think VAERS works well,' he says. 'The problem is that anti-vaccine activists use it to mean that anything reported in that system is a real issue, which is obviously wrong,' he adds — echoing Talaat's point that anyone can report anything. It's not clear how Kennedy plans to introduce AI into VAERS, but presumably he means to feed VAERS data into some sort of automated system for identifying alleged vaccine side effects and risks. Earlier this year, the top US vaccine regulator at the FDA was forced out over his refusal to grant Kennedy unfettered access to the VAERS database, out of fears he and his appointees would manipulate the data. Now, with little standing in his way, Kennedy seems poised to do just that. There is a reasonable argument to be made that the right set of machine learning algorithms or AI tools could streamline the review process for VAERS claims. But AI systems are only as good as their training and parameters. If you feed them faulty information, that's what they're going to regurgitate. If you build an AI system to validate your preexisting belief that vaccines are dangerous, that's exactly what it will do. Despite the genuine promise that some AI approaches have in health policy and medicine, experts routinely emphasize that we need to tread carefully in building, vetting, and adopting these technologies. Bias, privacy concerns, legal challenges, and user manipulation all remain major issues, according to one 2024 review of 120 studies of generative AI in medicine. (Not to mention hallucinations: In May, the 'Make America Healthy Again Commission,' a presidential advisory committee chaired by Kennedy, released a likely AI-generated report containing false citations to studies that did not exist.) The key question here is if an AI vaccine risk-assessment system could be developed fairly and accurately under Kennedy's leadership. Offit, at least, doesn't think so. 'Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist, and a conspiracy theorist,' he says. 'He will do everything he can, as long as he is in this position, to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Vaccine Shortages. Viral Outbreaks. Widespread Illness. More Death.
It's September 2026. Routine childhood vaccines are now optional in the United States, and government officials, after hastily compiling an immense research registry of autistic people, have added the neurodevelopmental condition to the list of compensable vaccine injuries, thereby opening up vaccine makers to an onslaught of lawsuits. Facing decreased demand and increased litigation, some vaccine makers have pulled their shots from the domestic market entirely. Outbreaks are spreading across the country, sickening tens of thousands of people; too many are dying, especially children, pregnant people, and older adults. Something similar is unfolding around the world because the U.S. government ended vaccinations for millions globally. This is one scenario America faces if we continue down the path being bushwhacked by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other anti-vaccine activists at the Department of Health and Human Services. And when I called up vaccine experts to ask whether my dystopian fears made me a doomer, they agreed that this grim scenario was plausible—and that it could get even worse. Every day seems to bring more ominous news about Kennedy's war on vaccines. Within just the past few weeks, Kennedy has done the following: He abruptly fired all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP, and replaced them with largely inexperienced people, some of who are outright anti-vaccine activists—who then promptly voted to ban thimerosal, a rare but safe preservative, from flu vaccines. He changed CDC recommendations so that they no longer say healthy children and pregnant people should receive Covid-19 vaccines. And he announced the U.S. would stop funding Gavi, an international organization that vaccinates children around the world. 'It's hard to know how this is all going to play out. But right now, everything appears very dark,' said Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And yet, he added, 'I don't think we've hit bottom. I think he's continuing to chip away, with some pretty big chips, to erode our vaccine ecosystem. I don't see a turnaround at this point. We're still in free fall as far as I'm concerned.'I'm not the first to try to gaze into a crystal ball about the future of vaccines in America. In January 2025, at Kennedy's confirmation hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren began rattling off the actions he could take as secretary, given his history of profiting from lawsuits against vaccine makers: You could publish your anti-vaccine conspiracies, but this time on U.S. government letterhead, something a jury might be impressed by. You could appoint people to the CDC vaccine panel who share your anti-vax views and let them do your dirty work. You could tell the CDC vaccine panel to remove a particular vaccine from the vaccine schedule. You could remove vaccines from special compensation programs, which would open up manufacturers to mass torts. You could make more injuries eligible for compensation, even if there is no causal evidence. You could change vaccine court processes to make it easier to bring junk lawsuits. You could turn over FDA data to your friends at the law firm, and they could use it however it benefited them. You could change vaccine labeling, you could change vaccine information rules, you could change which claims are compensated in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The bottom line, Warren added: 'Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it. Kids might die. But Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.' Sure enough, some of this has come to pass. In an X video in May, Kennedy announced that the CDC was changing its recommendations for the Covid vaccine. The agency turned the childhood recommendation from 'should' to 'may' and called the process 'shared clinical decision-making,' while eliminating the recommendation entirely for pregnant people, who are at significantly higher risk for severe illness and death. I asked the experts: Could other vaccine recommendations be softened like this? 'I think it's a real possibility—I think in many ways it's a goal,' said Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for the second Trump administration, specifically called for eliminating the CDC as a recommending body. If a vaccine is no longer recommended, 'that means that it couldn't be required for school entry.' (School mandates have long been a target of anti-vaccine activists.) Others thought it might be even worse. '[Kennedy's] end goal is to remove most or all childhood vaccines—to make them inaccessible, is my view,' said Dorit Reiss, professor at UC Hastings College of Law. 'So your scenario is plausible, although you're being very cautious in saying they might move to shared clinical decision-making. They could say 'this is no longer recommended.'' The new ACIP advisers could stop recommending some vaccines entirely: HPV, influenza, and hepatitis B shots have all been targeted by anti-vaccine activists. They could also vote to end Vaccines for Children, a $5 billion program covering the vaccinations of nearly half of all children in the United States. The administration may also make it difficult to approve new vaccines. 'It's not only about Kennedy's insistence on saline placebos,' Hotez said, referring to the health secretary's announcement in May that vaccines would need to go through new, unethical clinical trials involving placebo tests. 'There's so little vaccine expertise now, either at FDA because people seem to be leaving, and with ACIP, there's almost no vaccine expertise in its current group.' And, of course, there's the harm that figures like Kennedy do with public advocacy against vaccines. That includes the ACIP advisers' recommendation on Thursday to remove thimerosal, a preservative used only in multidose vials of flu vaccines—about 4 percent of all flu vaccines given in the U.S.—in order to prevent bacterial and fungal infections. Thimerosal was removed from all other childhood vaccines in 2001 as a precaution when anti-vaccine activists first began linking it to autism—a connection that multiple studies have disproven. Banning it entirely now could undermine American's sense of vaccines' safety and June, Health and Human Services awarded $150,000 to the Arizona law firm Brueckner Spitler Shelts for its legal 'expertise' on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is run by the Health Resources and Services Administration, a subagency of HHS. Drew Downing, a lawyer at the firm, has a reputation for representing people who say they've been injured by vaccines, and he has been involved in lawsuits against vaccine makers. Several of the new advisers on ACIP have also served as expert witnesses in lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. 'I think [Kennedy's] goal is to either remove vaccines from the vaccine injury compensation program or add to the list of compensable injuries, all of which will weaken the vaccine infrastructure,' Offit said. Autism, for example, could be added to the list of injuries based on the administration's fast-tracked research to find a link between the condition and vaccines, despite decades of scientific research showing otherwise. Changes to the compensation program could mean vaccine makers simply choose to stop making shots available in the U.S., Offit said: 'Make vaccines expensive enough, or make them more subject to frivolous litigation, and they'll leave.' Something similar has happened before. In 1980, 18 companies made vaccines; by 1990, that number had fallen to four. A 1981 study suggested that the whole-cell pertussis component of the DTP vaccine could in rare cases cause permanent brain swelling. Subsequent studies found no such link; in fact, the swelling was caused by infant epilepsy. Even so, litigation against pertussis vaccine makers and then manufacturers of all vaccines began to mount, causing vaccine prices to skyrocket and pushing some manufacturers out of business. Faced with a volatile vaccine market, Congress passed a law in 1986 leading to the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. 'If you really want to hurt vaccines, mess with the vaccination compensation program,' Offit said. After all, vaccines aren't usually a big payday for pharmaceutical companies, he said. 'They make money on things that you give frequently. They don't make as much money as things that you give once or a few times in a lifetime.' The vaccine market is big, but for pharmaceutical companies, 'vaccines are still a very modest component of their revenue compared to all the small molecule drugs that they're producing,' said Hotez. Facing litigation, companies might decide vaccine production isn't worth it. 'If it becomes untenable for them to remain in the U.S. market, they may just pull the plug on their vaccine side altogether.'If the measles vaccination rate declines by 10 percent, 11.1 million people will contract measles within 25 years, according to a new study coauthored by Hotez. Other vaccine-preventable diseases would also come roaring back. The resulting illnesses and deaths would be 'absolutely devastating,' he said. But this isn't just a future fear. Outbreaks are already cropping up: 2025 has already been one of the worst years for measles in decades; whooping cough cases increased sixfold between 2023 and 2024; polio was detected in wastewater in 2022. 'Things are already starting to fray,' Hotez said. 'Measles is the first one you see break through, because it's so highly contagious, but the others will follow. I worry about pertussis. I worry about bringing back things like Hib meningitis, which I used to take care of as a pediatric resident. And I even worry about polio coming back.' But outbreaks tend to underline the importance of vaccines, increasing their importance among the public. 'As outbreaks grow, we will see people clamoring for vaccines. Remember that most people still vaccinate their children,' Reiss said. Most parents—91 percent—believe vaccines are safe for most children, according to a new poll from the opinion research program at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 'People want to vaccinate their children,' Offit said. He believes we won't reach a scenario where vaccination rates drop low enough for widespread outbreaks. 'We won't let it get that far,' he said. 'I have to believe the federal government will step in.' Hotez agreed: 'Ultimately it's going to come down to the White House.' After all, outbreaks wouldn't be seen as solely the fault of top officials like Kennedy, Reiss said: 'Outbreaks are not going to be limited to the 'Kennedy outbreaks' or the 'HHS outbreaks,' they're going to be the Trump outbreaks. So I don't know how much Trump is willing to give Kennedy leeway when polio or diphtheria starts coming back.' Regardless, much damage has already been done, and Kennedy has only been on the job for less than five months. 'It will take decades, not years, to fix the damage,' said Reiss. Kennedy and other officials 'essentially took a machete to our public health institutions, and fixing that and rebuilding trust is going to take a while.' Yet there are no signs the damage is ending or that reprieve is coming, she said. 'We're in trouble.'
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
That cucumber recall? You might want to check your fridge
Does it feel like there have been lots of cucumber recalls lately? You are not wrong. The Food and Drug Administration has classified 137 potential salmonella recall reports for food products containing cucumbers in 2025, more than in any other year with available data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked cucumbers to a current salmonella outbreak. Salmonella bacteria are a major cause of foodborne illness, infecting 1.35 million people and killing 420 people each year. Since 2012, the Food and Drug Administration has classified over 3,200 salmonella food reports, according to federal data. On average, a salmonella recall lasts nearly a year, a USA TODAY review of the FDA data found. Currently, there are 217 salmonella recall reports ongoing. You can explore the products here: The FDA has the authority to mandate a recall, but about 99% are voluntarily issued by the companies that make the products. After a recall is initiated, the agency classifies the health hazard presented by the product from Class I (a reasonable probability that the product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death) to Class III (the product is not likely to cause adverse health consequences). About 44% of food recall reports have been classified as Class I. On the other hand, 80% of salmonella food reports are classified as Class I. Most people get infected with salmonella by eating contaminated food like raw or undercooked meat, poultry, eggs, raw or unpasteurized milk and other dairy products, and produce. According to the CDC, 1 in 25 packages of chicken in the grocery store is contaminated with salmonella. Department of Human and Health Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. is among the many promoting raw milk, but experts caution against it. 'We have people whose families have had children and parents and others sickened after drinking raw milk,' said Sandra Eskin, CEO at the nonprofit Stop Foodborne Illness. 'It has salmonella in it, it can have E. coli, and it can have any number of pathogens. That's why they invented pasteurization.' Warmer weather can also create ideal conditions for the bacteria to grow, so it's recommended to refrigerate perishable foods. Other sources of salmonella include contaminated water and the handling of animals. Symptoms start within six hours to six days from the time of exposure and include fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and stomach pain. Most people recover within 4 to 7 days without treatment, but some cases lead to hospitalization and death. Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term, there have been severe cuts and the federal health services workforce is expected to drop from 82,000 to 62,000, USA TODAY previously reported. Trump argued the cuts are a way to save taxpayers' money, but experts say allocating resources towards food safety is critical. An FDA spokesperson told USA TODAY in an email statement that the agency prioritizes food safety and is committed to working with all stakeholders. 'The layoffs relate to administrative staff positions in the FDA. There has been no impact to operational investigators conducting food safety inspections,' the FDA spokesperson said. Over a decade ago, when annual salmonella numbers were estimated to be lower, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that foodborne illness cost the country $3.7 billion per year, most of which was attributed to premature deaths. Eskin, who previously worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture overseeing food safety and inspections, said recalls are essential for public health. 'A recall is the last line of defense that you and I have to prevent getting sick,' Eskin said, 'if we're going to a restaurant, or more importantly, going to the grocery store.' Dr. Susan Kansagra, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said in an email statement that federal funds support a wide range of state-level activities related to foodborne illness, like laboratory testing, case reporting, and guiding providers and the public on prevention and treatment. 'Loss of funding and staffing decreases our national capacity to do these activities and therefore quickly detect and respond to foodborne illness,' Kansagra said. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After flood of cucumber recalls, you should check your fridge
