health – Page 4

Anti-vaccine activists want to go nationwide after Idaho law passes

anti-vaccine activists, anti-vaxxer, health, public health, syndication, vaccine mandates / Kelly Newman / October 20, 2025

This is so stupid… and dangerous

The Idaho Medical Freedom Act makes it illegal to require anyone to take a vaccine.

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Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.

The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools, and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.”

Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements.

But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the US through vaccination are making a resurgence.

The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.)

The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.

The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived.

A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month.

That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho.

Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that—contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the US—vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent.

It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines.

Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.”

An analysis published last year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the US over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year.

Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.”

The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic.

It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions—government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies, and others—on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control.

Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another.

Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard.

Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs.

That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated.

In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and daycare centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations.

The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form—one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated.

(There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.)

An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution.

Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho.

The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job, or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and daycares couldn’t require people on their property to follow public health guidance.

The state had just passed “the Coronavirus Stop Act” in 2023, which banned nearly all COVID-19 vaccine requirements. If lawmakers did that for COVID-19, Manookian reasoned, they could do the same for all communicable diseases and all medical decisions.

Her theory was right, ultimately.

The bill she penned in the summer of 2024 made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate in early 2025.

Manookian took to social media to rally support for the legislation as it sat on the desk of Gov. Brad Little.

But the governor vetoed it. In a letter, he explained that he saw the bill as government intrusion on “parents’ freedom to ensure their children stay healthy.” During an outbreak, he said, schools wouldn’t be able to send home students “with highly contagious conditions” like measles.

Manookian tried again days after the veto. In the next version of the bill, protections during a disease outbreak applied only to “healthy” people.

This time, Little signed it.

Weeks after the signing, Manookian joined like-minded advocates on a stage in Washington, DC, for a launch event for the MAHA Institute, a group with strong ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again.) The new Health and Human Services secretary had denounced vaccines for years before President Donald Trump appointed him.

At the gathering, Manookian announced her next mission: to make it “a societal norm and to codify it in law” that nobody can dictate any other person’s medical choices.

“We’re going to roll that out to other states, and we’re going to make America free again,” Manookian told the audience in May.

Manookian’s commitment to bring along the rest of the country has continued ever since.

Her nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund, is now distributing model legislation and a how-to guide, with talking points to persuade legislators. Manookian said in podcast interviews that she is working with the nonprofit Stand For Health Freedom to mobilize activists in every state.

In an interview with ProPublica, Manookian said her objective is for people to “understand and appreciate that the most basic and fundamental of human rights is the right to direct our own medical treatment—and to codify that in law in every state. Breaking that barrier in Idaho proves that it can be done, that Americans understand the importance of this, and the humanity of it, and that it should be done in other states.”

Her efforts were rewarded over the summer with a visit from none other than Kennedy, who visited Boise and toured a farm with Manookian and state lawmakers in tow.

“This state, more than any other state in the country” aligns with the MAHA campaign, Kennedy told reporters at a news conference where no one was allowed to ask questions. Kennedy called Idaho “the home of medical freedom.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment from Kennedy or his staff on Idaho’s law and his visit to the state.

Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy built into one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines, took interest in the Idaho bill early on.

The group promoted the bill as it sat on the governor’s desk, as he vetoed it, then as Manookian worked successfully to get a revived bill through the statehouse and signed into law.

The organization’s online video programming featured Manookian five times in late March and early April. One show’s host told viewers they could follow Idaho in its “very smart strategy” of taking a law against COVID-related mandates, “crossing out ‘COVID,’ making a few other tweaks, and you have an incredible health freedom bill after that.”

Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said she’s known Manookian for more than 15 years and pushed the national organization to publicize Manookian’s work. Holland introduced her at the Washington, DC, event.

Whereas most states put the onus on unvaccinated people to show why they should opt out of a mandate, Idaho’s legislation made unvaccinated people the norm—shifting the burden of accommodation onto those who support vaccination.

Now, parents of infants too young for a measles vaccine can’t choose a daycare that requires immunization. Parents of immune-compromised students must decide whether to keep their children home from school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing unvaccinated children won’t be quarantined.

Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association”—not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines—just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements imposed by states like California and New York.

“I think you could certainly do that in Idaho,” Holland said. “It wouldn’t be a public school. It might be the Church of Vaccinia school.”

The day Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act was signed, a legislator in Louisiana brought forward the Louisiana Medical Freedom Act. In a hearing later, she pointed to Idaho as a model.

Louisiana followed Idaho once before in 2024, when it passed a law that requires schools to describe the exemptions available to parents whenever they communicate about immunizations. Idaho had passed an almost identical law three years earlier.

Herricks, the Louisiana pro-vaccine advocate, said she watched the Idaho Medical Freedom Act’s progress with “a lot of concern, seeing how much progress it was making.” Now it’s set a precedent, Herricks said.

Holland, the Children’s Health Defense CEO, said she looks forward to Idaho’s approach spreading.

She pointed to a September announcement by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo that he intends to rid his state of all vaccine mandates. Holland said she expects other Republican-controlled states to take a serious look at the Idaho law. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s a big change,” Holland said. “It’s not just related to vaccines. It’s a blow against the notion that there can be compulsory medicine.”

Some people support the more-than-century-old notion that compelling people to be vaccinated or masked will provide such enormous collective benefits that it outweighs any inconvenience or small incursion on personal liberty.

Others, like Holland and Manookian, do not.

At the heart of laws like Idaho’s is a sense of, “‘I’m going to do what I want to do for myself, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do,’ which is in direct contrast to public health,” said Paul Offit, pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit, who co-invented a vaccine against rotavirus, is a critic of Kennedy and was removed from a federal vaccine panel in September.

A more fundamental conflict is that some people believe vaccines and other tools to prevent the spread of illness, like masks, are harmful. That belief is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of scientists and health experts, including Kennedy’s own Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC.

Both tensions are at play in Idaho.

As is the case nationally, Idaho’s “health freedom” movement has long pushed back against being labeled “anti-vaccine.” Idaho lawmakers and advocates have stressed that their goals are bodily autonomy and informed choice.

They do not take a stance on the bodily autonomy principle when it comes to abortion, however. Almost all state legislators who voted for the Idaho Medical Freedom Act also voted to ban abortion, if they were in office at both times.

“Every action has to be evaluated on its individual morality,” not on whether it does the most good for the most people, Manookian said.

But Manookian’s rejection of vaccine mandates goes beyond a libertarian philosophy.

Manookian has said publicly that she thinks vaccines are “poison for profit,” that continuing to let daycares require vaccination would “put our children on the chopping block,” that measles is “positive for the body,” that the virus protects against cancer, and that it can send people “into total remission”—an assertion she made on an Idaho wellness center’s podcast in April.

Manookian told ProPublica she believes infectious diseases have been made “the bogeyman.”

Against those claims, research has shown that having the measles suppresses immunity to other diseases, a phenomenon dubbed “immune amnesia” that can make children who have recovered from measles more susceptible to pneumonia and other bacterial and viral infections. About 20 percent of unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who are infected will die from complications of the disease, according to the CDC.

And while researchers have studied using engineered measles viruses in a cancer treatment, those same researchers have written that they were “dismayed to learn” their research has been misconstrued by some who oppose vaccination. They said they “very strongly advise” giving children the measles vaccine, that there “is no evidence that measles infection can protect against cancer,” and that measles is “a dangerous pathogen, not suitable for use as a cancer therapy.”

(Manookian said she believes she has evidence for her cancer remission claim but couldn’t readily produce it, adding that she may have been mistaken.)

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, meanwhile, is safe and highly effective, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. The CDC says the most common negative reactions are a sore arm, fever, or mild rash. Two doses of the vaccine provide near total protection, according to the CDC.

Manookian said she doesn’t believe the research on vaccines has been adequate.

She will have another chance to spread her views from a prominent platform in November, when she’s scheduled to speak at the Children’s Health Defense 2025 conference in Austin, Texas.

She’ll share the stage with celebrities in the anti-vaccine movement: Del Bigtree, communications director for Kennedy’s past presidential campaign; actor Russell Brand; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson; and Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who made headlines for his push to end vaccine mandates in Florida, months after Idaho wrote that concept into law.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Vaginal condition treatment update: Men should get treated, too

ACOG, bacterial vaginosis, dysbiosis, health, microbiota, partners / Beth Washington / October 18, 2025

For some cases of bacterial vaginosis, treatment should include a package deal, doctors now say.

The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) updated its clinical guidance Friday to fit with recent data indicating that treatment for recurring bacterial vaginosis (BV) in women is significantly more effective if their male partners are also treated at the same time—with both an oral antibiotic and an antibiotic cream directly onto the potentially offending member.

“Partner therapy offers us another avenue for hopefully preventing recurrence and helping people feel better faster,” Christopher Zahn, chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality at ACOG, said in a statement.

BV is a common condition affecting nearly 30 percent of women worldwide. Still, it’s potentially stigmatizing and embarrassing, with symptoms including itching, burning, a concerning fishy smell, and vaginal discharge that can be green or gray. With symptoms like this, BV is often described as an infection—but it’s actually not. BV is an imbalance in the normal bacterial communities that inhabit the vagina—a situation called dysbiosis.

This imbalance can be especially difficult to correct; of the women who suffer with BV, up to 66 percent will end up having the condition recur after treatment.

BV symptoms are “incredibly uncomfortable and disrupt people’s daily lives,” Zahn said, and that discomfort “becomes compounded by frustration when this condition comes back repeatedly.”

Firm recommendation

Studies in recent years have started to expose the reasons behind recurrence. Though again, BV is an imbalance, it has the profile of a sexually transmitted infection, with links to new sexual partners and similar incubation periods. Going further, microbial communities of penises can silently harbor the bacterial species linked to BV, and penile microbial communities can be predictive of BV risk in partners.

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RFK Jr.’s MAHA wants to make chemtrail conspiracy theories great again

health / DJ Henderson / October 17, 2025

A prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again movement is pushing for health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make the topic of chemtrail conspiracy theories a federal priority, according to a report by KFF News.

KFF obtained a memo, written by MAHA influencer Gray Delany in July, presenting the topic to Calley Means, a White House health advisor. The memo lays out a series of unsubstantiated and far-fetched claims that academic researchers and federal agencies are secretively spreading toxic substances from airplanes, poisoning Americans, and spurring large-scale weather events, such as the devastating flooding in Texas last summer.

“It is unconscionable that anyone should be allowed to spray known neurotoxins and environmental toxins over our nation’s citizens, their land, food and water supplies,” Delany writes in the memo.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told KFF that the memo presents claims that are false and, in some cases, physically impossible. “That is a pretty shocking memo,” he said. “It doesn’t get more tinfoil hat. They really believe toxins are being sprayed.”

Delany ends the memo with recommendations for federal agencies: form a joint task force to address this alleged geoengineering, host a roundtable on the topic, include the topic in the MAHA commission report, and publicly address the health and environmental harms.

It remains unclear if Kennedy, Means, or federal agencies are following up on Delany’s suggestions. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard told KFF that “HHS does not comment on future or potential policy decisions and task forces.”

However, one opportunity has already been missed: The MAHA Commission released its “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report on September 9, along with a strategy document. Neither document mentions any of the topics raised in Delany’s memo.

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CDC tormented: HR workers summoned from furlough to lay off themselves, others

CDC, health, Trump / Kelly Newman / October 16, 2025

Traumatized CDC has lost 33% of its workforce this year, union says.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 9: Bullet holes are seen in windows at the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) Global Headquarters following a shooting that left two dead, on August 9, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 8, a gunman opened fire near the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, killing a DeKalb County Police Department officer before being found dead by gunfire. Credit: Getty | Elijah Nouvelage

The dust is still settling at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a mass layoff on Friday, which former employees at the beleaguered agency are describing as a massacre.

In separate press briefings on Tuesday, a network of terminated CDC staff that goes by the name the National Public Health Coalition, and the union representing employees at the agency discussed what the wide-scale cuts mean for the American people, as well as the trauma, despair, and damage they have wreaked on the workers of the once-premier public health agency.

In a normal federal layoff—called a reduction in force, or RIF—the agency would be given a full outline of the roles and branches or divisions affected, as well as some explanation for the cuts, such as alleged fraud, abuse, or redundancy. However, the Trump administration has provided no such information or explanation, leaving current and former employees to essentially crowdsource what has been lost and only guess at the possible reasons.

The numbers

The union representing CDC workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2883, has been assessing the cuts since termination emails began arriving in employee inboxes late Friday. The union estimates that the Trump administration sent termination notices to 1,300 CDC employees on Friday, in what they called an illegal “politically-motivated stunt.” Of those 1,300 terminations, around 700 were rescinded, beginning on Saturday.

The Trump administration said the 700 rescinded terminations were sent due to a “coding error.” But CDC workers didn’t buy that explanation, saying all the terminations were intentional, and some were only reversed after backlash erupted when people realized what the administration was trying to cut—for example, terminating the experts responding to domestic measles outbreaks and those responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who received RIF notices that were later rescinded. Still, with the rescissions, some 600 terminations appear to remain.

In all, the union estimated that the CDC has lost 33 percent of its workforce since the start of the Trump administration. In January, there were roughly 13,000 CDC workers total. Since then, about 3,000 have been fully separated from the agency, including 600 laid off in a RIF on April 1, and 2,400 who were either fired or forced out amid pressure campaigns. An additional 1,300 have been laid off but are not yet fully separated from the agency; they remain on paid administrative leave but are unable to do their work.

In the RIF Friday, laid-off employees said they were given notices that list their termination effective date as December 8, leaving a 60-day period in which they would be on administrative leave.

The RIF was carried out amid an ongoing government shutdown over a health care funding dispute, and the Trump administration has claimed that the RIF is a consequence of the shutdown. But the union, along with federal employment lawyers and even some senior government officials, say a RIF during a shutdown is illegal; a temporary lapse in government funding is not a legitimate reason for a RIF under federal regulations, and it runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits the government from incurring new costs during a shutdown, such as by promising severance packages.

Brutal cuts

In practice, a RIF amid a shutdown added more trauma to the demoralized staff. In opening remarks, Local AFGE 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs noted that the CDC Human Resources staff had been furloughed during the shutdown but were temporarily brought back into work just so they could process termination letters—including their own. A terminated CDC employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said that more than 90 percent of the HR staff is now gone.

Among the terminations were also mental health workers who were helping CDC staff recover from an August attack, in which a gunman fired over 500 rounds at CDC buildings full of agency employees and killed a local police officer.

Another terminated CDC worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity discussed the personal toll of the RIF. She had worked at the agency for over two decades and learned of her termination Friday night as she was doing dishes after making homemade pizza with her family—money worries kept them from ordering out. Her phone “started going crazy” as coworkers were checking in after receiving their RIF notices. She dug out her work laptop, which had been set aside since she was furloughed, to find her own RIF notice at the top of her inbox.

As text messages continued to come in through the night, she said it was “heartbreaking and devastating” when she realized the Trump administration was “actually dismantling us.”

“These are just hardworking Americans who just want to do their job, who just want to help people, who want to make sure the correct information is out there [and] that we are preventing things from happening,” she said.

Since the RIF has sunk in, she has started to worry more for her family and their finances. During the furlough, paychecks are uncertain. And her effective termination date in December will land between holidays, when hiring is slow. She worried about affording Christmas presents for her family.

She also said that staff have asked about getting other jobs while on administrative leave but were told that in order to do that, they would need to get approval from the CDC’s ethics office to ensure there were no conflicts of interest. But staff can’t actually do that because everyone at the ethics office also got RIF notices.

Losses

Throughout the briefings yesterday, staff highlighted that the RIF did not just trim here and there, as one might expect with cuts designed to make the organization leaner. Instead, it lopped off entire teams and branches, completely shutting down whole lines of work.

One former CDC employee spoke broadly of big hits to experts in chronic disease, global health, and the National Center for Health Statistics, which runs critical data collection that states and local health departments rely on. The CDC’s library staff are all gone. Suicide prevention experts have been cut, as well as communications and policy staff, who develop briefings and provide information to Congress members.

Abigail Tighe, a former CDC employee with National Public Health Coalition, tried to put the cuts in context, saying: “We are losing the people with all the knowledge to prevent childhood drownings, child abuse, and suicide. We’re losing the experts who help us track and understand the health and safety needs of our communities [and] the brave and brilliant professionals who, on a moment’s notice, respond to new and unknown outbreaks across the world. And that’s just a few examples.”

A terminated scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that her entire office was eliminated in the RIF. “My heart breaks for my colleagues and friends who have been tormented, traumatized, shot at, threatened daily. These are kind, hardworking, thoughtful people whose lives are being overturned,” she said.

But, “ultimately,” she said, “I am terrified for the public safety of our country.”

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

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Measles outbreak in SC sends 150 unvaccinated kids into 21-day quarantine

anti-vaccine, health, measles, MMR, outbreak, public health, South Carolina, vaccine / Beth Washington / October 14, 2025

Health officials in South Carolina are warning that the highly infectious measles virus is spreading undetected in communities in the northern part of the state, specifically Spartanburg and Greenville counties.

Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.

Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.

It’s unclear how the latest case in Greenville became infected with the virus and how they may link to the nearby Spartanburg cases.

“What this case tells us is that there is active, unrecognized community transmission of measles occurring in the Upstate [northern region of South Carolina], which makes it vital to ensure that the public have received their measles vaccinations,” the South Carolina Department of Public Health said in an announcement.

The two recommended doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine are about 97 percent effective at blocking the infection, and that protection is considered lifelong. Without that protection, the virus is extremely contagious, infecting 90 percent of unvaccinated people who are exposed. The virus spreads easily through the air, lingering in the airspace of a room for up to two hours after an infected person has left.

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Layoffs, a “coding error,” chaos: Trump admin ravages the health dept.

CDC, health, health department, HHS, layoffs, robert f kennedy jr, Trump / Beth Washington / October 13, 2025

Federal health agencies are reeling from mass layoffs on Friday that appear to have particularly devastated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some terminations being rescinded on Saturday.

Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move.

Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is a massive department that houses critical federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others. Before Trump’s second term, the HHS workforce was about 82,000, but that was slashed to about 62,000 earlier this year amid initial cuts and efforts to push civil servants out.

While it’s unclear where all the new cuts occurred, reports from anonymous and external sources describe a major gutting of the CDC, an agency that has already been severely wounded, losing significant numbers this year. Its former leaders have accused the Trump administration of censoring its scientific work. It suffered a dramatic ousting of its Senate-confirmed director in August. And it was the target of a gunman weeks earlier, who shot over 500 rounds at its employees, killing a local police officer.

As terminations went out Friday, reports indicated that the terminations hit staff who produce the CDC’s esteemed journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, employees responding to the measles outbreaks in the US, others responding to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, workers in the Global Health Center, and disease detectives in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

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Trump admin fires more health employees amid government shutdown

health, HHS, lay off, Russ Vought / DJ Henderson / October 11, 2025

Questionable cull

Today’s layoffs are the work of White House Budget Director Russell Vought, a lead creator of the Project 2025 playbook, which planned a massive reduction in the federal workforce. In a post on X earlier today, Vought announced that the terminations “have begun.”

But as The Washington Post has previously reported, senior government officials have warned that Vought’s layoffs amid a shutdown are likely illegal, running afoul of the Antideficiency Act. The law forbids the government from incurring new expenses during a shutdown, and the process of laying employees off—which includes severance packages—does just that.

Federal employment lawyers told the Post that the move is almost certainly illegal for a second reason: Under federal regulations, a shutdown-driven lapse in funding does not count as one of the reasons federal employees can be terminated.

Last week, the American Federation of Government Employees and other unions representing federal workers filed a lawsuit over threats that the Trump administration would try to lay off workers during the shutdown.

In a statement today, AFGE National President Everett Kelley said, “It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country.”

“AFGE is currently challenging President Trump’s illegal, unprecedented abuse of power, and we will not stop fighting until every reduction-in-force notice is rescinded,” Kelley said.

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Childhood vaccines safe for a little longer as CDC cancels advisory meeting

ACIP, anti-vaccine, CDC, health, rfk jr, vaccines / 9u50fv / October 10, 2025

An October meeting of a key federal vaccine advisory committee has been canceled without explanation, sparing the evidence-based childhood vaccination schedule from more erosion—at least for now.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was planning to meet on October 22 and 23, which would have been the committee’s fourth meeting this year. But the meeting schedule was updated in the past week to remove those dates and replace them with “2025 meeting, TBD.”

Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask why the meeting was canceled. HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard offered no explanation, only saying that the “official meeting dates and agenda items will be posted on the website once finalized.”

ACIP is tasked with publicly reviewing and evaluating the wealth of safety and efficacy data on vaccines and then offering evidence-based recommendations for their use. Once the committee’s recommendations are adopted by the CDC, they set national vaccination standards for children and establish which shots federal programs and private insurance companies are required to fully cover.

In the past, the committee has been stacked with highly esteemed, thoroughly vetted medical experts, who diligently conducted their somewhat esoteric work on immunization policy with little fanfare. That changed when ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary. In June, Kennedy abruptly and unilaterally fired all 17 ACIP members, falsely accusing them of being riddled with conflicts of interest. He then installed his own hand-selected members. With the exception of one advisor—pediatrician and veteran ACIP member Cody Meissner—the members are poorly qualified, have gone through little vetting, and embrace the same anti-vaccine and dangerous fringe ideas as Kennedy.

Corrupted committee

So far this year, Kennedy’s advisors have met twice, producing chaotic meetings during which members revealed a clear lack of understanding of the data at hand and the process of setting vaccine recommendations, all while setting policy decisions long sought by anti-vaccine activists. The first meeting, in June, included seven members selected by Kennedy. In that meeting, the committee rescinded the recommendation for flu vaccines containing a preservative called thimerosal based on false claims from anti-vaccine groups that it causes autism. The panel also ominously said it would re-evaluate the entire childhood vaccination schedule, putting life-saving shots at risk.

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Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him

health / 9u50fv / October 9, 2025

And what about the lungs? A number of things could explain the problems in his lungs—including infections from soil bacteria he might encounter in his construction work or a parasitic infection found in Central America. But the cause that best fit was common pneumonia and, more specifically, based on the distribution of opacities in his lung, pneumonia caused by aspiration (inhaling food particles or other things that are not air)—which is something that can happen when people drink excessive amounts of alcohol, as the man regularly did.

“Ethanol impairs consciousness and blunts protective reflexes (e.g., cough and gag), which disrupts the normal control mechanisms of the upper aerodigestive tract,” Dhaliwal noted.

And this is where Dhaliwal made a critical connection. If the man’s drinking led him to develop aspiration pneumonia—accidentally getting food in his lungs—he may have also accidentally gotten nonfood in this gastrointestinal tract at the same time.

Critical connection

The things people most commonly swallow by accident include coins, button batteries, jewelry, and small bones. But these things tend to show up in imaging, and none of the imaging revealed a swallowed object. Things that don’t show up on images, though, are things made of plants.

“This reasoning leads to the search for an organic object that might be ingested while eating and drinking and is seemingly harmless but becomes invasive upon entering the gastrointestinal tract,” Dhaliwal wrote.

“The leading suspect,” he concluded, “is a wooden toothpick—an object commonly found in club sandwiches and used for dental hygiene. Toothpick ingestions often go unnoticed, but once identified, they are considered medical emergencies owing to their propensity to cause visceral perforation and vascular injury.”

If a toothpick had pierced the man’s duodenum, it would completely explain all of the man’s symptoms. He drank too much and lost control of his aerodigestive tract, leading to aspiration that caused pneumonia, and he then swallowed a toothpick, which perforated the duodenum and led to sepsis.

Dhaliwal recommended an endoscopic procedure to look for a toothpick in his intestines. On the man’s third day in the hospital, he had the procedure, and, sure enough, there was a toothpick, piercing through his duodenum and into his right kidney, just as Dhaliwal had deduced.

Doctors promptly removed it and treated the man with antibiotics. He went on to make a full recovery. At a nine-month follow-up, he continued to do well and had maintained abstinence from alcohol.

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Despite RFK Jr.’s shenanigans, COVID shot access will be a lot like last year

ACIP, CDC, COVID-19 vaccines, cvs, health, vaccines, Walgreens / Beth Washington / October 8, 2025

In an interview with Ars Technica in August, Brigid Groves, vice president of professional affairs for the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), signaled that efforts to limit access to COVID-19 vaccines is concerning to APhA, which is the leading organization representing pharmacists.

“We are concerned about that because the data and evidence point to the fact that this vaccine is safe and effective for [young, otherwise healthy] patients,” Groves said. “So, to suddenly arbitrarily limit that is very concerning to us.”

And, with the CDC’s permissive recommendations, pharmacies are not limiting them. Representatives for both CVS and Walgreens told The Washington Post that they would not require patients under 65 to prove they have an underlying condition to get a COVID-19 vaccine. CVS won’t ask you to self-attest to having a condition, and Walgreens also said that it won’t require any proof.

“In simplest terms, if a patient wants to get the vaccine, they’ll get it,” Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, told the Post.

With the shared decision-making, there may be extra forms about risks and benefits that might take an extra few minutes, but it should otherwise be just like past years.

On Tuesday, this reporter was able to easily book same-day appointments for an updated COVID-19 vaccine at local CVS and Walgreens pharmacies in North Carolina, without attesting to any medical conditions.

Children

Shots for younger children could be trickier: While adults and older children can visit their pharmacy and get vaccinated relatively easily, younger children (particularly those under age 5) may have a harder time. Pharmacists typically do not vaccinate those younger children—which has always been the case—and parents will have to visit the pediatrician.

Pediatricians, like pharmacists, are likely to be supportive of broad access to the shots. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said that all children should have access. The AAP also specifically encourages children under age 2 and children with underlying conditions to get vaccinated, because those children are at higher risk of severe disease.

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Nearly 80% of Americans want Congress to extend ACA tax credits, poll finds

ACA, health, health care / Mike M. / October 4, 2025

According to new polling data, nearly 80 percent of Americans support extending Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced premium tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of this year—and are at the center of a funding dispute that led to a shutdown of the federal government this week.

The poll, conducted by KFF and released Friday, found that 78 percent of Americans want the tax credits extended, including 92 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of Republicans—and even a majority (57 percent) of Republicans who identify as Donald Trump-aligned MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters.

A separate analysis published by KFF earlier this week found that if the credits are not extended, monthly premiums for ACA Marketplace plans would more than double on average. Specifically, the current average premium of $888 would jump to $1,904 in 2026, a 114 percent increase.

Consequences

The polling released today found that, in addition to broad support for the credits, many Americans are unaware that they are in peril. About six in ten adults say they have heard “a little” (30 percent) or “nothing at all” (31 percent) about the credits expiring.

“There is a hot debate in Washington about the looming ACA premium hikes, but our poll shows that most people in the marketplaces don’t know about them yet and are in for a shock when they learn about them in November,” KFF President and CEO Drew Altman said in a statement.

Yet more concerning, the poll found that among people who buy their own insurance plans, 70 percent said they would face a significant disruption to their household finances if their premiums were to double. Furthermore, 42 percent said they would ultimately go without health insurance in such a case. Currently, over 24 million Americans get their insurance through the ACA Marketplace.

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RFK Jr. drags feet on COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, delaying shots for kids

ACIP, CDC, COVID-19 vaccines, health, robert f kennedy jr, vaccines / Mike M. / October 3, 2025

Previously, the FDA narrowed the shots’ labels to include only people age 65 and older, and those 6 months and older at higher risk. But the ACIP recommended that all people age 6 months and older could get the shot based on shared decision-making with a health care provider. Although the shared decision-making adds a new requirement for getting the vaccine, that decision-making does not require a prescription and can be done not only with doctors, but also with nurses and pharmacists. Most people in the US get their seasonal COVID-19 vaccines at their local pharmacy.

Ars Technica reached out to the HHS on Thursday about whether there was a determination on the COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and, if not, when that is expected to happen and why there is a delay. The HHS responded, confirming that no determination had been made yet, but did not answer any of the other questions and did not provide a comment for the record.

In past years, ACIP recommendations and CDC sign-offs have happened earlier in the year to provide adequate time for a rollout. In 2024, ACIP voted on COVID-19 vaccinations in June, for instance, and then-CDC Director Mandy Cohen signed off that day. Now that we’re into October, it remains unclear when or even if the CDC will sign off on the recommendation and then, if the recommendation is adopted by the CDC, how much longer after that it would take for states to roll out the vaccines to children in the VFC program.

“Children who depend on this program, including children with chronic conditions, are still waiting unprotected. The delay in adopting COVID-19 vaccine recommendations puts their health at risk, reduces access and choice for families, and puts a strain on providers who want to deliver the best care for their youngest patients,” Susan Kansagra, the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said in a statement to Stat.

For now, children and adults with private insurance have access to the shots without the final sign-off, and health insurance companies have said that they will continue to maintain coverage for the vaccines without the final federal approval.

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