The Trump administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo doesn’t appear to be following the playbook used in previous outbreaks, and it’s sounding alarm bells among biosecurity experts.

Current and former leaders of the U.S.’s infectious disease response apparatus are warning that they’re not seeing the level of coordination between federal agencies that’s needed to successfully respond to such outbreaks abroad.

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Americans across the political spectrum are aligned on at least one belief, albeit for different reasons: The CDC is a mess. In a poll conducted this summer by The Washington Post and KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed low confidence that the agency could be trusted to make independent decisions based on scientific fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the head of Health and Human Services, has described the CDC as dysfunctional and politicized; according to the former CDC director Susan Monarez, he has also disparaged the agency’s workers as child murderers. Meanwhile, public-health experts—a group that has historically worked in tandem with the CDC—now question the agency’s credibility with Kennedy in charge. “You can’t trust anything that comes out of the CDC,” Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told me.

David Baltimore explained to Mr Mandela, in a language so precise as only he could, that there was no vaccine for Aids and that an aggressive rollout of antiretrovirals, tough management of needlestick use and a high visibility public campaign for safe sex were key.

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On Sunday, after four days of silence about how Ladapo’s all-encompassing goal would be achieved, the health department issued a statement saying it was proposing a rule change “to remove requirements for childhood immunizations … not required for school entry” such as hepatitis B, varicella (chickenpox), and influenza.

Vaccine requirements for polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus, it said, “remain in place, unless updated through legislation”, and “all vaccines will remain available to families throughout Florida”.

Scott Rivkees, an infectious diseases expert at Brown University and former Florida surgeon general under DeSantis, told the Guardian it appeared Ladapo was in retreat.

An artificial intelligence tool out of Boston University aims to enhance surveillance of disease outbreaks across the globe, a task traditionally informed by several federal agencies that have been dismantled or cut back in the second Trump administration.

The project known as the Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network, or BEACON, took more than a year to develop. It launched in April, as the Trump administration slashed the workforce and budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all but eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development and cut ties to the World Health Organization.

Vaccines have been making a lot of headlines over the last five years. First, because of the remarkable speed with which the Covid vaccine was developed, and more recently, because of the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines. I can’t think of a better time to have a conversation with today’s guest, Seth Berkley, who for more than a decade ran the largest vaccination program in the world.

Public health in America is undergoing dramatic changes, from changing access to vaccines to defunding research into treatment and prevention of diseases. This is all the work of the second Trump administration, more specifically, the leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior and it’s having effects beyond America.

In recent years, the U.S. has played a major role in battling malaria, providing more than a billion dollars annually to fight it. That is, until this year, when the Trump administration froze foreign aid.

The effects of that are covered in a recent article from the publication Science. Public health experts weigh in on that and the broader changes in public health in America.

To protect the people of Massachusetts from deadly bird flu in the U.S., the state’s health director, Robert Goldstein, is relying on an artificial intelligence platform that reads newspapers for outbreak information. It also searches for signals of outbreaks of other deadly diseases, such as Ebola, that are farther away. Those data used to come from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But with the U.S. withdrawing from the former and cutting thousands of jobs from the latter, Goldstein is trying to fill huge gaps in any way he can. The AI platform in Massachusetts, called BEACON, scans news reports in local languages and draws on a network of outbreak analysts from around the world, searching for early signs of looming disease threats.

When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his vision of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a recent op-ed, he cited one of the agency’s biosurveillance programs as a prime example of the agency’s capabilities: the Biothreat Radar Detection System.

But the “Biothreat Radar Detection System” doesn’t appear to exist — at least, not yet, sources inside and outside the CDC told NOTUS. And new details about how the program might apply AI to biosurveillance are giving biosecurity experts some pause.

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Earlier this week, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, with Gov. Ron DeSantis at his side, likened childhood vaccines to slavery and recommended that requirements for childhood vaccination be eliminated. Children in Florida will now be more at risk of vaccine-preventable illnesses than at any time in recent history, but the move will also have an impact in the broader population.

(TNND) — Republican senators who are also doctors stood up for vaccines during this week's hearing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic.

Senators of both parties grilled Kennedy over his statements and actions since taking the helm at Health and Human Services, including the big changes to vaccine policy.

“I'm approaching this as a doctor, not as a senator,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. “I am concerned about children's health, seniors’ health, all of our health.”

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