Scott Rivkees still remembers two cases from his first week as a pediatric intern at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1982.

The first was a patient with chickenpox or varicella encephalitis, a virus that causes brain inflammation. The second was a child with bacterial meningitis, a severe infection that causes inflammation of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord. The infection can produce seizures and deafness and lead to death.

It’s been a year since a measles outbreak began in West Texas, and international health authorities say they plan to meet in April to determine if the U.S. has lost its measles-free designation.

Experts fear the vaccine-preventable virus has regained a foothold and that the U.S. may soon follow Canada in losing the achievement of having eliminated it.

The reevaluation is largely symbolic and hinges on whether a single measles chain has spread uninterrupted within the U.S. for at least 12 months.

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On Jan. 5, Brown University Health — the largest hospital system in Rhode Island — announced that all of their facilities would require patients, visitors and staff to wear a N95 or Level 2 surgical mask. The new guidelines, effective Jan. 6, follow increased rates of respiratory viruses in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

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It has been a full year since one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent U.S. history began ripping through West Texas. The highly infectious disease has continued to burn across multiple U.S. states, Mexico and Canada since Texas reported an outbreak in children in January 2025. The U.S. had been virtually free of the disease for more than a quarter-century thanks to highly effective and safe vaccines, but now experts say we’re on track to losing that status if officials determine measles has spread continuously for a year.

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Flu cases are ticking down, but experts warn the U.S. isn’t out of the woods yet. Fifteen more children died from the flu in the week ending Jan. 10, bringing the total of pediatric deaths to 32.

On Friday, the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an over 18% drop in confirmed flu cases, compared to the previous week. Doctor visits for respiratory illnesses also decreased by more than 5% and hospitalization rates went down by nearly 55%. Influenza deaths rose by 2%.

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Today, we’re joined by sociologist Vivek Chibber, the provocative scholar and social critic who has a pointed critique of the modern day Left. The host of the Confronting Capitalism podcast joins us and argues that their management of institutions—including academia, media, the Democratic Party, and even public health—is completely out of touch with the lives and struggles of working and middle-class Americans. We discuss how this disconnect is fueling the widespread distrust of experts and institutions today, as well as Chibber's critique of the MAHA movement and its alliance with MAGA.

We also speak with public health professor and emergency physician Craig Spencer to explore how these critiques play out in the health space —on public health, cuts to scientific research, and the shrinking safety nets under the Trump administration. Finally, we discuss what, if anything, can be done to rebuild trust within communities that feel left behind, keying off of polling showing dramatic bipartisan support of the idea that good healthcare is a human right.

Things were going to change in public health. That much was certain after President Donald Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his secretary of health. One contributor to the Bulletin compared Kennedy, who built a career sowing distrust of vaccines, to Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet official who embraced pseudoscientific agricultural practices and sparked widespread famine, or Thabo Mbeki, the South African president who rejected the science of HIV/AIDS and exacerbated the disease’s devasting toll in that country. Yet Kennedy has managed to shock health experts.

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Maybe you’ve been sitting in church or listening to a lecture that, though provocative, sends you into a dozing dreamland, despite getting plenty of sleep the night before. Or maybe you’ve fought to stay awake during a long car ride. These experiences often have as their root cause a common factor — poor indoor air quality caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide because of poor ventilation.

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Developing a vaccine is one challenge. Delivering it to billions is another entirely. Dr. Seth Berkley – one of the most influential leaders in global health and the former CEO of Gavi – joins us to unpack his new book Fair Doses, which reveals the hidden systems, politics, and economics behind global immunization.

Under his leadership, Gavi was the largest vaccine organization in the world, raising $20 billion in funding, delivering 7 billion vaccine doses, and immunizing 3 billion children, transforming global access and reshaping the vaccine market for low-income countries. Dr. Berkley explains why vaccine mistrust has persisted for centuries, and why today’s misinformation environment is uniquely dangerous. He details how Gavi’s alliance model mobilized WHO, UNICEF, governments, and manufacturers to build the largest vaccine delivery network in history. We also go inside COVAX, from vaccine nationalism to the supply-chain barriers that defined the global COVID-19 response. Finally, Dr. Berkley looks ahead to how mRNA, synthetic biology, and AI could radically accelerate our ability to respond to the pandemics to come.

Much of the country is facing record flu cases thanks to a new strain of the virus. And the “subclade K” variant is likely already here in Spokane.

The new strain formed last year as influenza A’s H2N3 virus mutated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mutated form of the virus accounts for 91.2% of flu present in the United States. The surprise variant was not factored into this year’s flu vaccine, so the vaccine may be less effective because of it.

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