In this episode Ben Plumley catches up with Dr. Seth Berkley, founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, former CEO of GAVI and amongst other responsibilities, now a senior advisor at Brown University's School of Public Health's Pandemic Center. Seth has recently published a new book “Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity” and he and Ben discuss the book’s topics of vaccine equity, misinformation, and the rapid innovations in vaccine development, particularly the success and future potential of mRNA vaccines. Dr. Berkley highlights the challenges posed by misinformation and the political landscape, as well as the importance of global collaboration in addressing pandemics. They also explore his defining role in Covax's efforts to distribute COVID vaccines, the need for local manufacturing, and the impacts of nationalistic policies on global health. Dr. Berkley stresses the critical role of ongoing innovation and funding in preparing for future health crises and ensuring equitable access to health technologies. And he pulls no punches on the current US administration’s failures in supporting global health research and partnerships.

Avian flu flared up in Minnesota poultry operations last month after a nearly eight-month reprieve, forcing farmers to depopulate eight turkey barns.

A vaccine exists for this highly pathogenic avian influenza, which could be used against the nearly four-year outbreak that has wiped out 9.2 million birds in Minnesota alone.

Vietnam is among the countries most affected by extreme weather, which fuels the spread of infectious diseases. Prolonged heat and humidity create ideal conditions for mosquitoes to breed, driving dengue and other vector-borne illnesses. Flooding, meanwhile, increases exposure to waterborne and digestive diseases. Together, these climate-sensitive risks underline the urgent need for early warning and response systems to protect public health.

As a number of federal policies impact availability of COVID-19 vaccines, Rhode Island is looking to preserve access through protective measures. The moves followed a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration green-light of three new COVID-19 vaccines.

But in approving these vaccines, the FDA also restricted their use to people who are 65 years or older or have underlying health conditions. Those who are not eligible to receive the vaccine can get a prescription from a health care professional, but they must pay out of pocket prices.

Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced that The Sunshine State will become the first in the nation to remove the mandatory vaccination mandate for schoolchildren. That means that by the end of 2025, kids entering public school will no longer be required to have vaccinations for contagious diseases such as Chicken Pox, Hepatitis B among others. While Dr. Ladapo says the decision will ultimately give power back to individuals are parents to decide what they put in their children’s bodies, other medial professional disagree with the decision and say a health crisis could be looming. Former Florida Surgeon General and Professor of Education at Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Scott Rivkees, sat with us to talk about the ramifications that could come, not just with kids, but with public health as well.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.

Welcome to “the last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and favorite gas station food.

General Mills will be without a chief marketing officer for a time, as Doug Martin has taken the same position at a different food-ish company.

Martin is now heading up the marketing department at Wawa, a gas station chain that is pretty much the Kwik Trip of the East Coast, with a similar cult-like following thanks to its counter-serve food.

Among its many painful lessons, the COVID-19 pandemic taught us that America’s defenses against a devastating health crisis were far weaker than most had reason to expect. More than 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to COVID, the most of any country. It’s puzzling and frightening to watch the Trump Administration dismantle initiatives aimed at keeping us safe from another pandemic.

And let’s not kid ourselves; another pandemic is evolutionarily inevitable. We can’t say when it will strike or if it will be worse than COVID. (Deadly as it was, COVID proved to be far less fatal than others we’ve seen recently, like Ebola, Marburg, MERS and SARS.) But research has projected that there is about a 50 percent chance another COVID-like magnitude of a pandemic (>25 million global deaths) will hit us in the next 20 to 25 years.

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Earlier this week, President Donald Trump indicated that using acetaminophen, commonly known by its brand name Tylenol, shouldn’t be used during a pregnancy and could contribute to rising autism rates in the United States.

The claim has since been scrutinized by health officials, while also shedding light on how clinical data about pregnant women is gathered.
Alyssa Bilinski, a researcher at Brown University, joined 12 News at 4 on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s claim and the risks of medication in pregnant women.

The Pandemic Agreement, adopted by the World Health Assembly in May, is a historic step toward strengthening global systems to prevent, detect, and respond to epidemic and pandemic threats. Yet many low- and middle-income countries face significant political and technical challenges in ratifying and implementing the agreement.

No country is fully prepared for a future pandemic or epidemic. National implementation of the Pandemic Agreement will require sustained political will, policy reforms, investments in capacity building, and ongoing transparency, monitoring, and accountability.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) - Children in Florida are required to get several vaccines before they begin school. It’s a requirement supported by Dr. Scott Rivkees.

“Schools should be places where children should be able to go to without having to worry about getting vaccine preventable diseases,” he told TV20.

He was the state’s former surgeon general during Gov. Ron DeSantis’ first term and helped lead the state during the start of COVID-19.

Rivkees is now a professor at Brown University, but is sounding off on the state’s plan to eliminate vaccines mandates for children. It’s a decision made earlier this month by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the man who replaced Rivkees who left his post in 2021.

On Monday, President Trump, flanked by the heads of the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, drew a clear link between autism and pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. He urged women to avoid the drug while pregnant unless “absolutely necessary,” claiming, “There’s no downside in not taking it.”

The White House pointed to a recent systematic review of 46 studies, in which authors urged caution in using the medication, recommending only “judicious acetaminophen use” following “medical consultation.” At the same time, many experts are stating the opposite. For example, a statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists emphasized that pregnant patients “should not be frightened away from the many benefits of acetaminophen.”

Before he set foot in 200 Independence Avenue, Washington DC, Robert F Kennedy Jr, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, had raised more than a few eyebrows from America’s medical establishment. Around 17,000, to be precise – that’s how many doctors signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.

Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. On Monday, speaking from the White House, Trump and the US secretary of health and human services said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” It was announced that the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but neither Trump or Kennedy Jr provided any peer reviewed medical evidence to support this. They also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism.

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President Trump tied the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy to autism and made several other claims about vaccines. William Brangham discussed those claims and the concerns about what the president said with Alycia Halladay of the Autism Science Foundation and Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

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The committee that offers vaccine advice to the nation’s top public health agency voted Friday against recommending the updated COVID-19 vaccine to people aged 6 months or older, instead leaving the decision to individuals. The panel also decided against recommending that states and local authorities require a prescription for COVID-19 vaccines.

On many levels, people watching the two-day proceedings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) did not know what to expect. Much of the week was uncharted, and a planned vote on the hepatitis B vaccine was tabled despite being on the agenda.

(TNND) — The panel that develops vaccine recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed one change to childhood immunizations but tabled a vote for another before turning their attention to the hotly debated COVID-19 vaccines.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices continued its two-day meeting Friday after voting Thursday to recommend a standalone chickenpox vaccination in toddlers to reduce their risk of febrile seizures.

A combination MMRV vaccine is available, which includes measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) immunizations.

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In April 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential bid in Boston, promising to “Make America Healthy Again.” Since becoming President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made a mockery of this promise, undermining decades of public health consensus.

His tenure recently reached its lowest point, with the explosive departure of Director Susan Monarez from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four other officials left the CDC over Kennedy’s leadership, with one accusing him of “weaponization of public health.”

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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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The world’s market for vaccines, as it exists today, depends on the United States. The U.S. has poured immense resources into the design and development of vaccines, and has paid far higher prices for doses than most other nations can afford. The federal government has issued broad vaccine recommendations, generating strong, consistent demand. “That’s a predictable market,” Richard Hughes IV, a public-health-law expert and the former vice president of public policy at Moderna, told me. It’s also a huge one. Seth Berkley, the former CEO of Gavi, which supports the immunization of about half the world’s children, told me that the U.S. accounts for 35 to 40 percent of global vaccine revenue at a minimum, more than all of Europe combined.

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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Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. Her work focuses on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. She joins Joel Heitkamp on "News and Views" to talk about Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's Senate hearing yesterday, and the importance of vaccine transparency.


(Joel Heitkamp is a talk show host on the Mighty 790 KFGO in Fargo-Moorhead. His award-winning program, “News & Views,” can be heard weekdays from 8 – 11 a.m. Follow Joel on X/Twitter @JoelKFGO.)

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With the CDC in disarray and its future uncertain, this episode explores what’s driving the exodus of agency staff and what this means for national health security.

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – There’s mixed reaction among Floridians following Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s push to end vaccine mandates.

One person against this new push is Dr. Scott Rivkees, who was state Surgeon General from 2019 to 2021 with the DeSantis Administration.

“From a public health, medical, and view as a parent, this is a sad day for Florida,” Rivkees said.

The former state health official is now a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island. Rivkees questions the purpose of the state’s push for vaccine mandate elimination.
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(TNND) — Florida plans to end all vaccine mandates, a move criticized by leading medical groups.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made the announcement Wednesday at an event focused on “medical freedom” in the Sunshine State.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and slavery,” Ladapo said of vaccine mandates.

Ladapo said he doesn’t have the right to tell people what they must put in their bodies.

“Your body, your body is a gift from God,” he said at the event.

Ladapo called vaccine mandates “immoral.”

(TNND) — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his "Make America Healthy Again" agenda during a heated congressional hearing on Thursday against members of both parties.

Kennedy testified before the Senate Finance Committee, where he faced tough questions amid the ouster of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and big changes in vaccine policy.

Susan Monarez was ousted as CDC director after less than a month on the job.

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A decades-long, nationwide commitment to a wholesale vaccination policy began unraveling Wednesday, with some states moving to preserve broad access to inoculations while others lurched in the opposite direction.

In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey essentially wrote a prescription for COVID shots for every person in the state over the age of 5, a move that would blunt potential federal restrictions on COVID boosters.

Meanwhile, Florida’s surgeon general announced a plan to phase out vaccine mandates altogether, including those for children attending its public schools.

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(TNND) — President Donald Trump called on drug companies to "justify" the success they claim over COVID-19 vaccines.

“Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Monday.

Trump said he’s seen “extraordinary” information from drugmakers that hasn’t been shared publicly.

Trump specifically mentioned Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among those who “rip themselves apart” to figure out if the COVID-19 vaccines work as advertised.

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There are many reasons for the widespread condemnation of the decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cancel half a billion dollars in research and development of mRNA vaccines. Indeed, halting work on one of the most promising areas of biomedical innovation—one that brought an end to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and also promises treatments even for non-respiratory diseases like cancer—represents an astounding level of short-sightedness.

The Trump Administration has made significant changes to the departments in charge of public health. Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who teaches public health policy at Brown University, discusses the impact he expects on the health of average Americans and for the future of public health research.

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"There is no American health without a strong, vibrant and evidence-based U.S. CDC."Jennifer Nuzzo on who families can turn to for reliable medical info after the firing of the CDC head and resignation of several officials

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The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July, mentions “health care” only three times. But it is one of the most consequential health policies of the second Trump administration. Its sweeping ambitions for AI—rolling back safeguards, fast-tracking “private-sector-led innovation,” and banning “ideological dogmas such as DEI”—will have long-term consequences for how medicine is practiced, how public health is governed, and who gets left behind.

In addition to Covid prevention, medical researchers are discovering ways mRNAs could treat various cancers, HIV, and sickle cell anemia. But RFK Jr. and the Trump administration are threatening their efforts.

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Turmoil at the nation’s preeminent public health institution reverberated across the country Thursday as a sudden purge of top leaders and abrupt policy changes threatened to confuse Americans on a myriad of health issues and risked leaving the country unprepared for the next pandemic, medical and public health experts said.

On Wednesday, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Susan Monarez, who was confirmed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just one month ago. President Trump affirmed her dismissal Wednesday night.

Rattling departures of high-ranking officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appear to be sending the U.S. public health agency into unsettling disarray, experts say, after the White House abruptly dismissed CDC director Susan Monarez on Wednesday evening following alleged disagreements on health policy.

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Arguably, one of humanity’s most dramatic successes has been the application of science to understand and then decisively intervene to improve these harrowing conditions. The global infant mortality rate is now less than 25 per 1000, with the US at 5.2 per 1000. Although clean water, sanitation, improved nutrition, and advances in neonatal and perinatal care have all played crucial roles in this progress, the greatest single contributor has been the development and widespread use of vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO) Expanded Programme on Immunization is estimated to account for a 40% reduction in global infant mortality rate over the last 50 years, not including the dramatic effects of smallpox eradication.

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It’s been a tumultuous week for US health agencies, with the departure of several top officials, uncertainty around new Covid vaccine restrictions, and even more experts calling for the removal of top health official Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Susan Monarez, was fired by the Trump White House after some controversy, and four other top officials also resigned.

“[The] CDC basically imploded yesterday and now it’s truly in shambles,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and former senior adviser for the CDC. “This is a national security risk to Americans. Without steady-headed, evidence-informed leadership, everything from outbreaks to data to chronic diseases to injury is in jeopardy.”

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Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, has been removed from the position, the White House said Wednesday.

Several high-level veteran agency officials resigned after word spread about her departure, leaving the CDC leaderless at a perilous time. HHS has not named an acting director to lead the CDC.

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Toward Cleaner Indoor Air: Mapping State Legislative Progress

While the public health and regulatory communities focused their initial recommendations on handwashing, personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, isolation, and, eventually, vaccination, the idea of improving indoor air quality came up repeatedly.

Vendors quickly began promoting a range of products claiming to clean the air and prevent infections, leaving decision makers to weigh those claims and determine what, if anything, to do. Could cleaner indoor air really help reduce the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID-19?

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