The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for tracking and issuing recalls of dangerous products sold in the U.S., began discreetly pressuring hospital executives this year to share personally identifiable health data with a private contractor. But hospital lawyers and other industry experts have questioned the agency’s authority to collect, its ability to safeguard such a swath of sensitive information, and whether it has followed the legal process to overhaul its surveillance system.

After ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News asked the CPSC about the new system, the the program on July 21. Left unmentioned, however, is the alarm it has raised among hospital executives, as well as the nature and extent of the agency’s data demands.

In a stark departure from its product-focused mission, the agency’s goal is to obtain millions of Americans’ medical records from emergency room visits for most injuries, from a broken bone to a childhood vaccine reaction or even a suicide attempt, according to documents and emails obtained by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, as well as interviews with five people involved or familiar with the discussions.

A CPSC official also insisted in the emails that the institutions provide all ER patients’ identifiable information — such as names, addresses, diagnoses, and other personal details — to the contractor, Konza Health, for analysis. In correspondence with , Konza representatives described participation as “mandatory” or “required.”

As a condition of viewing the correspondence, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to republish some of the emails it obtained.

The CPSC wants at least 100 hospitals to start sending detailed medical records by the end of this year, according to an .

“The whole thing is troubling,” said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of health law at Case Western Reserve University who noted that giving a private entity access to a sweeping collection of data will introduce risks to patient privacy. “If this company really is collecting identifiable information, that is worrisome for patients.”

The new project was launched amid upheaval at the traditionally independent agency, which is without a governing board since President Donald Trump fired the CPSC’s three Democratic board members. Nearly 1 in 5 career staffers left the CPSC in the first 16 months of the new administration, according to a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News analysis of federal workforce data.

The initiative also comes as the Trump administration has sought unprecedented access to millions of Americans’ medical records, with the Office of Personnel Management requesting federal workers’ sensitive health information and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. using a private organization to collect more medical records for his studies on vaccines and autism.

Steve Roney, CPSC spokesperson, said in an emailed statement on July 10 that the CPSC is “modernizing” its surveillance system. Asked whether the CPSC will file complaints against hospitals that do not participate, he said only that while the previous system “operated as a voluntary program, the ability of hospitals to opt out limited the sample size and usefulness of the data.”

Roney also acknowledged that the agency had not yet notified the public, as “required by law.”

Federal law requires the agency to provide notice and a public comment period before requesting information from 10 or more entities, a step it has not taken despite plans for 100 hospitals to join the surveillance system. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News independently confirmed with over a dozen hospitals that they had been approached.

Federal public health authorities that private health data be reported. But CPSC officials have that if hospitals decline to share data with the new surveillance system, they could be subject to strict penalties from a data-sharing regulation known as “information blocking.”

Yet some hospital executives say they are reluctant to share patients’ sensitive data because they’re concerned about a different violation — that of .

AI Takes Over

Dozens of ERs across the country already participate in the CPSC’s voluntary National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, or NEISS, through which trained hospital workers report injuries involving consumer products, almost always stripped of patients’ identifiable information. The system helps the CPSC identify products, such as baby loungers, toys, and household appliances, with a pattern of injuring consumers.

The new injury surveillance program goes much further.

At a toy industry trade event in February, acting CPSC Chairman Peter Feldman said the agency is “investing in AI-enabled workflows that improve the quality and quantity of injury surveillance data, while also building up digital infrastructure to handle a massive new volume of electronic health records.”

Konza Health, a Kansas-based organization that runs the state’s health data exchange, will automatically pull and analyze medical records of all patient visits from ERs nationwide. Konza won a worth up to $15.9 million with the CPSC last fall.

In email correspondence with hospital technology officials, Konza Health President and CEO Laura McCrary also has described ERs’ participation as “required,” stipulating that they share patients’ records with identifying information.

McCrary told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News by email that the company is not using AI to process the records it receives, saying instead that Konza will use “advanced analytic parsing and filtering capabilities.” Roney, the CPSC spokesperson, did not answer questions about the .

For years, agency officials moving away from human contractors and automating NEISS to save time and money.

But without workers on-site, hospital staffers may no longer receive training to determine what clinical information is important to include for the CPSC. In short, the changes could dilute the quality of the product safety data the agency collects.

“They want to suck in as much data as possible, but I’m not sure how thoughtful they’re being about what is collected and what is actually needed by the agency,” said former CPSC chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric, one of the Democratic appointees Trump fired last year.

Wanted: Injuries From Vaccines and Stingrays

The CPSC’s new data collection appears to contradict its own 214-page , which instructs hospitals not to include identifiable information “such as names, birthdates, or addresses” when reporting cases.

The agency is supposed to receive patients’ identifying information only when needed for follow-up investigations, which happens in fewer than 1% of reported cases, according to the manual.

The CPSC has also historically limited the records it collects to minimize privacy violations in case of a data breach.

The risk is not hypothetical: From 2017 to 2019, the agency improperly released personal health information of around 30,000 people, a disclosure that a top Republican at the time

Konza, however, will receive even more sensitive information on many more people. McCrary said in a statement that Konza will remove patients’ names, addresses, and medical information “not needed by CPSC” before sharing records with the agency.

Leaving a private organization to collect sensitive information introduces risks, including that it could be stolen or used for business purposes, said Hoffman, the Case Western professor.

“Very often, they will use information for marketing because now they’re going to know what conditions people have,” she said.

Roney said that its contract with Konza, which has not been made public, prohibits the organization from selling or marketing the data it collects.

The CPSC’s manual also identifies types of ER visits that should not be reported to the CPSC, which has jurisdiction over only certain consumer products. Excluded injuries are those caused by food, illegal drugs, medical devices, alcohol, or plants, as well as injuries that did not involve consumer products — such as a cut from a rock or broken bones from a fall on the ground — and suicide attempts by adults.

But in a to one hospital and reviewed by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, Konza set no such limits on the information it would gather from ER records and said it would hold on to patient health information for at least 30 days.

In an email sent to hospital technology officials, McCrary wrote that Konza would provide the CPSC with records when a patient is treated in the ER for any of more than 10,000 conditions. The expansive list of diagnostic codes Konza provided in the email includes injuries that do not involve consumer products.

Child injuries resulting from “poisoning by” vaccines or contact with stingrays, neither of which is regulated by the CPSC, are included in the list.

A limited number of hospitals once shared deidentified data on all injuries — regardless of product involvement — through the NEISS using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury-tracking program. But the CDC halted that data collection, after funding and staffing were cut last year, and has not restarted it.

Pressure on Hospitals

CPSC Chief Data Officer Elizabeth Puchek, who joined the agency late last year after engineering U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ data system, has told hospitals in emails that they must seek an exemption from the program if they decline to share patients’ emergency room records with Konza.

The CPSC’s targeted outreach has included some of the nation’s largest urban and rural health systems, as well as small, publicly owned hospitals.

Staff members at Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames, Iowa, said that Konza and federal officials told them their participation in the new program was mandatory. The hospital, which has long participated in NEISS, signed a new contract in April to share its ER records with Konza.

Yet the hospital is reevaluating its participation after being notified that the funds it received to participate in NEISS were “no longer available,” spokesperson Steve Sullivan said.

Several hospital executives, lawyers, and others have raised doubts about the CPSC’s claimed authority.

Harborview Medical Center spokesperson Susan Gregg said the Seattle hospital’s emergency room has “voluntarily submitted de-identified data for many years, but we are not obligated to report this information.”

In Boston, Mass General Brigham has declined to participate in the new program, with spokesperson Kelly Mitchell saying that “to protect patient privacy, we are unable to provide these medical records.”

Henry Ford Health in Detroit; St. Luke’s in Boise, Idaho; and Sanford Health based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — which together handle over a million ER visits a year — are among the health systems that have been approached but not yet entered into an agreement with Konza, according to representatives. Several of the nation’s busiest hospital systems targeted for the program — including the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas — declined to answer questions about whether they’re participating.

Hoehn-Saric, the agency’s former chairman, said he was surprised that the CPSC would insist that hospitals provide identifiable records from all emergency room visits.

“This idea that they can simply demand patient information from a hospital and that the hospital would provide it — I really don’t understand the basis for that,” he said.

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

“The national security might be something worth paying for,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said July 22 in an exclusive interview with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News.

The U.S., which has grappled with drug shortages in recent years, relies primarily on China to produce the active ingredients in many antibiotics, according to in JAMA Health Forum. Domestic facilities have closed or shifted to producing other drugs.

“Do we want China to have that sort of leverage for these drugs to be produced principally, maybe 99%, over there, and we don’t have access to them if tension rises between the two countries?” said Cassidy, who is a physician.

On July 21, Trump said in a that he would give generic drug companies two years to move production back to the U.S., after which he would impose 100% tariffs on imported products, rising to 200% the following year. Generic drugs make up an estimated 90% of all prescriptions filled in the U.S.

Cassidy, who has served in Congress , lost his bid for reelection in May after Trump endorsed a Republican primary challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow.

Last month, more than 16 months after his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, on CBS News’ Face the Nation that the secretary broke promises he made to the senator, including that he would not change the federal recommendations for childhood vaccines.

Asked whether he would summon Kennedy again to discuss those promises, Cassidy said he had asked for him to appear before his committee but had not heard back about whether he would do so. Kennedy in April to discuss the Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request for HHS.

Cassidy told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News that when he agreed to vote to advance Kennedy’s nomination, he trusted that Kennedy would keep his word about not disparaging vaccines.

“If they agree to guardrails and disregard those guardrails, you can judge me,” Cassidy said. “You may decide my judgment wasn’t very good, but I don’t think you can say I acted in bad faith.”

Regardless, Cassidy added, Kennedy was going to exert influence in the administration, and he thought it would be better for Kennedy to be in an official post, where his work would be subject to oversight.

“I’m pretty sure that RFK was going to have the president’s ear whether he was in office or not,” he said.

While Kennedy’s efforts to roll back federal vaccine recommendations are being blocked by courts, this week reported that the number of measles cases confirmed in the U.S. so far in 2026 has exceeded the total for 2025 — making it the highest number of cases in 35 years.

Cassidy, a principal author of the 2020 No Surprises Act targeting surprise medical bills, also said he doesn’t think Congress needs to make modifications to the law in the wake of reports that doctors and other healthcare providers are winning huge payouts under the arbitration system the law created. The No Surprises Act was intended to shield patients from receiving big bills for receiving medical care they didn’t know was outside their health plan’s network.

An analysis by this week found that providers were awarded nearly $15 billion in disputed claims in 2025, more than triple the 2024 figure of $4.08 billion.

“The initial step to make sure that people are getting their best deal is price transparency,” Cassidy said.

The HELP Committee on July 22 overwhelmingly approved advancing the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, a bipartisan bill that would further expand the requirements that hospitals, insurers, and other healthcare providers make prices public and available to patients and employers. A House committee advanced a similar bill this week, also with bipartisan support, but it remains unclear whether either measure will be approved by the full House and Senate.

The interview — in which Cassidy also discussed his — was part of the “How Would You Fix It?” series featuring Julie Rovner, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ chief Washington correspondent and host of the What the Health? podcast.

An abbreviated version of this interview aired July 23 in Episode 456 of What the Health? From ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News: “A Shrinking Safety Net.”

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

For the first time in a quarter century, the U.S. no longer meets a main criterion for having eliminated measles as a public health threat. That status hinges on sporadic outbreaks fizzling out within a year. Utah’s outbreak has lasted for longer, since .

Nearly 400 people have been hospitalized with measles in the U.S. this year and last, three people have died, and at least three suffered with .

This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to finalize a comprehensive study of the nation’s measles situation, examining data from January 2025 through June 2026.

“I don’t think we could say with a straight face that there hasn’t been transmission over the past 12 months,” said a CDC scientist with knowledge of the agency’s measles report. (ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to name the researcher, who is concerned about retaliation.) The researcher said a national committee of measles specialists will review the CDC’s internal report, which then goes to the Pan American Health Organization, a group that evaluates the measles elimination status of countries throughout North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean.

PAHO will make at an annual meeting this fall, but scientists say the writing is on the wall. “The assessment for elimination isn’t until November, but that is a scheduling issue, basically,” said Anne Schuchat, who led the CDC’s immunization and respiratory disease group from 2006 to 2015.

“It’s just so sad, because some people will get brutally ill,” she said of measles’ return. “This is a wake-up call.”

Pediatricians in Utah have been on the front lines as measles and other vaccine-preventable ailments have returned to the U.S. In interviews with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, six doctors shared insights on this new era of vaccine hesitancy — and what could be done to turn the situation around.

The conversations have been edited for clarity.

On Unvaccinated Children Hospitalized With Measles Complications

Emilie Morris, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County: When children come in, they’re often bent over. We call it tripoding, which is particular to upper respiratory infections and airway swelling. They have a rash — viruses cause rashes all the time — but in this context, the kid is hunched over, mouth open, drooling, crying, maybe not even producing tears, because they’re so dehydrated. Really labored breathing, kind of tugging in their belly, tugging between their ribs. Their eyes look kind of glazed over. It’s like they’re seeing through you.

Nathan Money, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County: If the child has a fever or trouble breathing, and they’re unvaccinated, I have to be way more aggressive from a medical standpoint, because they are at higher risk of having life-threatening illnesses. I have to do more blood work, or lumbar punctures to rule out meningitis. I have to do things which are painful, and it’s traumatic for the families.

I tell them, “Because your child doesn’t have vaccines, I have to be more worried about conditions like sepsis or meningitis, so therefore I need to do more workup.” The last thing I want to do is miss something. These are parents who love their children. They always tell me, “Do what you need to do to make sure my child is safe.”

On Treating Unvaccinated Children Hospitalized for Measles

Trahern W. Jones, a pediatric infectious disease specialist based in Salt Lake City: So I’m coming into a room and just hearing the most awful barking cough, just a cough and a high-pitch stridor as the child is trying to breathe. And he’s just coughing so hard it just makes you feel short of breath. He looks like he’s been beaten down for days, but he can’t rest, because the cough keeps him awake.

The parents tell me they’re not anti-vaccine, but in the past, somebody they know had a reaction to a vaccine — or something they thought was a reaction to a vaccine — and so they paused vaccines when the child was a baby. They were planning to catch up later.

In another case, the parent was stunned by how awful it was. I asked them what they knew about measles before their child was sick, and they said the only person who’d ever taught them anything about measles was their grandmother who had taken care of her kids with measles ages ago. That’s something I’ve heard from other parents. It’s such an awful illness. Even the best possible course is going to be one of the worst diseases most children ever go through.

There are multiple facets to it. Physically, the child has been beat down for multiple days by this virus. The parents don’t get to sleep, because they’re nursing their child. Then there’s the emotional component because the parent is regretting not getting the vaccine, not realizing how bad this was, and then feeling deeply ashamed, trying to reconcile with family members who are really upset at them for not getting their child vaccinated.

Morris: One child was from a family that was uninsured because they didn’t feel that they would need to use the medical system. They were faced with the high burden of cost of our healthcare system. The cost was playing into the parents’ decision on whether or not their child should receive necessary medical care. I said something like: “Please don’t go home. Your child needs oxygen. She has pneumonia. We will figure out a way to pay for this, because we acknowledge what we do is expensive.”

On top of that, the parent had several other children in the home who weren’t vaccinated. It was past the period where we could intervene with vaccines to try to prevent infection, so then our recommendation was to quarantine their children at home for 21 days: “Don’t interact with anybody else in your community. Don’t go to the grocery store, even with a mask. Please take this seriously.”

It takes time for parents to understand the level of concern I have, even when their child is physically ill in the hospital requiring ongoing care. It’s pretty indicative of the breakdown of trust between physicians and families. I say, “This is the gravity or severity of your child’s situation and how serious we need to be about protecting other people.”

It’s frustrating. How can I make people understand I have a very genuine concern for their child? And I know they share that concern, but maybe it’s not the same degree of concern, because they don’t understand the illness and how severe it can become.

Money: It’s heartbreaking to see these children struggling to survive when measles could have been easily prevented by a safe mechanism that is readily available and well studied. These are well-meaning parents who love their children, who have gotten bad information from federal leadership or from online sources. The saddest part to me is when I am caring for a child and the parent says, “I didn’t know that this could get so bad.”

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On Conversations With Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Children

Tim Duffy, a pediatrician in Salt Lake County: A lot of families aren’t aggressively anti-vax, but they’re hesitant. Younger parents who grew up in the digital age have done their research — “research” in quotation marks — for months. And they keep getting confirmation of their concerns on social media. They think they’re doing what’s best for their child.

I’ve told families: “You could do nothing I say as a pediatrician. You could sleep your child on their stomach. You could not put them in a car seat or, when they’re older, not use seat belts. You could do nothing I say, and for your individual child, they will probably be OK. But from my standpoint, where I’m taking care of thousands of kids, within a system that takes care of hundreds of thousands of kids, we will have bad outcomes. These children will show up at our facilities, and it’s so sad.”

Pediatrician in southern Utah whom ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to name, because of concerns about harassment after being targeted by anti-vaccine activists in the past: A lot of parents are concerned about autism. I’ve told them that I’d be very concerned if there was any evidence that what we’re doing is causing autism. But if vaccines were causing autism, we should see more cases of autism in vaccinated kids compared to unvaccinated kids, and we’re just not seeing that.

I’ve also had families who say they want to be natural, or that they’re concerned about what is in the shots. A frequently asked question is: “Did you vaccinate your children?” I say that knowing what I know, I’m confident giving this to my kids. They’re all vaccinated.

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On the Influence of Politics on Vaccine Hesitancy

Jones: Vaccines have become a political football. That wasn’t true 20 years ago. But now it’s used to drive a wedge between groups of people, which is unfortunate. Vaccines are one of the main reasons why we don’t have to worry about losing our kids.

Southern Utah pediatrician: People don’t know who to believe. If politics comes up, I tell parents that my messaging on vaccines is not politically motivated. When parents ask about changes to the vaccine schedule, I’m transparent. [In January, the Department of Health and Human Services reducing the number of vaccines given to children. A few months later, a federal judge blocked those changes.]

I’ve said there was a process for the approval of immunizations through ACIP [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices], which is made up of scientists, public health experts, and doctors, and all those people were let go, and a new panel was selected. A couple of individuals changed the recommendation outside of the time-tested, evidence-based process for evaluating vaccines. That raises concerns for me as a doctor. I tell parents that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and several other professional organizations have issued statements saying that these changes are not based on evidence.

Ellie Brownstein, a pediatrician in Salt Lake County and president-elect of the Utah chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics: I avoid talking about politics, but what’s being said has added another layer to our work. One family asked me about changes to vaccine recommendations, so instead of just telling them what immunizations are due, I talk with them about why physicians and researchers have followed a different schedule for years, about the reasoning and the science behind it. I explain that I trust these experts over someone without a lot of experience.

Money: People are not vaccinated, because they’ve lost trust in the medical community. They’re placing trust elsewhere. Rebuilding trust is a complicated process, but it comes from consistent messaging at every level, from the pediatrician to local health departments to community leaders, city leadership, district leadership, religious leadership, educational leadership.

We need consistent messaging from state leadership, which has been pretty absent. I want to see commercials on TV about the safety of the MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine and the dangers of the measles, sponsored by my state leadership. I’d like to see this on billboards and in schools, in public buildings and grocery stores. I want to go to a sports event and see messages about the measles and the MMR vaccine. Right now, people have to go out of their way to find information from reputable sources.

We also need policy changes to support vaccination. This train is going in the wrong direction, and it can feel like a helpless situation, because we’re just not seeing the public messaging and leadership that’s needed to turn this around.

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Advice on Talking With Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Children

Jones: Approach them with as much compassion as you possibly can. Ask open-ended questions to learn about their experiences that led them to have these concerns. I think it’s really important to not come down on them, citing facts and figures and pointing to guidelines on why they need to get their kids vaccinated. But try to direct their attention to the fact that you’re a real person with your own real experiences and knowledge. I point out to families that I have my own kids, and I would never recommend something for your kids that I wouldn’t do for mine.

Southern Utah pediatrician: I’ve learned that if you come down hard, you’re going to lose people who need care. My number one goal now is to build bridges and maintain a relationship with families, because that’s what’s going to allow me to convince some of them.

I approach people differently depending on where they are. Parents who are very skeptical or anti-vax will say no when I tell them their child is due for immunizations. I’ll say: “Fine. You guys get to choose. You’re the parents. But I’m curious to know what your reasoning is.” Sometimes they’re just like, “It’s something I’ve decided.” They don’t want to have a conversation.

It’s a good day if I can have a conversation with someone who doesn’t want to vaccinate, even if I don’t convince them. I try to help them think through things rather than shoving anything down their throat. When they’re done talking, I’ll ask, “Can I share my perspectives on this?” Some will say yes enthusiastically, and others will say yes because they’re being polite.

A lot of parents aren’t sure what to do, and those are the people I focus most of my time on. I focus our conversation on their specific concerns, and I’m open about specific side effects that different immunizations can have. For example, I’ll tell them that some children get a fever after a vaccine, which is OK. The fever is not harmful, but it can make babies feel crummy as their body is building up antibodies against viruses and bacteria.

Brownstein: I don’t like the idea of excluding unvaccinated kids from my practice. I know some do that. But what that does is it ends any future discussion. I can’t keep talking with parents about vaccines if I kick them out of my practice, and if these parents find like-minded doctors, this situation will get worse.

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On Being on the Front Lines of Measles’ Comeback in the U.S.

Money: I wish that people could see what I see. Everyone else sees what people post on Instagram. Or they think, “Someone I know had measles when they were a kid and they were fine.” But as a hospital-based pediatrician, I see what happens when things go poorly. I see what happens when children with measles aren’t able to breathe on their own, and they’re in a hospital bed with a cannula in their nose, struggling to breathe, an IV in their arm because they can’t drink on their own. And the child is terrified, and the parents are scared that their child might die.

It’s heartbreaking as a pediatrician and as a father to know that the entire situation could have been easily prevented.

Duffy: Even though parents say vaccination is their choice, I still feel personally responsible if something bad happens that’s preventable, because I feel like I didn’t say the right thing, I didn’t ask the right questions. Maybe I let it drop because of the look on a parent’s face.

Morris: Every pediatrician I know cares so deeply about what they do. Sometimes people forget that we are human beings practicing this discipline, and we bring all our concerns for our community into this space. I’m trying to navigate a lot of complex human emotions, like how it feels to hold grief with a family when something bad happens that was preventable — which is the worst situation, because you think, “Could I have done something differently?”

Jones: I think we’ll see more diseases start coming back that we thought we had gotten rid of. I think it’s going to take dramatic changes to actually prevent those outcomes. I’m not necessarily seeing those changes being done by those in power.

I think of that quote from The Lord of the Rings. It’s something like, you don’t get to choose the time that you’re born into, but you get to choose what you’re going to do about it. And if there’s any comfort that I have, it’s in knowing that there are right decisions to make and that I’m going to make them, and I’m going to help others make them, too.

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

In June, Vincent Munster, an infectious disease researcher at the National Institutes of Health, was charged with bringing biological specimens into the U.S. without proper documents. Weeks later, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ordered Anthony Fauci, Munster’s former boss, to appear before a Senate committee, alleging that he’d lied to Congress about the covid-19 pandemic’s origins. This spring, the FBI detained a former aide to Fauci, and federal officials banned a virus researcher in North Carolina from receiving federal funding.

In each case, senior U.S. officials and members of Congress have leaned into unproven theories that arrogant scientists damaged rather than protected public health by recklessly experimenting with covid and other killer viruses, including in China.

Conservative groups and social influencers have amplified that view through a whirlwind of covid conspiracy theories, bioterrorism fearmongering, and anti-immigration sentiment. The recent charges stirred long-held mistrust of the high-security Rocky Mountain Laboratories, where Munster works, among residents of this blue-collar mountain town in Montana built on logging.

A dozen scientists interviewed for this article said that any crimes or errors committed by Munster, who was transporting vials of inactivated mpox for research purposes, seemed to be over paperwork and posed no threat to the public. Nonetheless, some colleagues in Montana said, the alleged improprieties needlessly bat a hornet’s nest.

“This just gives ammunition to the people that are trying to stop this valuable research,” said Kim Hasenkrug, a scientist emeritus at the NIH who worked at Rocky Mountain Labs for 31 years. “Even people who have trusted us in the past, this sows seeds of distrust. How could it not?”

Cuts to U.S. foreign aid and research funding have left tens of millions of dollars in gaps in the fight against spreading Ebola and mpox outbreaks, scientists told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News. “When the next pandemic comes around and we need vaccines to protect ourselves, the chances are that China will develop them before we do,” said Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research. Andersen co-authored studies that stoked the ire of proponents of the theory that a lab leak started the covid pandemic.

Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, said the federal government “remains fully equipped to protect Americans and respond to emerging public health threats.” She said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had deployed experts domestically and internationally to respond to Ebola.

Scientists like Munster are indispensable for figuring out the source of pandemic viruses, whether bats, pigs, rats, or some other animal, Andersen said. Munster “is the person who goes out to Africa to get samples of bad viruses from people,” said Stanley Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa and a longtime member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel. “He’s done lots of things that needed to be done, and he does them well.”

Authorities arrested Munster and Claude Kwe, a research fellow at Rocky Mountain Labs, June 2 on charges of conspiracy to smuggle mpox into the United States and lying to border agents. They had been stopped Jan. 25 at the Detroit airport after returning from the Republic of Congo.

The announcing the charges said FBI testing had confirmed the viruses were inactivated — Munster helped — but that the scientists jeopardized Americans’ safety.

“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo. Let that sink in,” said Jerome Gorgon, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The says Munster and Kwe falsely told customs agents the mpox specimens they brought back were for diagnostic use. Yet several scientists told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News that the specimens most likely were indeed for use in developing mpox diagnostic tests.

The complaint also states that the scientists lacked the appropriate documents. requires researchers to register and certify inactivated viruses.

“He is presumed innocent and we will have to await future proceedings before commenting,” Kwe’s federal community defender, Benton Martin, said of his client.

In Montana, Marshall Bloom, an associate director at Rocky Mountain Labs, told the Ravalli County Board of Health in a July meeting that the scientists have been suspended and aren’t allowed on campus amid an internal NIH investigation. “These are not trivial accusations,” Bloom said.

It is not illegal or unheard of to take an inactivated virus on a plane. If the samples were inactive, “the risk is zero,” said Daniel Jernigan, who worked for 26 years at the CDC and led its National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases until retiring last August.

“But you have to have the documentation available,” he added.

Jernigan recalled reprimands issued for this sort of lapse but knew of no arrests.

“In this climate,” Perlman said, “you’d want to make sure you talk to people at your institution to make sure any i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.”

Munster’s attorney didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.

Skeptical Neighbors

Conservative politicians and others skeptical of the nation’s covid response have had Munster and Rocky Mountain Labs on their radar for years.

The facility is in Hamilton, a town of 5,000 in rural Ravalli County, which gave President Donald Trump 69% of its vote in 2024. The lab got its start with studies of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the 1900s, when ranchers and cattle were dying from the then-unknown disease.

Today it is a Biosafety Level 4 facility, one of only several dozen labs in the world to employ the highest level of safety controls that enable scientists to study the deadliest pathogens.

Munster and his laboratory of viral ecology are known as the “go-to group for highly dangerous viruses” such as Middle East respiratory syndrome, Nipah, Ebola, and bird flu, said zoologist Peter Daszak, whose work has also been targeted in recent years. Munster “goes into red zones,” gets samples from sick people, and makes diagnostic tests that help assess an outbreak and how to stop it, Daszak said.

Munster and his colleagues contributed to studies of , , and — work that put the lab in the crosshairs of people warning about the dangers of biomedical research.

In April, the White Coat Waste Project, a self-described government watchdog group to stop tax-funded animal testing, paid for billboards across seven cities with NIH-funded labs, including Hamilton.

The next month, about the investigation into Munster, citing an anonymous letter. That caught the attention of Laura Loomer, a far-right activist known as a loyalty enforcer for Trump who has the president’s ear. She posted about it to her 1.9 million followers on the social platform X.

“Fauci Holdovers at @NIH and @HHSGov are about to unleash Ebola in America,” Loomer posted on May 17, asking why Munster, who is Dutch, and Kwe, from Cameroon, weren’t imprisoned or deported.

Little more than a week later, Montana Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy sent a letter to HHS calling for an investigation, saying the alleged improper behavior by the scientists could threaten national security.

Munster and Kwe were charged days later. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, in mid-July as a reason to close the Hamilton facility, part of his ongoing “Fauci-era programs.”

The arrests added to local apprehensions about the facility.

 “You can’t pick and choose which rules you follow when you’re dealing with this stuff,” County Commissioner Jeff Burrows said at a June meeting. “And I know he’s innocent until proven guilty, but for God’s sakes, this is a big deal.”

The Ongoing Push To Blame Fauci

About two weeks after the charges, departing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released declassified documents that she said proved Fauci had lied to Congress about NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab that, in her words, “sparked covid.” The documents, however, provide no new evidence that the lab launched the covid virus. Most, though not all, virus experts think the best evidence indicates the virus jumped from bats to other animals, and then to humans at a Wuhan market.

of the lab-leak theory have issued fresh calls to punish Fauci, 85, and scientists his institute funded. Fauci declined to comment for this article.

Shortly after Gabbard’s report, Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, subpoenaed Fauci to testify before the committee.

Fauci “was Dr. Frankenstein of the modern era” and “has the blood of millions of people on his hands,” Peter Navarro, a senior adviser to Trump, on June 25. “You idiot! … You need to come clean, Fauci.”

The administration’s mistrust of the federal bureaucracy and the scientific work it has funded has led to broad cuts and staffing losses, including in .

A May 2025 suspended research on many risky viruses, and HHS later halted an $82 million, that funded research into emerging viruses by 10 labs across the world. In late May this year, the White House that would give political appointees sweeping power over all federally funded science.

Prominent covid experts and scientists close to Fauci have been called before congressional committees, barred from receiving government grants, or arrested.

In April, heavily armed FBI agents of David Morens, Fauci’s 78-year-old former aide. They forced him to strip to his underwear and drove him in handcuffs 40 miles to a federal courthouse, where he was briefly jailed, according to Science magazine. Morens’ case is pending.

In May, HHS told Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina coronavirus expert, that it was halting his federal funding because of a “pattern of deception” in his communications with the NIH. .

In some ways, the arrests of Munster and Kwe felt unsurprising, said Philip Stewart, a recently retired Rocky Mountain Labs researcher focused on tick-borne diseases.

“There is an anti-science movement,” Stewart said. “We are targets, and if it hadn’t been Vincent, it would have been someone else.”

Most Americans believe in the lab-leak theory, according to surveys, and several U.S. intelligence agencies lean in that direction. That makes targeting scientists who do that kind of work politically expedient, said Daszak, whose NIH-funded nonprofit worked with Chinese virologists in Wuhan and has been under scrutiny since April 2020, when Trump his funding ended.

Animal viruses jump to humans in the wild a year, usually producing negligible infections, occasionally sparking an outbreak. The Ebola virus causing the current African epidemic may have originated in bats, which seem to carry it without getting sick.

Doctors on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo lacked diagnostic tests . Munster, who has extensively researched Ebola, was locked out of his lab soon after the January detention.

“While we sit around removing pandemic preparedness grants, arresting scientists, locking them up in some cases,” Daszak said, “viruses are out there evolving.”

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

Céline Gounder, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to offer compensation for automatic covid vaccine injuries and the drop in enrollment in Affordable Care Act health plans on CBS’ The Takeout With Major Garrett on July 10 and 9, respectively.

• .
• .

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News Southern correspondent Sam Whitehead discussed abortion telehealth on WUGA’s The Georgia Health Report on July 10.

• .
• Read Kate Wells’ “A Ban Won’t Stop Abortion Pill Access, Telehealth Providers Say.”

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

“I have been vaccinating people throughout my entire career in uniformed services. I believe in vaccines,” Schwartz said at the hearing. “I do believe that mRNA technology is safe and effective.”

Her position contrasts with that of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ousted Trump’s previous CDC director, Susan Monarez, after she sparred with him over vaccines. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has baselessly called mRNA vaccines the deadliest ever made.

Schwartz “has dedicated her career to protecting the health of the American people.” Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “The president nominated her because of that exemplary record, and Secretary Kennedy looks forward to working with her to advance the Administration’s public health priorities.”

The CDC has had a Senate-confirmed leader for only about one month during Trump’s second term, and the agency has been roiled over the administration’s cuts to public health funding, firings of scientists and other career employees, and efforts to scale back childhood vaccines and access to covid shots.

Schwartz, who was deputy surgeon general in Trump’s first administration and is a former chief medical officer for the Coast Guard, has support in the public health community, where it’s hoped she can restore credibility at the agency she would lead.

“I will follow the science wherever it leads,” Schwartz told senators. “My first priority will be restoring trust in public health institutions.”

Democrats and some Republicans have expressed doubt that Schwartz will maintain any more independence from Kennedy than Monarez, who has said she was fired in August after refusing to sign off on changes Kennedy demanded to vaccine recommendations and personnel cuts. In a released by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), it was revealed Kennedy had pressured Monarez to change CDC guidance regarding the universal childhood flu vaccine.

Monarez “refused to act as a rubber stamp for Secretary Kennedy’s very dangerous agenda,” Sanders said July 15 at the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s confirmation hearing for Schwartz. “Frankly, she stood up for protecting the well-being of the American people.”

The chairman of the HELP Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), pressed Schwartz on whether she would push back against rhetoric or policies not based in science.

“We need unbiased leaders who make decisions based upon science, not politics or ideology,” Cassidy said. “This is not a theoretical.”

Cassidy, a physician, has also quarreled with Kennedy over vaccines. He lost a Republican primary for reelection in May after Trump endorsed one of his opponents. Despite his rupture with the White House, Schwartz almost certainly needs Cassidy’s support to win confirmation. That requires publicly committing to support vaccination and mainstream science.

Schwartz told the committee she would “never compromise” on science.

“The president would never ask me to not follow the law,” she said. “But I will always follow the law.”

Many Democrats on the committee raised concerns about the administration’s politicization of public health. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) asked about the “political scrubbing” of research grants. Trump officials have canceled many research grants under the CDC and the National Institutes of Health for political reasons, including targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

“Restoring trust to the CDC is my No. 1 priority,” Schwartz said. “Scientific integrity is core.”

The American Public Health Association’s CEO, Georges Benjamin, , saying she “possesses the medical background and public health knowledge to understand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must be guided by evidence-based science.”

The APHA has fought many of Trump’s initiatives on public health. After Monarez’s resignation, the organization titled “Kennedy’s attack on public health must be stopped.”

Schwartz told the committee that if she is confirmed, she is committed to “radical transparency” and modernization.

Schwartz expressed support for one Kennedy initiative: She told senators she believes nutrition education and physical fitness assessments are important.

“I am all in on the Make America Healthy Again agenda,” she said.

At the July 15 hearing, Schwartz faced questioning alongside Trump’s pick for HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, Sean Kaufman.

Cassidy called out Kaufman for past comments casting doubt on the efficacy of vaccines. The senator raised his voice as he accused Kaufman of spreading “those damn lies.”

Kaufman was conciliatory. “Let me be clear: Vaccines save lives,” he said. “They are safe and effective.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Schwartz will replace Jay Bhattacharya, who is performing the duties of CDC director but is not officially the acting director. Bhattacharya is also the director of the NIH.

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

A Tragic, Deadly Denial

I read your article in The Washington Post about the woman whose Humana policy required prior authorization for a drug she’d been taking (Bill of the Month: “She Struggled To Get a Lifesaving Drug Even After Insurers Vowed To Help,” June 29).

My husband, Kenney, had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. On June 7, he fatally shot himself after a COPD exacerbation event.

His pulmonologist had prescribed two new nebulizer prescriptions on June 2. One was a specialty medication that would come directly from the drug company. A couple of days later, we called Walgreens to see why the other one hadn’t been filled. Turns out it required prior authorization.

Why the doctor who prescribed it needed to tell his health insurer that he really did think his patient needed it, I will never understand. The pharmacist said she would send the request to the doctor. And why she hadn’t already done that, again, I do not understand. By June 7, of course, it still wasn’t filled.

That day, a Sunday, Kenney experienced the flare-up when I was out mowing the yard. How terrifying it must have been for him to be unable to breathe and me not being there at least to hold his hand. That night he killed himself, leaving a note saying that he hated to leave me but that he couldn’t keep living like that — with the constant anxiety of not knowing when he wouldn’t be able to draw a breath.

Not long ago, a “welcome” packet came in the mail about the other nebulizer treatment — 25 days after it had been prescribed.

Admittedly, my husband’s health was not great. He did have COPD, but we still went out to eat once in a while, and he didn’t have to take his oxygen on those trips. He rarely used it just walking around the house.

He did make a serious suicide attempt six years ago (our daughter and granddaughter had died), but after seeing what it did to me and our son, he promised he’d never do it again. It was only when these exacerbation/flare-up events started this year that he indicated life was getting bad.

Perhaps, just perhaps, if he had received both medications in a timely manner, he would be here today, and we would have had many more years together. We met when we were 16 and had been together ever since. He was 78 when he died.

— Cindy Clements Blewett; Kyle, Texas

Navigating GLP-1 Coverage

Sydney Lupkin’s thoughtful article about the obstacles in obtaining weight loss drugs was interesting (Healthcare Helpline: “Trouble Getting Weight Loss Drugs Covered by Insurance? Here’s What To Know,” June 26). It would have been more helpful had it included a discussion of Medicare’s decision to cover these drugs as of July 1, 2026, and how to navigate the rocky shores of obtaining a prescription that won’t be denied.

— Sharie Hartman; Manteca, California

Beyond the Veil of Pregnancy Centers

I would like to address the article about a pregnancy resource center providing prenatal care in Sandpoint, Idaho (“Religious Anti-Abortion Center Finds Opportunity in Town Without OB-GYNs,” May 20). It is unfortunate that many still do not understand what pregnancy resource centers do, nor the high-quality care they provide. While there are some “crisis pregnancy centers” that provide limited offerings, most centers are aligned with a national organization like the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, the Heartbeat Pregnancy Center, or Care Net. All these organizations require centers to have a medical director (a licensed healthcare practitioner) and require that the nurses who perform the ultrasounds have appropriate training. While I am not affiliated with 7B Care Clinic, I am concerned that the article may not have accurately reflected what is provided in such clinics. I offer my experiences to bring further clarity.

I work at a life-affirming women’s clinic. I am a board-certified family physician. I have delivered approximately 1,000 babies in my career. I have been performing ultrasounds for my patients for over a decade, and fought for this ability under the scrutiny of maternal-fetal medicine specialists, spending time alongside their registered diagnostic medical sonographer technicians, and having my scans reviewed by maternal-fetal medicine physicians. I have practiced medicine in three states over three decades.

Second, while I am life-affirming, I am not “anti-abortion.” I happen to believe that there are better choices, and I know that some women will still choose abortion, even after hearing all their options. I will gladly see those women for follow-up to answer questions and evaluate for complications — something that the abortion clinics in my area apparently will not do. I say this because that is what the women I see tell me. The clinic that performed the procedure or gave them the pills will not see a patient after the abortion for any follow-up. I have always willingly seen patients for any reason, whether I was working at a private clinic or hospital-owned clinic. That is no different now that I work for a life-affirming women’s clinic.

We provide a variety of services — free of charge. We are also stepping up to provide prenatal care up to 20 weeks because there is a shortage of obstetrical clinicians in our county. We encourage women to see a clinic where they can be followed throughout the entire pregnancy, if possible, and we are in no way marketing ourselves as competition. We are stepping in to fill the large gap that exists.

Just because the clinic in Sandpoint chooses to respect life does not make it a fake clinic. This clinic seeks to bring in physicians to provide prenatal care. They are bringing in OB-GYNs from Washington state, which has no restrictions on abortion. With this information taken into consideration, I ask you to reconsider any concerns about a clinic bringing board-certified OB-GYNs into an area where there is a shortage.

— James Heid, Vancouver, Washington

The Root of All Good

The article Claudia Boyd-Barrett wrote about how immigrant parents’ arrests are creating a mental health crisis for children was moving and brought awareness to the mental health challenges faced by them (Growing Up Scared: “Arrests of Immigrant Parents Create Mental Health Crisis for Children,” June 18). It was important to note how every story was different but focused on how much children missed and yearned for their parents to come back home. You also wrote about how it affected them by not having a parental figure in the home. That really touched me. Specifically, Jacob’s story and when he listed all the things he missed about his mom but especially being close to her.

I am currently a master’s student in social work working to become a better ally to the Hispanic immigrant community. I’ve seen how being afraid and sad over the immigration policies has affected my friends in this community. Losing a close parent and not being able to have that security with them anymore is hard to go through, and trauma affects children as they grow.

In this article, you have recognized the worth of a person, which is a core principle in social work. These children are worthy and have the right to feel taken care of and secure.

I would love to see more mental health services accessible to immigrant communities and their families. This would benefit children as they learn to cope with their feelings and how to make sense of a new world.

— Stacy Xiong, Athens, Georgia

Bagging a Bargain

Author Susan Jaffe mentioned GoodRx in the article “Thousands of Medicare Beneficiaries Thought Their Drug Plan Was Free. Then They Lost It” (July 7), but she failed to mention a much better discount drug site, Mark Cuban’s costplusdrugs.com, where a 90-day supply of 2.5 milligrams of rivaroxaban, a generic for Xarelto, is available for under $50. This could help the thousands of people who lost coverage through unpaid premiums from Wellcare Value Script obtain their medications. The problem of yearly increasing penalties for losing Part D coverage is something that has to be addressed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Thanks to ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News for the relevant coverage.

— Jackie Button; Miami

Fleshing Out the Details

Your report identifying alpha-gal syndrome as a red meat allergy is accurate in that respect but inadequate in its breadth (“Would Hunters Take a Lyme Disease Vaccine? We Asked,” June 30). Alpha-gal is an allergic reaction to virtually all mammalian products. If you explore that, you’ll find an interesting story, as mammalian products are everywhere, including in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and other non-meat products. Alpha-gal is growing rapidly, and too many people, including doctors, do not realize that AGS is far worse than just a red meat allergy.

I suggest you help build understanding of the threat by describing the allergy in the future as an allergy to mammalian products. If you do not think your audience will understand that term, perhaps you can explain that it includes pork and anything derived from animals with hooves. As a former and now retired reporter, I encourage you to cover this allergy because its implications are surprising and scary.

— John Varner, Surry, Virginia

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More and more Americans are being exposed to these parasites as climate change expands the range where they can survive. That means more people are also exposed to the bevy of health conditions they can cause, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the alpha-gal-triggered red meat allergy, and, most common of all, Lyme disease.

For the latter, there may be some additional protection on the horizon. Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva they plan to seek regulatory approval for a vaccine to protect against Lyme disease. A for Lyme became available in the late 1990s but was pulled only three years later due to lawsuits, public fear of side effects, and a lack of interest.

It’s unclear whether this latest stab at a Lyme disease vaccine will get a warmer reception if it’s approved, especially in the postcovid era of vaccine skepticism.

For a sense of how it might go over with rural populations at high risk of Lyme, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News spoke with a group of hunters.

Few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks.

At the same time, as a collective, hunters , according to a survey from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And these are identities increased or vaccines, according to Ashley Kirzinger, associate director for Public Opinion and Survey Research at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News.

At the same time, few people spend more time in the woods exposed to ticks and the possibility of Lyme disease.

Left untreated, Lyme can cause a , from fevers, chills, and headaches to arthritis, shooting pains, and inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About in the U.S. may be diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, the CDC says; that’s at least in part because the where cases have been reported has “expanded significantly” since 1995.

So would hunters get the Lyme vaccine if it became available?

“Given my proclivity for the outdoors, absolutely,” said Jess Manganelli, one of seven hunters (and one hiker) who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News on a recent Saturday at the Busch Shooting Range in Weldon Spring, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis.

Of the eight, Manganelli, who had been hunting turkeys the weekend before, was the most positive toward the vaccine. Six others said they would consider it but would want more information about its safety and effectiveness as well as their risk for contracting the disease.

But Manganelli was the only one who believed she may have previously contracted Lyme disease, although she was never formally diagnosed with it. Two years ago, she experienced muscle weakness, tiredness, fatigue, swelling, and headaches after a tick bite, but when she went to urgent care she was told they didn’t test for Lyme.

Nearly all the hunters knew someone who had had Lyme disease — an old roommate, a family member, friends, a former student. Lyme can be and to treat and is often misdiagnosed at first. Many of the hunters witnessed their acquaintances navigating those challenges and struggling with sometimes debilitating symptoms.

That familiarity among the hunters in Missouri was unsurprising to author and conservationist Steven Rinella, host of the hunting show MeatEater.

“I’m a turkey hunter. In talking about turkey hunting, you talk about ticks as much as you talk about turkeys,” Rinella said. “Just the nature of turkey hunting puts you into exposure. You’re sitting for long periods of time trying to use vegetation for concealment.”

In fact, both Rinella and his older son contracted Lyme disease 13 years ago during a bluegill fishing trip in the Hudson Valley in New York. His son developed Bell’s palsy, a sudden paralysis on one side of the face, but recovered quickly after a course of oral antibiotics. Steven Rinella’s symptoms, on the other hand, lingered for months, leaving him unable to walk down stairs without a handrail or to ride a bike. He ended up receiving intravenous antibiotic treatments for a month.

“I thought my life had changed,” Rinella said, “but I recovered, as far as I know.”

That experience is one reason Rinella said he would absolutely consider getting a Lyme vaccine if it proved safe and provided considerable protection against the disease. Unlike with some other diseases, prior infection does not provide permanent immunity, so a person who has had Lyme could still benefit from a vaccine.

Knowledge of similar challenges influenced the thinking of the hunters in Missouri as well.

Jeremy Hollingshead said he may be less inclined to take a vaccine owing to his former roommate’s experience with Lyme disease, which is not to say the experience was pleasant. In fact, Hollingshead said he thinks his old pal is still dealing with lingering effects of it 10 years later. But Hollingshead has spent his whole life in the woods, and of hundreds of people he knows who have done the same, he knows of only one of them contracting Lyme.

“I know it was a bad outcome for him,” Hollingshead said, but he thinks the odds of getting Lyme himself seem pretty slim.

Meanwhile, Julian Barnes said seeing a relative struggle with Lyme makes him more open to a potential vaccine. It took a long time for doctors to come to that diagnosis, and finding a good treatment has been equally difficult.

“I would say I am vaccine-hesitant, generally speaking,” Barnes said. “But Lyme, I’ve seen the way it affects people in my life.”

“I would definitely have to really understand the vaccine, how it works,” Barnes added.

The new, four-dose vaccine candidate technically missed one of the bars set out in trials because Lyme. Still, the companies say it’s about 75% effective in reducing cases, and they plan to submit it to regulators for approval. A Pfizer spokesperson said there were no updates to share on the company’s regulatory efforts when contacted by ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News in June.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a noted anti-vaccine activist before taking over as head of the agency that oversees vaccine approvals, and he’s remade it in ways that have prompted some vaccine makers to on development.

But he’s also been an advocate on Lyme disease. In May, he announced an . And during his Senate confirmation hearings, he said his family had been deeply affected by Lyme disease and that than he would to find a vaccine or treatment.

If the vaccine is approved by the FDA, an endorsement from Kennedy would go a long way, according to KFF’s Kirzinger, particularly among supporters of his Make America Healthy Again movement, who tend to be more vaccine-skeptical.

“They trust him as much as they trust their own doctors to tell them what to do with their health and for health information,” Kirzinger said. “If he comes out as a strong proponent of this vaccine and says, ‘Look what my administration did, and we made this available,’ I would imagine there would be less vaccine resistance among that group.”

Kirzinger also said this vaccine could be ripe for misinformation. New polling from KFF shows people who don’t have a trusted medical provider as well as those who use social media and AI for health information are common vaccine myths.

Only one of the hunters who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News said they definitely would not be interested in a Lyme vaccine if it became available.

“I kind of hand it off to God and the body he gave me. I’m pretty durable,” JP Cummings said. But even while he’s not interested in it for himself, he’s curious to see what his fellow hunters do as more information comes out.

“Hunters care about the wildlife; hunters care about health,” Cummings said. “They love the wildlife, they love their deer, and they love their fellow hunters.”

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .

Since the summer of 2025, Florida leaders have aimed to make the state the first to drop some of those vaccine mandates. The anti-vaccine rhetoric has often been positioned as a push for “medical freedom.” Related efforts to revise laws and regulations rumbled along at the state health department and in the legislature for months.

But by the end of April, the fight seemed to have stalled out.

In the opening minutes of a special session on April 28, the Republican speaker of the Florida House, Daniel Perez, refused to bring the vaccine issue to the floor.

“There is some concern here, on my behalf, about children being in school without measles, mumps, polio, and chickenpox vaccines that have been working for decades,” Perez told reporters afterward.

For now, at least, the push to end childhood vaccine mandates has failed in Florida, and that outcome could offer insights into such efforts’ chances in other states. An Associated Press analysis found that at least 350 anti-vaccine bills in state legislatures last year. Many focused on relaxing requirements for vaccines in schools.

Ladapo: Mandates Are Bodily ‘Slavery’

Last September, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo set the stage for the anti-vaccine campaign. They held a news conference at a private Christian school east of Tampa, where the state would work to end all vaccine mandates in Florida law.

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

“Who am I, as a government or anyone else,” Ladapo said, “or who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?”

Political analysts say that the prospects for efforts to cut back on vaccine mandates are closely tied to the political prospects of Republicans trying to maintain their majorities at the state and federal levels. DeSantis is term-limited, and his governorship ends in January. And the congressional midterms are in November.

“For Republicans, they’re a little bit leery,” said , an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “They know we’re in an election cycle. They know political history. And it’s pretty clear that the president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterm election.”

Although hundreds of anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in state legislatures, the noisy rhetoric and splashy headlines don’t guarantee passage, said , an associate professor of health policy at Georgetown University.

In many states, including Florida, “there’s a disconnect between what we hear a lot from a potentially vocal minority about how they feel about vaccines compared to where the majority of people really are,” Whitener said.

“For most people,” she said, ”they still support the idea of near-universal vaccination, still understand the importance of vaccinating children to protect people who can’t be vaccinated.”

A last year by KFF and The Washington Post showed 81% of parents supported school vaccine requirements.

“They support these vaccines,” said , a senior vice president at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News. “They support protecting their kids through these mandates. And that includes Florida parents.”

Unwinding Mandates by Law, and by Regulation

To undo some of the vaccine mandates, Florida’s legislature would have to pass new bills. Others could be changed by a rulemaking process at the state Department of Health, including for chickenpox, hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate, and Haemophilus influenzae type B.

At a Dec. 12 forum in Panama City hosted by the health department, public comment went on for hours, with those who wanted to keep the mandates slightly outnumbering those who opposed them.

“This is about freedom,” said one speaker, Larry Downs Jr. “The default setting should be freedom, not these corporate chemical vaccine injections.”

Florida schoolteacher Marion Fesmire has worked overseas. She defended vaccine requirements in part because of some of the suffering she has seen.

“I’ve seen kids with polio. I’ve seen blind kids. I’ve seen kids die before they’re even 10 years old. It’s heartbreaking,” Fesmire said.

The health department hasn’t held any more public forums on vaccines since then.

Nor has the department filed the paperwork needed to change the vaccination rules, including a statement of regulatory costs. In that, the department must estimate whether changing the rules could affect personal income, the number of visitors to the state, or the size of the Florida workforce.

In an April 13 email, the health department said that it is “currently in the rulemaking process” and that any updates would be posted in the Florida Administrative Registrar.

Pushing for a New Exemption

During the winter legislative session, a , didn’t include removing mandates but did feature a new kind of exemption. In addition to a religious or medical exemption, a parent could exempt a child for reasons of personal conscience. This type of exemption is .

Democrats, the minority in the Florida Legislature, came out against it.

“It’s currently very easy to opt out for religious reasons from school immunizations,” state Sen. (D) said while speaking from the chamber floor. “Why is this bill necessary? Given that context, is your bill just about giving people more options to ignore school immunizations, or is it intended to solve a public health problem?”

A few Republicans also opposed the bill. State Sen. (R) brought up the measles outbreak. Florida is the state with the number of measles cases this year, with 155 as of June 6.

“I truly believe that this is a dangerous bill, and I cannot vote for it,” Harrell said.

The bill also included a permanent ban on mandates for any mRNA-based vaccines and would have allowed nonprescription sales of ivermectin. That anti-parasite medication rose to popularity as an alternative treatment for covid, although the Food and Drug Administration determined that the available clinical trial data does not demonstrate effectiveness against covid in humans.

Florida’s previous surgeon general, Scott Rivkees, , calling it “the equivalent of walking into a pharmacy and requesting amoxicillin for a self-diagnosed infection.”

In the end, when the failed to make it to committee.

Yet, people on both sides say the Florida fight is far from over, especially given the lingering mistrust of the medical establishment after the covid pandemic.

“There are many more people now who have skepticism about the wisdom of public health policy and law,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, an anti-vaccine activist who has been working to end mandates since the early 1980s.

“I don’t think that that’s going to disappear,” she said. “I think it’s going to grow.”

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Dowse wore a full-body protective suit with a plastic face mask. As a pediatrician in southern Utah, he couldn’t risk getting even a mild infection, because many of his patients are babies too young for measles vaccines or children whose parents choose not to protect them with immunizations. “I went in looking like a scientist in E.T.,” he said.

Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, or death in newborns. If the baby entered the world with a measles rash and fever, Dowse was prepared to give the infant a spinal tap to assess the risk of neurological damage.

Luckily, flushed and crying, the baby looked healthy. To keep it that way, Dowse wanted to inject the baby with concentrated antibodies against the measles virus. To his surprise, the parents objected, promising to give their child “all kinds of vitamin A,” Dowse said. He begged them not to, saying, “You can’t see it on the surface, but the baby’s body is fighting the measles.” They were afraid of vaccines, so Dowse explained that antibodies were different and that they would stop measles from replicating in the infant.

“That shot is going to basically give the baby ammo to fight,” Dowse said.

The parents relented. A couple of days later, they left the hospital with a child who had narrowly skirted an infection that killed many thousands of babies a century ago. Nonetheless, Dowse said he doubted they would be returning for childhood vaccinations to protect their baby against a bevy of illnesses. Like more than a dozen Utah doctors and health officials who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, Dowse has adjusted his expectations.

He is part of a reluctant cohort of medical professionals now on the front line of America’s regressive next chapter in health history, one in which dangerous and preventable diseases return.

“I wish that people could see what I see,” said Nathan Money, a hospital pediatrician in Utah whose eyes welled up with tears as he described children he’s treated for measles struggling to breathe. “This train is going in the wrong direction, and it can feel like a helpless situation, because we’re just not seeing the public messaging and leadership that’s needed to turn this around.”

Since measles was deemed eliminated in the U.S. a quarter century ago, public health workers have extinguished sporadic outbreaks in close-knit, undervaccinated communities with targeted methods: Isolate people with measles and quarantine their contacts to contain the virus. But as vaccination rates , the virus is moving beyond insulated communities, overwhelming public health departments constrained by shoestring budgets. Larger outbreaks, the kind not seen for a generation, have forced health officials into a new paradigm: They have stopped racing to “contain” infections and shifted gears into what they call “mitigation.”

Utah made that transition early this year, once the outbreak hit “a point where you no longer have control over it,” said state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen. By March, measles had been detected in every health jurisdiction in the state and in northern Arizona. More than 950 people have tested positive in the two states since the outbreak began in August, but many people with measles haven’t been tested. A of measles viruses suggested that the true number of cases last year could have been 6.5 times what was known.

Last year under President Donald Trump, U.S. measles cases exceeded 2,000 for the first time since 1992. Six months into 2026, the U.S. has already surpassed that threshold. Prolonged outbreaks exact a toll on children, who have spent days in hospitals for severe infections and missed weeks of school for mild ones. Adults with measles miss work. Parents delay daycare to keep their babies safe. Doctors in Utah have enacted labor-intensive protocols to keep measles from spreading in clinics. Newborns and people with weakened immune systems who have been exposed to the virus receive infusions of concentrated antibodies costing $500 to $1,000. Medical visits for measles . Health departments spend millions trying to curb infections.

“This is like a snowball that gathers speed as it rolls downhill,” said Emilie Morris, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County. A full-throttle campaign to educate communities on the safety of vaccines and the diseases they prevent could turn the situation around, doctors and health officials said. It would require an effort similar to what the anti-vaccine movement has long done in videos, blogs, and podcasts. For example, the anti-vaccine organization that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded before taking the helm at the Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Health Defense, visits , , and has bought that downplay the threat of viruses while wildly exaggerating the risk of vaccine side effects. Kennedy’s and as health secretary are adding to parents’ doubt.

After the development of vaccines and antibiotics in the mid-1900s, virologist and Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet wrote, “One can think of the middle of the twentieth century as the end of one of the most important social revolutions in history, the virtual elimination of the infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life.”

He couldn’t have imagined what was coming.

‘Year of Sickness’

In communities nestled among the red sandstone cliffs and riparian forests of southern Utah, measles took hold last summer. At the main school in Hildale, a town along the Arizona border, just 30% of kindergartners are considered adequately immunized by Utah’s health department, meaning they’ve gotten recommended vaccines against measles, tetanus, polio, and more. Exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements are easily acquired in the state: Parents need only claim personal, religious, or medical reasons.

Many people in Hildale and the surrounding towns are connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sect that has been leery of the government since a police raid in 1953 separated polygamous parents from their children. Shirlee Draper, a southern Utah resident who grew up in the faith, said they became ever more isolated in the early 2000s under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. Before he was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault against minors, Jeffs instructed his followers to withdraw from public schools and mainstream medicine.

“Growing up, we all got our vaccines,” said Draper, who left the group during Jeffs’ reign. “It wasn’t until Warren Jeffs came along that there started to be more and more resistance.”

After Jeffs went to prison, many people left the faith but remained concerned about vaccines because of online misinformation, such as claims that the shots are toxic. Today a small shop in Hildale sells mouth sprays and oral drops professing to detoxify vaccines. Water, glycerin, and “whole grain alcohol” are listed as ingredients in one called Vxx-Dtx.

A mother who ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to name, because she fears stigmatization, said she considered getting her kids vaccinated when schools in southwest Utah started seeing measles cases last summer. She had split from the fundamentalist group but still worried about vaccines giving her children autism or other complications. in top-tier scientific journals have refuted a link between vaccines and autism, but the anti-vaccine movement has kept the notion alive.

Then the woman’s son told her that his classmate had a rash and spit on him, she said. A few days later, he fell ill with a fever, followed by vomiting, diarrhea, and a head-to-toe rash.

“He felt downright sick for 10 to 14 days,” the woman said. “It was hard to see the end of the tunnel.”

Then her daughters came down with measles. She had a fleeting case, too, even though she had been vaccinated as a child. Breakthrough infections and are relatively rare. Only 4% of reported this year and last have been among people who’ve had two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

By the time the family recovered, the son had missed nearly three weeks of school, the daughters a month, and the mother had postponed an important family gathering because she didn’t want to spread infections. “I just got my youngest’s missed-school report and it’s super high,” she said. “This is the year of sickness.”

The woman said she regretted not getting her kids vaccinated when the outbreak started. She said she knows about 30 people who have fallen sick with the measles. Except for a few who needed medical care, they haven’t been tested. “I bet there’s been thousands of cases,” she said.

Measles doesn’t have a cure. She and others have tried to ease symptoms with cod liver oil, vitamin C, zinc, and “essential oils,” plant extracts long used in folk medicine that have become a lucrative industry in Utah. People in southwest Utah are trying a lot of things: One resident sells homemade lotion on Facebook, writing, “Breastmilk & Honey has been a life saver for the measles rash.”

Beyond Containment

The outbreak may have started among a fundamentalist community, but it’s spread far beyond because Utah’s vaccination rates have dropped steadily since the covid pandemic. Fewer than 80% of kindergartners in the 2024-25 school year in southwest Utah, with only 87% adequately immunized in the state as a whole — far below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity.

Several Utahns told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News that “alternative health” or “wellness” drives the trend, rather than religion. The state has a thriving supplement industry, , aided by deregulatory policies supported by the late Utah senator Orrin Hatch and a high concentration of people who earn income from multilevel marketing. These networks of people sell supplements, essential oils, peptides, and other alternative therapies on social media, YouTube, and podcasts, according to and .

Alternative health isn’t necessarily anti-vaccine, but many people who sell unconventional remedies online and in podcasts and mainstream medicine.

“People are suspicious, and it’s well founded,” Draper said. She described dismissive doctors, exorbitant medical bills, hospital systems that over care, and pharmaceutical companies that drove . Communities already wary of government authorities are poised to interpret failings in American healthcare as signs that medical authorities aren’t to be trusted, either, she said.

“Across America, we have entire populations who find safety in clinging to whatever confirms their deeply held beliefs,” she said.

A mistrustful disposition gave way to covid conspiracy theories in 2020 and 2021. In southwest Utah, for example, a tricked out with digital billboards showed up to covid vaccination sites to advertise Plandemic, a rife with , including that masks “activate” the coronavirus and that global elites planned covid-19 to control the population. Misinformation added fuel to anger about public health rules, and there was political backlash under the umbrella of a largely Republican “medical freedom” movement. Utah enacted laws reining in public health, including one that eases exemptions to childhood vaccinations and another that prohibits most employers from requiring vaccines.

In the wake of the covid backlash, health officials tread lightly. Rather than enforce containment measures, “we give our advice and focus on personal responsibility,” said David Heaton, public information officer at the Southwest Utah Public Health Department.

One of the most contagious diseases in the world, measles spreads with astonishing speed among the unvaccinated. One of a New York school outbreak in 1974 found that a second-grader with measles infected 28 other students in 14 classrooms because measles can spread through ventilation systems.

As cases doubled then quadrupled in southern Utah, the regional health department couldn’t keep up with calling the contacts of everyone infected. It shifted its efforts to announcements guiding the public at large. For example, it asks people to call before showing up to clinics with measles symptoms. Still, patients in plenty of hospitals have been exposed. For example, when parents brought a sick, unvaccinated child to a large pediatric hospital in Utah in September, they shared the space with 11 infants too young to be vaccinated. Doctors rushed to give the babies infusions of antibodies and they remained healthy, according to a .

On the radio and in posts on social media, Heaton warns that measles is spreading and that vaccines are the best defense. “If you’re not immunized and you’re anywhere in public,” Heaton said, “you’re fair game for this virus.”

The department doesn’t have the capacity to talk with people directly in the five counties it serves. For a few years, it leaned on community health workers who went to churches, town halls, and other gathering places, listening to people’s concerns and telling them what the science said about covid, vaccines, and other matters of public health. But these workers were laid off early last year, after the Trump administration clawed back more than $12 billion in federal public health grants to states.

“We were starting to get a little bit of traction,” Heaton said of the community workers. “And then we lost all of our team.”

The department offers free measles vaccines to children, but uptake is slow. Nursing director Mindy Bundy said that when she started the job 20 years ago, demand was so high that she would give parents tickets while they waited, as if they were crowding around a deli counter.

“Now even in an outbreak,” she said, “we aren’t seeing a huge increase of people wanting vaccination.”

As officials tried to do the best they could, the outbreak spread north, hopping from one undervaccinated community to the next. When health officials in Utah County spoke with people who had tested positive, they often had no connection to other known cases. “Pretty quickly, we started to lose the links,” said Michael Leman, the county health department’s nursing director. Contact tracing, the cornerstone of containment, was failing.

Every week, the state health department posted a growing list of locations on its website — a Trader Joe’s, a Mormon temple, an aquarium, preschools — that people had visited while contagious. But many people who tested positive hadn’t been to those places, Leman said. “They could have gotten it at Walmart. They could have gotten it walking through a mall,” he said. “I mean, just anywhere in the public they could have been exposed.”

In February, high school students throughout Utah tested positive after a state wrestling tournament at Utah Valley University in Orem. A dashboard monitoring measles viruses in wastewater lit up with notifications around the state. “Wrestling really feels like our turning point,” said Nicholas Rupp, communications director at the Salt Lake County Health Department.

Salt Lake County’s shift from containment to mitigation meant prioritizing high-risk situations and relaxing control everywhere else. When a student has a confirmed case, for example, health officials meet with the school nurse to figure out which kids are most vulnerable. Unvaccinated children in the same classroom as someone infected are asked to stay home for 21 days, but those in other classrooms might not be, said Melanie Crossland, an epidemiologist at the Salt Lake health department. Some schools with high vaccination rates have opted to monitor student temperatures daily instead of requesting quarantines. One school created a separate space for the unvaccinated.

Crossland said such bespoke strategies entail a “huge” amount of effort but have staved off blowback that deflated her during covid.

“We give everything when we’re here,” she said, “but the days of killing ourselves, when legislatively no one is going to give us any help, are done.”

Daycare Dilemma

The outbreak has lasted so long that some children who have recovered from measles have since been hospitalized for what should be mild illnesses from common bugs, said Kerri Smith, a hospital pediatrician in southwest Utah. Measles can , impairing a body’s ability to fight other viruses. “It’s making children very susceptible to getting sick again,” Smith said.

Her eyes were bloodshot, and she looked drained from a week of long shifts. Since the outbreak began, she’s treated more than a dozen babies and children severely sick from measles.

“They’re usually admitted to the hospital with measles pneumonia, so they’re struggling to breathe, pulling for air below their ribs,” she said. “High fevers, 104 to 105, absolutely miserable, extremely fatigued, really dehydrated with sunken eyes.” Most children fully recover from measles, but a fraction develop permanent , a small percentage die, and in , measles kills a person years after the infection.

No one has died so far in Utah’s outbreak. And barring that tragic outcome, Smith and other doctors said, some parents fail to grasp the gravity of measles, even as their own children have tubes inserted into their small nostrils to deliver oxygen. Despite repeated warnings, doctors said, some unvaccinated family members of patients — who could be contagious — walk around the hospital while visiting their loved one. This means the waiting room, the elevator, the cafeteria, and other places need to be shut down for cleaning, and vulnerable people alerted.

“People don’t realize how easily this spreads,” Smith said.

Morris, the pediatrician working in two counties, recalled a conversation with a nonchalant father who didn’t seem to understand the need for quarantine. “I know this is an inconvenience to you,” she said. “It’s also a huge inconvenience to the parent who has an infant who could be severely impacted by this disease.”

On top of feeling depleted, doctors with young children said they are anxious. Emily Chin, a physician in Salt Lake County, worries she’ll bring measles home to her newborn. One evening, she sat in her garage after caring for a child with a rash. The patient’s measles test was still being processed, so Chin isolated herself in a room for the night, wearing an N95 mask instead of holding her infant.

Like many mothers in Utah, Chin plans to give her baby an early dose of the measles vaccine at 6 months old because of the outbreak, in addition to two doses at ages 1 and 4. Several mothers said they avoid travel and public places because they fear their babies could be infected. Some are delaying daycare. Others, like Kandace Hyland, a marketing director in Salt Lake County, don’t have that option.

Hyland was shocked when her daycare told her that it didn’t track the vaccine status of staff, even amid the outbreak. In March, she posted an calling for the state to require daycare staff to be vaccinated against the measles when the virus is spreading. Even if daycare staff file for vaccine exemptions, she said, parents could at least find out what portion of their babies’ caretakers pose a life-threatening risk.

Hyland sent her idea to the state health department. Nolen, the state epidemiologist, said she agreed with the concern, and was “talking with the division of licensing about the issue,” in an email shared with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News. Hyland also wrote the Division of Licensing and Background Checks. In an email, its director, Shannon Thoman-Black, replied that the division does “not have the legislative authority to implement a mandate.”

“They always talk about parents’ choice,” Hyland said. “But I don’t feel like I have a really good ‘parents’ choice’ right now.”

Measles’ Comeback

The U.S. will almost certainly this year or next, but it could be regained if political leadership backed nationwide campaigns to boost confidence in vaccines, said Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national immunization center and now the chief medical officer at the Callen-Lorde community health center in New York.

“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, that’s unlikely to happen,” he said. “We’re going back to a pre-vaccine era.”

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard defended the secretary and his agency in an email, writing that the CDC has “surged resources” to contain measles outbreaks. “The CDC, HHS principles and the Secretary have been vocal that the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect yourself against measles,” she said.

Kennedy’s words and actions suggest otherwise. He’s said that the measles vaccine leads to “deaths every year,” which is . He continues a potential link between autism and vaccines, no matter how many there is none. And he oversaw abrupt changes to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule, a move called dangerous and not backed by science. A federal judge blocked those changes in March, but Trump recently issued an executive order to reexamine the schedule.

“It’s been confusing for the public,” said Dorothy Adams, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department.

In May, Kennedy met with Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who has said little about the state’s ongoing outbreak. Kennedy praised Utah’s action on Make America Healthy Again priorities, such as banning fluoride in public drinking water and easing restrictions on raw milk sales, according to Salt Lake City’s . Cox declined to comment for this article.

Meanwhile, the U.S. public health system has been further weakened by the Trump administration’s cuts and delays to public health grants.

“If you’re in the thick of it and you don’t know if you will be reimbursed, you adjust your response,” said Angela Dunn, a doctor and former Utah state epidemiologist. “This outbreak is a perfect storm of disinformation, trauma from the covid pandemic, and the drop in funding.”

Measles isn’t the only preventable malady making a comeback. As children played nearby in a sun-speckled park in Salt Lake City, Morris talked about a baby in the intensive care unit who was bleeding uncontrollably after a fall. The baby’s parents had refused an injection of vitamin K that helps blood clot in newborns. As they fretted over their infant, Morris said, she felt awful for them and regretted not being able to overcome mistrust in basic, lifesaving interventions. She had the same swirl of emotions when an unvaccinated toddler in her care recently died of whooping cough.

“I was one of the only people in the room with the nurse when the child coded,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You think, ‘I wish this child was vaccinated,’ but it’s hard because I also see how much grief these parents are holding.”

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .