Outside experts and groups widely condemned the decision.

New research finds the shingles vaccine can potentially provide broad protection against dementia.

Just a tiny amount of fentanyl, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, is enough to stop a person’s breathing. The synthetic opioid is tasteless, odorless, and invisible when mixed with other substances, and drug users are often unaware of its presence.

It’s why biotech entrepreneur Collin Gage is aiming to protect people against the drug’s lethal effects. In 2023, he became the cofounder and CEO of ARMR Sciences to develop a vaccine against fentanyl. Now, the company is launching a trial to test its vaccine in people for the first time. The goal: prevent deaths from overdose.

“It became very apparent to me that as I assessed the treatment landscape, everything that exists is reactionary,” Gage says. “I thought, why are we not preventing this?”

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Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are raising the alarm over the deadly impacts of international funding cuts in global health. Slashed budgets are projected to reverse decades of progress, causing the number of children dying before their fifth birthday to rise for the first time this century. An estimated 4.8 million children are expected to die this year, an increase of 200,000 deaths compared to last year.

“That is something that we hope never to report on, but it is a sad fact. And there are many causes, but clearly one of the key causes has been significant cuts in international development assistance from a number of high-income countries,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, in a briefing with media this week.

Suzman specifically called out the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Germany for “making significant cuts” to their support. Internationally, funding plunged 26.9% below last year’s levels, according to the philanthropy.

The Gates Foundation today released its annual Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress on measures including poverty, hunger, access to clean water and energy, environmental benchmarks and other metrics.

The Seattle-based foundation worked with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to model the effects of reduced assistance. The researchers found that if the cuts to aid persist or worsen, an additional 12 million to 16 million children could die over the next 20 years.

While offering dire projections, the document aims to be a call to action for governments and philanthropists large and small.

“This report is a roadmap to progress,” Gates writes, “where smart spending meets innovation at scale.”

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder calls out some specific areas that could yield the most benefit, including primary healthcare, routine immunizations, the development of improved vaccines and new uses of data.

Modeling in the report predicts that by 2045, better vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and pneumonia could save 3.4 million children, while new malaria tools could save an additional 5.7 million kids. Shots of lenacapavir could successfully prevent and treat HIV.

The foundation calls attention to the life-saving benefits of vaccinations as the U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to undercut public support of vaccines.

With the backdrop of reduced federal funding for global humanitarian causes and backpedaling on vaccinations, Gates earlier this year announced plans to give away $200 billion — including nearly all of his wealth — over the next two decades through the Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based organization, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, will sunset its operations on Dec. 31, 2045. The philanthropy is the world’s largest and has already disbursed $100 billion since its founding.

“If we do more with less now — and get back to a world where there’s more resources to devote to children’s health — then in 20 years, we’ll be able to tell a different kind of story,” Gates writes in the report. “The story of how we helped more kids survive childbirth, and childhood.”

On Friday, Vinay Prasad—the Food and Drug Administration’s chief medical and scientific officer and its top vaccine regulator—emailed a stunning memo to staff that quickly leaked to the press. Without evidence, Prasad claimed COVID-19 vaccines have killed 10 children in the US, and, as such, he announced unilateral, sweeping changes to the way the agency regulates and approves vaccines, including seasonal flu shots.

On Wednesday evening, a dozen former FDA commissioners, who collectively oversaw the agency for more than 35 years, responded to the memo with a scathing rebuke. Uniting to publish their response in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former commissioners said they were “deeply concerned” by Prasad’s memo, which they framed as a “threat” to the FDA’s work and a danger to Americans’ health.

In his memo, Prasad called for abandoning the FDA’s current framework for updating seasonal flu shots and other vaccines, such as those for COVID-19. Those updates currently involve studies that measure well-characterized immune responses (called immunobridging studies). Prasad dismissed this approach as insufficient and, instead, plans to require expensive randomized trials, which can take months to years for each vaccine update.

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Kirk Milhoan has claimed without evidence that the covid-19 shots caused spikes in cancer and miscarriages. Now he's helping shape the country's vaccine policy.

With ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country’s top health official, a federal webpage that previously laid out the ample evidence refuting the misinformation that vaccines cause autism was abruptly replaced Wednesday with an anti-vaccine screed that promotes the false link.

It’s a move that is sure to be celebrated by Kennedy’s fringe anti-vaccine followers, but will only sow more distrust, fear, and confusion among the public, further erode the country’s crumbling vaccination rates, and ultimately lead to more disease, suffering, and deaths from vaccine-preventable infections, particularly among children and the most vulnerable.

On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website titled “Autism and Vaccines,” the previous top “key point” accurately reported that: “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”

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© Getty | Win McNamee

With the government reopening, the dubious panel of vaccine advisors selected by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is wasting no time getting back to dismantling the federal childhood vaccine schedule.

A meeting that was scheduled for October but put on hold during the shutdown has already been rescheduled for December 4 and 5. A Federal Register notice Thursday said that the meeting will “include discussions on vaccine safety, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, and hepatitis B vaccines.” The announcement was light on information beyond that but indicated that there would be a vote on hepatitis B vaccines.

The panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—is typically composed of preeminent, extensively vetted vaccine experts. But, in June, Kennedy summarily fired all 17 experts on the panel and installed 12 new members, almost all of whom are questionably qualified and espouse anti-vaccine views.

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© Getty | Elijah Nouvelage