In a win for President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a recent court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume using states’ Medicaid data to find people who are in the country illegally.

The case is ongoing. But for now, immigrants — including those who are in the country legally — will have to weigh the benefits of gaining health coverage against the risk that enrolling in Medicaid could make them or their family members easier for ICE to find.

read more

Part 1 of this article was published in HSNW, 19 January 2026.

In the first part of this article, we explored four key myths and why they don’t stand up to scrutiny:

•  ‘Vaccines were never properly tested’

read more

In consulting rooms across America, physicians face a challenge that no medical school prepared them for. A parent arrives with a list of concerns gathered from social media, podcasts, and well-meaning friends. The questions sound scientific. The language borrows from immunology. The citations reference real studies. And yet the conclusions are wrong.

read more

New federal guidance to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for all children from 17 vaccines down to 11 comes as states already are charting their own courses on vaccine policy.

read more

The Trump administration plans to stop assigning value to human life when analyzing the costs and benefits of air pollution controls.

On Monday, acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Jim O’Neill signed a decision memo adopting the most significant weakening of childhood vaccine recommendations in modern American history.

read more

Before 2025, science policy rarely made headline news. Through decades of changing political winds, financial crises and global conflicts, funding for U.S. research and innovation has remained remarkably stable, reflecting the American public’s strong support for investing in basic science.

read more

For years, Sen. Ron Johnson has been spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines.

read more

The US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, believes that aluminum in vaccines can cause health issues, such as neurological disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases. This contradicts scientific evidence from many studies that have confirmed the safety of vaccines and aluminum “adjuvants” – substances that boost vaccines’ effectiveness.

read more

On Friday morning, after contentious discussion, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8-3 to drop the recommendation for a universal birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and 6-4 to suggest that parents use serologic testing—which detects antibodies in the blood—to determine whether more than one dose of the three-dose series are needed.

Under the first recommendation, only infants born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B would receive a birth dose, while parents of other babies would be advised to postpone the first dose for at least two months.

read more

read more

Ralph Abraham, MD, the former Louisiana surgeon general, has been quietly named the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a controversial pick to help lead the nation’s top infectious disease organization as the second highest-ranking CDC official. 

read more

Near the back corner of the local library’s parking lot, largely out of view from the main road, the South Carolina Department of Public Health opened a pop-up clinic in early November, offering free measles vaccines to adults and children.

Spartanburg County, in South Carolina’s Upstate region, has been fighting a measles outbreak since early October, with more than 50 cases identified. Health officials have encouraged people who are unvaccinated to get a shot by visiting its mobile vaccine clinic at any of its several stops throughout the county.

read more

For nearly 80 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was respected around the world for its authoritative, evidence-based leadership in public health.

But the CDC’s stunning reversal Wednesday—stating on its website that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism”—shows the agency can no longer be trusted, multiple doctors and public health advocates told CIDRAP News.

read more

Today, the Washington Post reports that career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are quite upset to learn that the agency has updated the CDC website to resurrect the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism.

read more