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There's been good news in Healthcare reform this week, and our guest is right in the middle of the fight for positive change.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of […]

Federal immigration agents tend to receive less training on how to properly deploy crowd-control weapons, research finds.

The pilot, launched in January 2026 in 6 states, could reduce wasteful spending, but increases provider paperwork and risks patient access to necessary care.

The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Red meat and dairy may be grabbing the headlines, but processed foods and sugary drinks remain the real drivers of chronic disease.

Armed with new tools that reveal patterns of connection between brain areas, researchers are gaining clearer insights into how the brain regulates behavior.

An ICE family detention center in Texas is halting “all movement” after finding two cases of measles.The cases were detected Friday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, confirming that two detainees had “active measles infections.” The facility in Dilley, Texas, located about an hour away from San Antonio, holds parents suspected of immigration violations alongside their children.Some detainees have been quarantined, McLaughlin said, adding that everyone is “being provided with proper medical care.”The Dilley facility is where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whose picture went viral after he was detained in Minneapolis, last month by ICE agents, was held, along with his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, before being released Sunday. During his time in the detention center, Conejo Ramos reportedly felt feverish, complained about being tired, vomited at least once, and was not eating well, but was not reported to have measles. When Conejo Arias asked for medication from staff, they said they didn’t have any.Measles cases have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denigrating vaccination and failing to take the rising number of cases seriously, while promoting policies that will encourage future outbreaks. A new measles outbreak in South Carolina, for example, just became the largest in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000.As the level of measles vaccination drops, the number of outbreaks is only going to go up, spreading the disease among vulnerable populations in crowded areas like ICE detention centers and prisons, which are already known to have inhumane living conditions. Measles spreading to an ICE detention facility seems to be an unholy by-product of MAGA immigration cruelty and MAHA’s anti-vaccine agenda.