Owen Dyer

Despite the headlines, covid-19 vaccines remain more widely accessible in the US than in the UK. Owen Dyer investigatesUS health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr recently moved to restrict access to covid vaccination in the apparent name of safety. On 20 September the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—purged by Kennedy in June and replaced with new members criticised for holding vaccine sceptic views1—voted on their covid vaccine recommendations for the coming year.2The committee stopped short of making a routine recommendation and instead framed covid-19 vaccination as a matter of “individual choice” for all people aged 6 months or older, while noting that the benefits are greater for older adults and people with risk factors.This made the US the first high income country to drop a universal recommendation for covid-19 vaccination.And, working amid a torrent of negative press coverage, Kennedy’s panel narrowly balked, in a 7-6 vote, at taking the one measure that public health experts most feared: requiring a doctor’s prescription for a covid-19 shot.In reality, the committee had been defanged before it even sat. The largest association of US health insurers, AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans), announced on 16 September that it will continue to follow the recommendations of the former, pre-purge committee.It declared, “Health plans will continue to cover all ACIP recommended immunisations that were recommended as of 1 September 2025, including updated formulations of the covid-19 and influenza vaccines, with no cost sharing for patients through the end of 2026.”1 The country’s biggest insurer, UnitedHealth Group, not an AHIP member, also swiftly followed suit.“The evidence based approach to coverage of immunisations will remain consistent,” proclaimed AHIP, in what former Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and …

US President Donald Trump’s recent order, announced 19 September, decrees that employers must pay a $100 000 (£74 400; €85 100) fee each time they submit a new H-1B visa application for workers currently outside the US, a notable increase on the current fee that averages $3500.1The decree’s language suggests that the president’s main target is the tech industry, although thousands of doctors and scientists also work in the US on H-1B visas. Rural clinics, teaching hospitals, and research laboratories all depend on foreign medical graduates.The order says that the payment may be waived if the job being filled “is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the US.”A few days after the order was published White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement to Bloomberg News that it “allows for potential exemptions, which can include physicians and medical residents.”On 25 September the American Medical Association (AMA) and 54 other medical societies wrote to Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, pointing to the national interest exemption and urging her “to clarify that all physicians, including medical residents, fellows, researchers, and those working in non-clinical settings, are critical to our national interest and exempt from the proclamation.” …

PubMed, the life sciences search engine maintained by the US government and relied upon by researchers worldwide, is still performing its basic automated functions during the federal shutdown, but new journals are not currently being added to its index.A shutdown warning posted on the PubMed homepage after the US government shutdown on 1 October spread unease through the research community. “Because of a lapse in government funding,” it said, “the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.”1The same warning has been posted on many other web pages run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was also posted on the PubMed page during the 35 day shutdown …

Canada has bought half a million vaccines designed to prevent H5N1 avian influenza in humans.The vaccines are intended to stamp out any potential human transmission of the disease by immunising those most at risk, such as farm workers, medical staff, and veterinarians.1 Some 60% of the doses will be distributed to the provinces, while the remaining 200 000 are held in a federal reserve.The vaccine, GSK’s Arepanrix H5N1 A/American wigeon clade 2.3.4.4b, is based on existing seasonal flu vaccine technology. It was approved in Canada on 19 February, the day the order was placed.In December the UK ordered five million doses of human H5 influenza vaccine from Seqirus UK.2Experts fear that Canada is entering a dangerous period as migratory birds return from their southern winter grounds—almost certainly carrying new mutations of H5N1 virus—while the …

A male palliative care nurse who injected patients with deadly overdoses has been sentenced to life in prison by a court in Aachen, Germany.The 44 year old, whose name has not been publicly released, was convicted of 10 murders and 27 attempted murders, all committed from December 2023 to May 2024. The incidents took place while he worked the night shift at a palliative care centre in Wuerselen, a town near Aachen.His motive for playing “master of life and death,” prosecutors alleged, was to reduce his nightly workload. The court heard that he had frequently shown a lack of empathy towards patients who needed extra care and had often expressed his irritation with them …

A “senseless” triple drone strike on children and health workers in southern Sudan has killed 114 people and injured 35, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported.The attack, launched on 5 December in Kalogi in South Kordofan state, first targeted a kindergarten. As health workers sought to evacuate wounded children a second strike targeted them. A third drone then hit a nearby hospital.The Sudan Doctors’ Network blamed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the sides in the country’s civil war.WHO’s secretary general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, commented, “Disturbingly, paramedics and responders came under attack as they tried to move the injured from the kindergarten to the hospital.” Sudan’s civil war has been marked by constant attacks on civilians,1 displacing more than 12 million from their homes, said WHO. More than 40 000 people have died, but the atrocities have escalated sharply in recent weeks since the RSF took the city of El Fasher.The civil war …

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accused several of America’s largest retail chains of “failing to remove” recalled infant formula products that have been linked to the country’s first official outbreak of infant botulism.The product in question, ByHeart Whole Nutrition Infant Formula, has been the subject of an investigation by US officials into an outbreak of infant botulism across several states.In warning letters to the retail companies Target, Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons, the FDA reprimands them for failing to provide “any information demonstrating that corrective actions to effectuate this recall have been implemented” despite multiple follow-up emails after an initial conference call.1 Instead, says the FDA, the retailers continued to sell the products across dozens of US states for weeks after the initial recall notice on 8 November. Most of the botulism cases so far identified occurred during those weeks.While sporadic cases of botulism affect as many as 200 infants each year in the US, the 51 cases across 19 states so far identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the ByHeart outbreak are by far the largest number ever traced to a single source. All cases resulted in hospital admission. There were no deaths, although one baby girl was intubated for four weeks.FDA inspectors and state partners made 4000 spot inspections in the weeks after the initial recall …

US officials have approved a daily pill version of Novo Nordisk’s injectable obesity drug Wegovy (semaglutide), opening the door to even more patients taking it.The “Wegovy pill”—cheaper than the traditional injectable version and with a more easily disturbed mechanism of action—will be available from early January on the US market. It is the first pill form of the popular obesity injections known as GLP-1 receptor agonists to be approved by regulators.GLP-1 receptor agonists, sold as brands such as Wegovy and the Eli Lilly drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro, work by mimicking a hormone that suppresses appetite.Novo Nordisk has insisted that adequate supplies of the newly approved pill will be made available, as supply issues have previously dogged the rollout of Wegovy. The US Food and Drug Administration declared a shortage of injectable …

The Danish drug company Novo Nordisk has paid $58.7m (£45m; €49m) to settle a cluster of seven US lawsuits accusing the company of deceptive sales practices, paying kickbacks to high prescribing doctors, and playing down the cancer risks of its best selling antidiabetes drug liraglutide (marketed as Victoza).The company was accused of promoting the off-label use of liraglutide in patients who did not have type 2 diabetes, of paying kickbacks to doctors, and of disguising its sales staff as “diabetes educators” before sending them to doctors’ offices.But the most serious allegations concerned the company’s …

The US National Institutes of Health has paused grants for new studies involving fetal tissue—a move that critics say is less about science and more about appeasing the Trump administration’s anti-abortion supporters. But neither side is satisfied, reports Owen DyerThe annual March for Life, the high point of the US anti-abortion movement’s calendar, took place in Washington DC on 23 January 2026.The day before, US President Donald Trump’s administration had announced that research using fetal tissue would no longer be supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).1 The marchers were told that applications for new studies in that field were frozen on 22 January, pending a review that could soon lead to a ban.2The mood among marchers was, however, sombre, suspicious, and resentful.Almost every field of disease research could be affected by the ban. Among the 77 studies involving fetal tissue approved by the NIH last year were more than a dozen on HIV as well as others looking at viral infections, rhabdomyosarcoma, type 1 diabetes, Gaucher disease, and paediatric embryonic tumours.US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “is ending the use of human fetal tissue from elective abortions in agency funded research and replacing it with gold standard science. The science supports this shift, the ethics demand it, and we will apply this standard consistently.”The move, the HHS said in a statement, “reflects …