Dr. Nirav Shah, former Maine CDC director, taking post at Colby College
Mar. 13—Dr. Nirav Shah, Maine's former CDC director and a top federal health official during the Biden administration, is returning to Maine to launch a public health education program at Colby College.
Shah, 48, became a mini-celebrity in Maine during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was often on television and online explaining the coronavirus to the public and answering journalists' questions. Chocolate bars were named after him, coffee mugs were inscribed with the words "In Dr. Shah We Trust," and he enjoyed a large online fan club.
Shah left Maine in 2023 after being tapped by the Biden administration to become principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Shah, in an interview with the Press Herald on Tuesday, said it was always his intention to return to Maine, as he and his wife kept their home in Brunswick to return to once his federal stint was over.
"It was a tremendous opportunity," Shah said of the U.S. CDC job, where among other duties, he focused on the federal response to the bird flu. "It was an opportunity to help the CDC think about the big picture and develop a long-term strategy."
Shah said he's excited to help stand up an undergraduate public health program at Colby College in Waterville, where he will be a visiting professor.
"I will be leading an effort to create a public health undergraduate program, and help shape the future of public health training," Shah said. "Interest in public health is as high as it's ever been, especially among young people."
David Greene, Colby College president, said in a written statement that Shah is a "natural teacher."
"He has an extraordinary capacity to synthesize and communicate complex issues. And that he does so with humor, compassion, and a clear commitment to bettering the lives of others is all the more remarkable," Greene said.
Shah helped during the transition from the Biden to the Trump administration, but his last day on the job was Feb. 28.
Shah said he is not discussing what led to his departure at this time — other than changing administrations — or his thoughts on the Trump administration's approach to public health. Shah said he may at a later time make public comments about the Trump administration.
Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist who has made many false claims about vaccines, to oversee the U.S. CDC as health and human services secretary.
Kennedy, in a Fox News interview this week, falsely claimed that the measles vaccine can cause the measles.
This story will be updated.
Copy the Story Link
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
33 minutes ago
- Yahoo
An Uproar at the NIH
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Updated at 10:26 a.m. on June 9, 2025 Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. In an emailed statement, Bhattacharya said, 'The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.' A spokesperson for HHS also defended the policies the letter critiqued, arguing that the NIH is 'working to remove ideological influence from the scientific process' and 'enhancing the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of NIH-funded research.' The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants—originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, 'the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled. 'It's nice to have free speech,' he said, before carrying right on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Miami Herald
41 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
VA Marks Benefits Milestone For Veterans
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has announced that its mobile app has now accumulated more than 3 million downloads since its launch in 2021. The Health and Benefits app, which has 1.4 million active users, provides veterans access to information on health care and benefits. It allows users to refill and track VA prescriptions, review appointments, review claims and appeals status, submit evidence for claims and appeals, review VA payment and direct deposit information, locate the closest VA facilities, access the Veterans Crisis Line and show proof of Veteran status. VA Acting Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology and Acting Chief Information Officer Eddie Pool said: "VA's Health and Benefits app gives Veterans fast and convenient access to a host of important information, from appointments to prescriptions and benefits. We encourage all VA-enrolled Veterans to stay connected and informed by downloading the app." This story will be updated. Related Articles How Veteran's Benefits Are Impacted by Trump's Tax Bill: What to KnowHegseth Joins Veterans in Normandy to Mark 81st Anniversary of D-DayList of Cities Hosting 50501 Protests on June 6Harvey Milk Navy Ship To Be Renamed-Vets Call It 'Insult to LGBTQ Troops' 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
A new COVID-19 variant, vaccine changes: What to know in 2025
A new COVID-19 variant, vaccine changes: What to know in 2025 Show Caption Hide Caption RFK Jr. says COVID-19 vaccine no longer recommended for some The COVID-19 vaccine is no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says. Like it or not, COVID-19 is still a public health issue five years after the start of the pandemic flipped the nation, and the world, on its head. Changing vaccination guidelines, ever-evolving variants and strains, threats to health insurance and more mean COVID is still very much a regular conversation on the lips of lawmakers, regulators and the general public. More than 40,000 positive tests were reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May, and while hospitalizations and deaths are fortunately down significantly since the pandemic's peak, vulnerable people are still grappling with limiting their risk amid changing practices. Here is a brief recap of the status of COVID cases, variants and vaccines in the U.S. as of June 4, 2025. Where do COVID cases currently stand in the US? According to the most recent data on the CDC's COVID Data Tracker dashboard, there were 735 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in May 2025 as of May 24. In the four weeks leading up to May 24, 3% of 1,344,681 COVID tests administered nationwide were positive. New NB.1.8.1 COVID variant In January, a new COVID-19 variant known as NB.1.8.1 was first detected in China. As of mid-May, the variant had reached 10.7% of global reported COVID-19 cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). As of May 27, less than 20 cases of NB.1.8.1 had been reported in the U.S., a CDC spokesperson told USA TODAY. This figure is too low to be added to the CDC's COVID Data Tracker dashboard, the spokesperson added, though they did not clarify the threshold for adding new variants to the dashboard. New COVID variant in China: Here's what to know about NB.1.8.1 NB.1.8.1 is one of the latest variants of COVID-19, a "slightly upgraded version" of the LP.8.1 variant that is prominent right now, Subhash Verma, microbiology and immunology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, previously told USA TODAY. For comparison, LP.8.1 made up 70% of reported COVID-19 cases in the U.S. between April 26 and May 10, as reported by the CDC. Verma said NB.1.8.1 may be able to be transferred more easily than LP.8.1. Additionally, he said that NB.1.8.1 is able to evade antibodies created by vaccines or past infections more easily than LP.8.1. The variant has similar symptoms to other strains, including fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, sore throat, congestion or a runny nose, new loss of taste or smell, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, nausea or vomiting. Vaccine back-and-forth: Who can get it and will there be new boosters? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on May 27 that the COVID-19 vaccine would no longer be included in the CDC's recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and pregnant women, a move that broke with previous expert guidance and bypassed the normal scientific review process. Under the changes, the only people who will be recommended for COVID-19 vaccines are those over 65 and people with existing health problems. This could make it harder for others who want the COVID-19 vaccine to get it, including health care workers and healthy people under 65 with a vulnerable family member or those who want to reduce their short-term risk of infection. RFK changes vaccine recommendations: Want a COVID vaccine? It could cost you $200. Insurance coverage typically follows federal recommendations, so anyone who is healthy and under 65 is likely to have to pay out of pocket to get the shot, which runs about $200, if they can get it. It's not clear what insurance companies will do about the new recommendations. RFK Jr. is a vaccine skeptic known for making false claims about vaccination and other medical practices. Under his leadership and the Trump administration, the FDA canceled the advisory meeting of independent experts who usually gather to formulate new flu shots annually and nixed a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine amid the spread. He also pushed false claims about MMR vaccines as measles, previously eradicated in the U.S., began erupting in states across the country, causing the first death in a decade. It is not yet known how accessible the COVID-19 vaccine will be moving forward. Contributing: Karen Weintraub, Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY; Reuters
