CDC considers narrowing its Covid-19 vaccine recommendations
The US Centers and Disease Control and Prevention is considering recommending annual Covid-19 shots to those who are older or who have compromised immune function, rather than the current blanket recommendation for everyone 6 months of age and older.
The change would more closely align the US with guidance given in other countries. Unlike countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, the US alone recommends an annual Covid-19 vaccine for healthy younger adults and children. The World Health Organization also doesn't routinely recommend annual Covid-19 vaccines for healthy adults under 65 or healthy children.
On Monday, a panel of independent experts that advises the CDC on its vaccine recommendations, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, weighed the pros and cons of moving the US away from a blanket recommendation that most people get an updated Covid-19 shot every year and toward a more nuanced, risk-based recommendation.
Members of the Covid-19 vaccine work group said they began studying the policy change in November.
Under a risk-based recommendation, the CDC would continue to recommend two doses of Covid-19 vaccines each year for older adults — those over 65 — and to anyone with weakened immune function.
It may also consider recommending annual vaccination for adults and children who are at high risk of Covid-19 disease because they have a higher risk of being exposed to it. Those groups could include people like health-care workers or children in day care.
There was also strong support for a statement in the recommendation to say that anyone who wanted to get a Covid-19 vaccine could still get one, even if they didn't fit into a higher-risk category.
A risk-based recommendation would be more complicated to communicate to the public and potentially trickier to implement than a universal recommendation, and some members of the full committee said they'd be against it for that reason.
'I guess I'm surprised that we're considering a risk-based recommendation, which in general, we have not had a lot of success with implementing in the US,' said committee member Dr. Denise Jamieson, dean of the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
Jamieson said she also worried that some people could lose insurance coverage for their Covid-19 vaccines if the recommendation was softened for some groups.
It's also not clear where the committee might land on underlying health conditions and who would be considered at higher risk based on a pre-existing condition, such as diabetes or heart or lung diseases.
An analysis of data based on the CDC's list of conditions that increase the risk for severe disease from a Covid-19 infection found that 74% of adults have at least one health condition that puts them at risk.
And even though Covid is no longer causing the same kind of punishing waves of illness and death as it once did, it was still the 10th leading cause of death among adults in 2023. From September 2023 through August 2024, it caused roughly 40,000 deaths in the US.
'Covid is still a fairly dangerous disease and very, very common,' said committee member Dr. Jamie Loehr, who runs a family practice clinic in Ithaca, New York.
Loehr said he wondered how feasible it might be to implement a risk-based recommendation and what message it might send to the public.
'Even though I'm in favor of a risk-based recommendation, I still have my hesitations,' he said.
Others worried that exempting healthy adults might make long Covid more common. Studies have shown that vaccination cuts the risk of developing the condition, which affected more than 9 million adults and children in 2023, according to national surveys.
'What I would like to see is modeling around long Covid,' said committee member Dr. Oliver Brooks, the chief medical officer of Watts Healthcare Corp. in Los Angeles. 'My primary concern through all of this at this point is long Covid.'
Though there was concern that risk-based recommendations would decrease vaccination, others pointed out there's no proof that's true.
'There's not clear evidence at all that risk-based approaches are less effective,' said committee member Dr. Noel Brewer, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina. 'The data supporting that claim are not really there.'
On the whole, members of the committee who have studied the question most closely said they favored switching to risk-based recommendations.
As of April, more than three-quarters of the working group on the Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for this coming fall and winter favored risk-based recommendations, though they don't plan to formally vote on the policy change until the next meeting, which is scheduled for June.
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NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
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‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
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. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. 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
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Salmonella outbreak: Recalled eggs sold at Walmart, Safeway, and elsewhere sicken people in 7 states
A significant recall of 1.7 million dozen eggs is underway. The eggs were believed to be the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened dozens of people across seven states and so far led to 21 people being hospitalized. They were distributed to several major retailers, including Walmart and Safeway. Here's what you need to know about the recall and outbreak. Shell eggs recalled due to salmonella fears On June 6, the August Egg Company of Hilmar, California, issued a voluntary recall of 1.7 million dozen eggs produced at its facilities. The company initiated the recall after it discovered that the eggs are feared to have been contaminated with salmonella, a potentially deadly bacterium. On the same day, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published August Egg Company's recall notice on its website, while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced an investigation into a multistate outbreak of salmonella linked to eggs. Dozens sickened and hospitalized across 7 states The CDC's investigation has found that eggs produced by August Egg Company are linked to dozens of cases of people becoming ill after consuming them. The agency's latest data shows that there are so far 79 cases linked to the August Egg Company's recalled products. Of those cases, 21 have resulted in hospitalizations. Thankfully, no deaths have been reported so far. The cases are spread across seven states: Arizona, California, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Jersey, Nevada, and Washington. Of those states, California has the most number of cases, at 63, followed by Washington and Nevada, with four cases each. Arizona has had three cases, Nebraska and New Jersey two cases, and Kentucky has one. However, many people who become sick with salmonella see their symptoms resolve without contacting a health professional, so the actual number of cases could be higher. When and where were the eggs distributed? According to the notice posted on the FDA's website, the recalled eggs were distributed between February and May. The retail locations that received the eggs include: Walmart Save Mart FoodMaxx Lucky Smart & Final Safeway Raleys Food 4 Less Ralphs The eggs were distributed between February 3 and May 15, 2025, to Save Mart, FoodMaxx, Lucky, Smart & Final, Safeway, Raleys, Food 4 Less, and Ralphs locations in California and Nevada. Those eggs had sell-by dates ranging from March 4 to June 4, 2025. The eggs were also distributed between February 3 through May 6, 2025, to Walmart stores in California, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nebraska, Indiana, and Illinois. Those eggs had sell-by dates ranging from March 4 to June 19, 2025. What eggs are included in the recall? Over two dozen egg products packaged under multiple brands are included in the recall. The recall notice states that the eggs were packaged in fiber or plastic cartons and have a plant code number P-6562 or CA5330 with the Julian Dates between 32 to 126. Photographs of the cartons can be found here. The item names of the egg products included in the recall, along with their plant number and carton UPC are: Item Name Plant Number Carton UPC Clover Organic Large Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 070852010427 First Street Cage Free Large Brown Loose 1 case=150 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 041512039638 Nulaid Medium Brown Cage Free 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 071230021042 Nulaid Jumbo Brown Cage Free 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 071230021011 O Organics Cage Free Large Brown 6 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 079893401522 O Organics Large Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 079893401508 O Organics Large Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 079893401546 Marketside Organic Large Cage Free Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 681131122771 Marketside Organic Large Cage Free Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 681131122801 Marketside Large Cage Free Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 681131122764 Marketside Large Cage Free Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 681131122795 Raley's Large Cage Free Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 046567033310 Raley's Large Cage Free Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 046567040325 Raley's Organic Large Cage Free Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 046567028798 Raley's Organic Large Cage Free Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 046567040295 Simple Truth Medium Brown Cage Free 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 011110099327 Simple Truth Large Brown Cage Free 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 011110873743 Sun Harvest Organic Cage Free Large Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 041512131950 Sun Harvest Organic Cage Free Large Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 041512145162 Sunnyside Large Brown Cage Free 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 717544211747 Sunnyside Large Brown Cage Free 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 717544211754 Sunnyside Organic Cage Free Large Brown 12 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 717544201441 Sunnyside Organic Cage Free Large Brown 18 eggs P-6562 or CA-5330 717544211761 Loose Small Brown Cage Free-1 box= 6 flats (1 flat= 30 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA Loose Medium Brown Cage Free -1 box= 6 flats (1 flat= 30 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA Loose Medium Brown Organic -1 box= 6 flats (1 flat= 30 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA Loose Large Brown Organic-1 box= 6 flats (1 flat= 30 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA Loose Jumbo Brown Cage Free -1 box=5 flats(1 flat=20 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA Loose Jumbo Brown Organic -1 box=5 flats(1 flat=20 eggs) P-6562 or CA-5330 NA What is Salmonella? Salmonella is a potentially deadly bacterium that is usually contracted after eating contaminated foods. The CDC says that typical symptoms of a salmonella infection include diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps, which typically present between six hours and six days after exposure to the bacteria. Typical salmonella infections last between four and seven days, and most people recover without treatment. However, salmonella infections can also cause severe illness in individuals, especially those who are younger than five, older than 65, or have weakened immune systems. What should I do if I have the recalled eggs? According to the CDC, if you have the recalled eggs in your possession, you should not consume them. Instead, you should throw the eggs out or return them to their place of purchase for a refund. You should also sanitize all surfaces that may have come into contact with the eggs.
