Login
Trump Vaccine Order Takes Aim at States That Limit Exemptions
A largely overlooked part of the executive order President Donald Trump issued this week scaling back the schedule for childhood vaccines threatens legal action against the four states that don’t allow personal or religious exemptions to school vaccine requirements.
Those states — California, Connecticut, Maine and New York — are among the states with the highest immunization rates, and they are among those that have been most successful in controlling the worst measles outbreak in more than three decades.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. All allow exemptions for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Forty-six states plus the District of Columbia also allow exemptions for religious and/or personal beliefs.
Trump’s order, which he signed on Monday, says the attorney general will take legal action against states that do not provide “religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”
US Appeals Court Revives Justice Department Subpoena to Gender-Affirming Care Provider
A U.S. federal appeals court handed President Donald Trump’s administration a legal victory on Friday in its efforts to seek data from providers of transgender health care to minors, reinstating a Justice Department subpoena that a lower court had blocked as politically motivated. In its ruling, a divided panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal judge in Seattle wrongly concluded the Justice Department’s subpoena was issued in bad faith in a lawsuit brought by telehealth provider QueerDoc.
QueerDoc provides gender-affirming care for patients, including minors, diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is distress from a mismatch between a patient’s sex at birth and gender identity. The subpoena, part of a wave of similar demands from the Trump administration to hospitals and clinics across the country, sought personnel records, billing information, patient records and other information.
“The President may direct DOJ to exercise its statutory authority in a manner that aligns with his broader policy goals,” wrote Circuit Judge Carlos Bea, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush. He was joined by Trump appointee Circuit Judge Daniel Bress. Circuit Judge Richard Paez wrote a dissent.
Trump Wants Fewer Childhood Vaccines. California Says ‘Nothing Is Changing’ Here
California is not changing its childhood vaccination recommendations, or its requirement to have health insurers cover the inoculations, after President Donald Trump’s executive order that calls for reducing the number of vaccines U.S. children receive, state health officials say.
The executive order, signed this week, calls for scaling back the number of routine childhood vaccinations, splitting the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine into three shots given at separate visits — a vaccine formulation that does not exist — and threatens legal action against states like California that do not allow religious or personal belief exemptions.
But California is not changing its vaccine recommendations or requirements for schoolchildren, and health insurers in the state must continue covering the same vaccines as before the federal action.
Marin Pharmacist’s Body May Be a ‘Temple,’ but It Still Should Have Been Vaccinated, Judges Rule
The San Francisco Chronicle reported:
A Marin County woman who worked as a pharmacist rejected her employer’s mandate to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because, she said, her body was “a temple of the Holy Spirit” that must be kept free of harmful substances. A federal appeals court was not convinced.
Maria Ledezma had objected to vaccinations for many years, and her employer, Optum Health Services, was entitled to conclude that her objections were based on “personal health preferences and a self-directed judgment about what substances are harmful,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday in a 2-1 decision dismissing her suit against the company.
“Invoking a broad principle that sounds in religious terms — that her body is a temple — does not transform her personal health judgment into a religious mandate,” said Presiding Judge Mary Murguia and Judge John Owens in the majority opinion. In dissent, Judge Patrick Bumatay interpreted Ledezma’s spiritual beliefs more broadly and said she should be allowed to sue her former employer and try to prove she was a victim of religious discrimination.
The EPA’s Data on Cancer Risk From Air Pollution Has Gone Dark
Darya Minovi was mapping pollution from medical sterilization plants across the country when many of the communities she was speaking to began asking the same question. The facilities emit ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen, and those who lived nearby wanted to know how much the emissions were increasing their cancer risk. She turned to data compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency to find out.
The resulting maps, published in 2023 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit where Minovi is a researcher, revealed that more than 14 million people lived in a 5-mile radius of ethylene oxide-emitting facilities. Crucially, the map highlighted 23 sterilization facilities that the EPA had found emit ethylene oxide at levels that definitively contribute to elevated cancer risk. The project helped raise awareness and was used to push the government to tighten limits on ethylene oxide emissions.
But now, the cancer risk data that made Minovi’s analysis possible has quietly gone offline. After more than two decades of sharing this information with the public, the Environmental Protection Agency has omitted cancer risk estimates from its latest update to national air pollution data.
The agency is continuing to release raw pollution figures, but it is no longer providing information on the additional cancer risk that the emissions cause. It has also not updated its searchable U.S. map of cancer risk from air pollution with the most recent data.
FDA Travels to Mexico a Month After Linking Taylor Farms to Cyclospora Outbreak
Food and Drug Administration investigators traveled to Taylor Farms’ operation in Mexico for the first time this week to start inspecting the facilities linked to the largest cyclospora outbreak in the U.S., according to four people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Donald Prater, the FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, confirmed in an interview Friday that inspectors were on-site at the processing facility and plan to be in the fields next.
Given the scale of the outbreak, food-safety experts and some former top FDA officials said the agency should have gone to Mexico sooner than nearly a month after officials publicly connected the company’s shredded lettuce to an outbreak that has sickened nearly 10,000 people.
Though Mexican officials and the company have conducted their own testing on the farm, some food-safety experts worry the conditions that may have contributed to the contamination are gone, complicating investigative efforts. The company said it suspended all production on that facility on July 18.
