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U.S. Participating in Influenza Vaccine Meeting: WHO
The U.S. will participate in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) upcoming meeting on the composition of the influenza vaccine despite officially withdrawing from the global group last month. The WHO will meet on Feb. 26 in Turkey to discuss the composition of the 2026-2027 flu vaccine for the northern hemisphere.
“The vaccine composition meeting will be taking place later this month. The U.S. will participate in that meeting as far as I understand,” Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, said in a press conference Wednesday.
Last month, the U.S. officially withdrew from the WHO following the end of the year-long process to exit the group. The U.S. was a founding member of the WHO and had been part of the organization for nearly 80 years.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has expressed an openness to bringing the U.S. back into the fold and has said he hopes the country reconsiders its withdrawal. States like California, Illinois and New York have moved to join the WHO’s global disease network since the U.S.’s exit.
HHS Is Making an AI Tool to Create Hypotheses About Vaccine Injury Claims
The US Department of Health and Human Services 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 all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025.
The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda.
A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
Confronting Changing Federal Guidelines, Proposals Aim to Expand Mainers’ Access to Vaccines
In light of federal policy changes limiting vaccine access for children, two lawmakers introduced bills to protect and expand Mainers’ ability to get vaccinated. The complementary proposals introduced Tuesday aim to decouple Maine’s vaccine policy from federal guidance by instead accepting recommendations from trusted medical and public health organizations.
They also aim to expand liability protections for pharmacists who administer vaccines and give them more authority to prescribe and dispense certain vaccines to children and adults without requiring notifications to or permission from doctors.
“If federal actions create uncertainty or retreat from longstanding science-based standards, Maine must have the authority to step in and ensure that access to critical vaccinations remains clear, stable and grounded in evidence and science,” said Maine Senate President Mattie Daughtry (D-Cumberland), who introduced one of the bills at a Health Coverage Insurance and Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Maryland Legislation to Clarify Vaccine Guidelines Adds to ‘Confusion’ Instead, Opponents Say
The Moore administration’s plan to counteract “confusion” over shifting federal vaccine recommendations by granting more authority to state officials will just create more confusion, not less, critics told a Senate committee Tuesday. “It is unnecessarily confusing for the parents of our state, and it is contributing to the politicization of all health care policy,” Catherine Garrett, who leads a patient advocacy group called Love Maryland, said in virtual testimony to the Senate Finance Committee.
Garrett was testifying against Senate Bill 385, the so-called Vax Act, that would grant that state health secretary the authority to set vaccine recommendations for Marylanders, independent of any federal guidelines. The bill is priority legislation for Gov. Wes Moore (D), who announced it last month shortly after U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began watering down vaccine recommendations.
In January, President Donald Trump (R) issued a memorandum directing Kennedy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reevaluate childhood vaccines based on “best practices from peer, developed countries.” The CDC then announced it was reducing the number of vaccinations recommended for all children.
Republican House Bill Guts Laws Protecting U.S. Consumers From Toxic Chemicals
A new Republican House bill proposes sweeping changes to US toxic chemical laws that would gut protections for consumers, workers and the environment, public health advocates mobilising against the legislation warn.
Among other changes to the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), the bill would limit the type of science that is used to determine health risks, stop legally requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure chemicals won’t harm people, give industry a prominent role in chemical review processes, and make it more difficult legally for the agency to ban toxic substances.
Congress in 2016 strengthened TSCA and the bill, drafted by Republican Alabama congressman Gary Palmer, would reverse many of those changes. Industry has been attacking the law for the last nine years and is seizing an opportunity to attempt to gut it with the GOP fully in charge of the federal government, said Daniel Savery, an attorney with the Earthjustice legal non-profit, which is among hundreds of groups organizing against the proposal.
WHO Urges U.S. To Share COVID Origins Intel
The World Health Organization on Wednesday urged Washington to share any intelligence it may be withholding on the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins, despite the United States quitting the WHO. The global catastrophe killed an estimated 20 million people, according to the UN health agency, while shredding economies, crippling health systems and turning people’s lives upside down.
The first cases were detected in Wuhan in China in late 2019, and understanding where the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from is seen as key to preventing future pandemics.
On his first day back in office in January 2025, US President Donald Trump handed the WHO his country’s one-year withdrawal notice, which cited “the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Trump’s administration has officially embraced the theory that the virus leaked from a virology laboratory in Wuhan. But the WHO said Washington did not hand over any COVID origins intelligence before marching out the organization’s door. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recalled that some countries have publicly said “they have intelligence about the origins — especially the US.”
