Gerard Gallagher

2 weeks ago | healio.com | Gerard Gallagher |Caitlyn Stulpin |Sara Kellner

Key takeaways:The committee is made up of independent advisors who make recommendations to the CDC. Several of the new members rose to prominence as critics of the country’s COVID-19 response. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named eight new members to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, including several who rose to prominence as critics of vaccines or the U.S. response to COVID-19.

3 weeks ago | healio.com | Gerard Gallagher |Stephen Feller |Caitlyn Stulpin

Read more Key takeaways: The Trump administration closed a CDC lab that tracked STIs, including drug-resistant gonorrhea. Experts painted a grim picture of STI surveillance in the wake of the lab’s closing. In early 2023, health officials in Massachusetts and at the CDC announced the detection of the first two cases of gonorrhea in the United States that were resistant or showed reduced susceptibility to five different classes of antibiotics.

4 weeks ago | healio.com | Gerard Gallagher

Key takeaways: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that the CDC would stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy kids and pregnant women. The CDC tweaked but did not remove its recommendation. The CDC tweaked — but did not remove — its recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination in children, days after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the agency would stop recommending the shots for healthy kids and pregnant women.

1 month ago | healio.com | Gerard Gallagher |Caitlyn Stulpin |Stephen Feller

FDA officials outlined new restrictions for COVID-19 vaccine approvals in the United States that could limit their use among healthy people. The policy shift was announced Tuesday in a New England Journal of Medicine article written by FDA Commissioner Martin Makary, MD, MPH, and Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, who leads the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and is the agency’s top vaccine regulator.

2 months ago | healio.com | Gerard Gallagher

HONOLULU — The results of a large observational study provided more evidence that receiving antibiotics in the first 2 years of life can increase a child’s risk for obesity, researchers reported. The study did not see a similar relationship between antibiotic use in the year leading up to a pregnancy all the way through the perinatal period, according to results presented at PAS by Sofia Ainonen, MD, a pediatric resident at the Oulu University Hospital in Oulu, Finland.