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A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who led the agency’s network to study hospitalization trends from infectious diseases like COVID-19 has resigned in protest following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s orders to change the agency’s vaccine recommendations and the committee that makes them.

Dr. Fiona Havers’ last day at the CDC was Monday, according to an announcement sent by an agency official to her branch within the agency’s Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division. They received the notice shortly after Reuters first reported on the resignation.

“I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions,” Havers wrote in an email sent to colleagues before the announcement.

An infectious disease researcher who has worked with Havers, and received her email voicing concerns with how the data would be used, described the resignation as the latest in the “dismantling” of the agency’s expertise.

“It’s a big loss to the CDC,” the researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CBS News.

CBS News sent a request for comment to the CDC about the concerns that Havers expressed, but did not hear back from the agency’s spokesperson. Instead, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services responded.

“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity. Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis, and evidence – not conflicts of interest or industry influence,” Emily Hilliard, the department spokesperson, said in an email.

Havers had led the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network, or RESP-NET, that collects and studies trends in hospitalizations from COVID-19, RSV and influenza. Her presentations of RESP-NET’s findings have figured prominently into past meetings of the agency’s Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices as they weighed updates to the CDC’s vaccine recommendations.

“Of all the work we have accomplished, I am most proud of how COVID-NET and RSV-NET hospitalization data, presented at nearly every public ACIP meeting since 2020, have been critical drivers of COVID-19 and RSV vaccine policy in recent years,” Havers wrote in her email.

The CDC’s vaccine recommendations are closely watched by doctors and health authorities because they are tied to federal policies enabling access to vaccines, including liability protections and requirements for insurance coverage.

Usually, the ACIP deliberates and votes on updated recommendations, which are later adopted by the CDC director. In an unprecedented move this year, Kennedy bypassed the process to order his own changes.

In late May, Kennedy first ordered narrowing the guidance to exclude children and pregnant women without other underlying health conditions, sidestepping an ACIP process that had been already underway to discuss changing the recommendations.

He then fired the current roster of ACIP members in June — in what he described as a “clean sweep” of the panel — as well as removed the agency officials who oversee the panel’s vetting and agenda.

In a viewpoint published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the 17 members of the panel fired by Kennedy denounced the health secretary for “dismantling the process by which vaccines have been recommended.”

“As former ACIP members, we are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of US immunization policy, impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses,” they wrote.

Kennedy later replaced the panel with a list of picks that included several allies of the health secretary and opponents of recommendations for COVID-19 and some other vaccines.

The committee’s new membership is set to meet next week to vote on updated vaccine recommendations for COVID-19 and RSV, among other diseases. 

Mantis hopes that Moriarty’s post about Graves’ disease will encourage people to take their own symptoms seriously, even if they’re vague, easy to write off as run-of-the-mill stress, or feel too random to be related. “It’s important to listen to your body,” he says. “If something doesn’t feel right, talk to your provider.”

Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News

Nearly two-thirds of adults oppose President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” approved in May by the House of Representatives, according to a KFF poll released Tuesday.

And even Trump’s most ardent supporters like the legislation a lot less when they learn how it would cut federal spending on health programs, the poll shows.

The KFF poll found that about 61% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — and 72% of the subset who identify with Trump’s “Make American Great Again” movement — support the bill, which would extend many of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while reducing spending on domestic programs, including cutting billions from Medicaid.

But when pollsters told survey respondents about the bill’s consequences for health care, opposition grew, including among MAGA supporters.

For example, after being told that the bill would decrease funding for local hospitals and increase the number of people without health insurance, support among those who back MAGA dropped more than 20 percentage points — resulting in less than half the group still backing the bill.

Ashley Kirzinger, KFF’s director of survey methodology and associate director of its Public Opinion and Survey Research program, said it’s no surprise polling shows that party affiliation affects how most of the public views the bill.

“But the poll shows that support, even among MAGA supporters, drops drastically once the public hears more about how the bill could impact local hospitals and reduce Medicaid coverage,” she said.

“This shows how the partisan lens wears slightly when the public learns more about how the legislation could affect them and their families.”

KFF is a health policy research, polling, and news organization that includes KFF Health News.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who won passage of the legislation in the chamber he controls by a single vote on May 22, has insisted the bill would not “cut Medicaid.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which calculates the effects of legislation on the nation’s deficits and debt, says the measure would reduce federal spending on Medicaid by $793 billion over 10 years, resulting in nearly 8 million more people becoming uninsured.

The bill is encountering strident opposition from the health industry, most notably hospitals that expect to see large cuts in funding as a result of millions of people losing Medicaid coverage. The House-passed legislation would increase the frequency of eligibility checks and require that most nondisabled adults regularly prove they are working, studying, or volunteering at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage.

“This is common sense,” Johnson said May 25 on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “And when the American people understand what we are doing here, they applaud it.”

Critics say the bill marks the latest attempt by Republicans to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

As the Senate moves toward a possible vote on its version of the legislation before Independence Day, the KFF poll shows Medicaid and the ACA are more popular than ever.

About 83% of adults support Medicaid, including large majorities of Democrats (93%), independents (83%), and Republicans (74%). That’s up from 77% in January, with the poll finding the biggest jump in favorability among Republicans.

Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program cover about 78 million people who are disabled or have low incomes.

About two-thirds of adults hold favorable views of the ACA, the most since the law’s enactment in 2010, as recorded in KFF polls. The law has only been consistently popular with a majority of adults since about 2021.

Views of the ACA remain split along partisan lines, with most Republicans (63%) holding unfavorable views and most Democrats (94%) and independents (71%) viewing it favorably.

The poll found other indications that the public may not understand key provisions of the GOP bill, including its work requirements.

The poll finds two-thirds of the public — including the vast majority of Republicans (88%) and MAGA supporters (93%) and half (51%) of Democrats — initially support requiring nearly all adults on Medicaid to prove they are working or looking for work, in school, or doing community service, with exceptions such as for caregivers and people with disabilities.

However, attitudes toward this provision shifted dramatically when respondents were presented with more information.

For example, when told most adults with Medicaid are already working or unable to work, and that those individuals could lose coverage due to the challenge of documenting it, about half of supporters changed their view, resulting in nearly two-thirds of adults opposing Medicaid work requirements and about a third supporting them.

The poll of 1,321 adults was conducted online and by telephone June 4-8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The activity of the human brain is known to be closely connected to other physiological signals, such as heart rate and breathing. A study by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and other institutes reveals that a global spatiotemporal pattern in the brain (i.e. a pattern in brain activity that repeats itself across the brain and over time) is a central component of these brain-body interactions.

The same research team has now set out to further investigate this global signal, in the hope of identifying its underlying physiological and neural origins. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, show that this unified pattern of brain-body activity is in great part driven by the autonomic nervous system, the part of the nervous system regulating arousal and other involuntary bodily functions.

“The inspiration for this project came from our previously published paper in Nature Neuroscience where we described prominent spatiotemporal patterns in brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals,” Taylor Bolt, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

“Of these patterns there was one that dominates: the pattern known as the ‘global signal.’ It’s easy to see when viewing an fMRI scan: suddenly the brain’s fMRI signal ‘lights up’ with strong activity that seems to cover the entire brain—thus, the reason it’s called the ‘global signal.’”

The primary objective of this recent study by Bolt and his colleagues was to pin-point the underlying physiological and neural sources of the dominant pattern in fMRI signals observed in their earlier work.

To do this, they analyzed human fMRI data collected in previous studies and compiled them into readily available datasets, which are widely used to conduct neuroscience research.

“Most existing datasets are limited—pulse oximeter (PPG) on the finger and respiration belts—while others may collect more comprehensive recordings,” explained Bolt.

“Catie Chang had gathered a comprehensive fMRI dataset with a wealth of physiological recordings that allowed us to track a range of bodily states and tie these back to what’s going on in the brain, particularly the brain’s ‘global signal.’ We also supplemented these analyses with several other fMRI datasets (with associated physiological recordings) to ensure the robustness of our findings.”

The methods employed by the researchers were carefully designed to determine the extent to which the human body’s physiological systems (e.g. heart, lungs, exocrine, etc.) track fluctuations in global fMRI signals. Moreover, if these systems are tightly connected, Bolt and his colleagues wished to determine which of them is responsible for the global fMRI fluctuations they observed.

“We found a robust association between the global fMRI signal and a host of autonomic-driven changes in the body that spanned cardiovascular, pulmonary, exocrine and smooth muscle systems under resting conditions,” said Bolt.

“We also found that these co-fluctuations of brain and body observed at rest are induced by experimental manipulation of arousal, including a cued deep breath and intermittent auditory stimulation. Further, the same brain and body co-fluctuations were observed with spontaneous arousals during sleep (as measured by brief, aperiodic EEG activation).”

Overall, the findings gathered by Bolt and his colleagues suggest that the autonomic nervous system, which plays a central role in the regulation of arousal and wakefulness, is an important source of the global fMRI signal. Similarly, they also indicate that the global signal in the brain is a key component of the autonomic nervous system’s arousal response.

“We would now like to dive into the functional significance of the global fMRI signal in the arousal response—what is it ‘doing’ for us, and what downstream mechanisms (or behaviors) are affected by this phenomena,” added Bolt.

Written for you by our author Ingrid Fadelli, edited by Sadie Harley, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive. If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You’ll get an ad-free account as a thank-you.

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All 50 states as well as the District of Columbia and U.S. territories have approved a $7.4 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin, over the company’s improper marketing of opioids.

The deal was filed with a federal bankruptcy court by Purdue Pharma officials in March after negotiations with state attorneys general and other stakeholders. If this plan is finalized, payouts will occur over the next 15 years.

In a statement, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James said the plan will “hold the Sackler family accountable” for what she described as their “leading role in fueling the epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses.”

Under the outlines of the deal, members of the Sackler family who currently own Purdue Pharma are expected to contribute roughly $6.5 billion.

According to the company, a major change from past settlement deals will mean people who wish to sue the Sacklers in civil court for alleged wrong-doing will not be forced to give up those lawsuits.

“Creditors can preserve their right to take legal action against the Sacklers if they do not opt in to the Sackler releases contained in the Plan,” Purdue Pharma said in a statement.

The firm sent a statement to NPR on Monday describing approval of the reorganization plan by states and territories as a “critical milestone” in finalizing a deal to “provide billions of dollars to compensate victims, abate the opioid crisis, and deliver opioid use disorder and overdose rescue medicines that will save American lives.”

The Sacklers have said repeatedly they did nothing wrong and committed no crimes. 

NPR has reached out to members of the Sackler family for comment, but have yet to receive a response. 

In a joint statement sent to NPR, attorneys suing Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers praised the deal.

“After five years of litigation and three years in bankruptcy, we are pleased that all 55 eligible states and territories have unanimously agreed to accept,” said members of the National Prescription Opiate Litigation Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee.

They said the deal would add “more than $7 billion in much-needed funds to help communities across the country” recovering from the opioid crisis.

Not everyone is satisfied with the deal. Ryan Hampton, an addiction recovery advocate who was addicted to Oxycontin and other opioids for more than a decade, said the deal only sets aside roughly $850 million to compensate direct victims of Purdue Pharma.

“I’d still give it an F at this point because it still falls short of anything meaningful that victims will receive,” Hampton said. He estimated that his own direct payout would be roughly $3,500.

“Compared to how long and drawn out this process has been … it is very little money,” Hampton said, adding, “I’m ready to put it behind me and move on with my life.”

This settlement will have to be approved by a federal bankruptcy court. Experts tell NPR, this version of the deal is likely to be accepted by the courts and by the U.S. Justice Department.

The DOJ’s bankruptcy watchdog agency challenged earlier settlement attempts, leading to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a previous bankruptcy deal with Purdue Pharma and Sacklers in July of 2024.

If finalized, this settlement will add to more than $50 billion in opioid pay-outs by corporations that profited from manufacture, distribution and retail of opioid painkillers at a time when overdoses and drug deaths were skyrocketing in the U.S.