Free Republic

When the next pandemic strikes, Americans will again depend on a cadre of senior health officials to steer the nation’s response and reassure the public. But the team rapidly assembled by President-elect Donald Trump is largely untested, possesses scant infectious-disease expertise and has often questioned vaccines and other interventions overseen by the agencies they have been tapped to lead. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and writer who is Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, has been among the agency’s most prominent critics, arguing its response to the coronavirus pandemic was heavy-handed and bureaucratic. Dave Weldon, chosen...

Adults who received the updated coronavirus booster shots are better protected against severe disease than those who haven’t, cutting their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized with covid-19 by 50 percent or more, according to new federal data.Two reports released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give the first detailed look at how well the updated boosters from Pfizer and Moderna protect against serious illness. But uptake of the “bivalent” boosters rolled out in September has been low among vaccine-weary Americans, with only about 14 percent of those eligible — ages 5...

On Tuesday morning, a Fox News contributor claimed on Twitter that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate that schoolchildren get coronavirus vaccines. By Tuesday evening, the claim was being repeated by the nation's most popular cable news show, and had been amplified to millions more on social media online. "The CDC is about to add the Covid vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, which would make the vax mandatory for kids to attend school," host Tucker Carlson tweeted, sharing a segment from his show that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times online. But...