The administration approved a new flu shot but is raising fresh questions about the relationship between autism and other vaccines.
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Here’s what happened under President Donald Trump this week that you may have missed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees vaccine recommendations and tracks disease outbreaks, had been without a leader for a year. (Trump fired its director after she refused to resign amid pressure to change vaccine policy.) Trump nominated several people for the job; this week, one got approved by the Senate: Erica Schwartz, a physician and retired Navy admiral who served in the first Trump administration.
She’ll report to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has systematically tried to dismantle federal vaccine recommendations, including a renewed focus on discredited science about vaccines and their relationship to autism. So a key question remains, reports The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun: Will Schwartz preserve the agency’s scientific independence? In her confirmation hearings, she stopped short of saying she would publicly oppose Kennedy if he directed the agency to take actions she believed were unsupported by scientific evidence.
Despite Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, this week an agency he oversees approved a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine for older adults. The government had considered blocking vaccines that use mRNA technology, which helped create the covid-19 vaccine in record time and is being used to develop flu shots. Health experts say this technology could allow the vaccines to better respond to changing strains of flu.
“It looks effective,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, who briefly led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Trump and now heads the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “It looks safe. And more exciting than this individual vaccine is the idea that you can use this platform to get around all the challenges with the current flu vaccine, which is always a guessing game. And you can really cut down on manufacturing time. I think this is our future of rapid vaccine development.”
This summer, the Supreme Court said Trump can’t unilaterally override the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil.
Trump tried again this week, though. “We’re ending it in a different way,” he said Thursday of birthright citizenship.
Trump issued two executive orders that are limited in their reach and are likely to get paused if not outright knocked down by the courts, say experts. They declare that babies born to foreign lobbyists or “foreign enemies” can’t get citizenship, which would cover a few thousand people rather than 15 million undocumented immigrants, my Post colleagues report.
“This is my very clear legal take:” Amanda Frost, an immigration law professor at the University of Virginia, told my colleagues. “He cannot issue an executive order saying that children of birthright tourism — even if the mother violates immigration law to come to the United States — are not U.S. citizens.”
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Ending the civil rights-era anti-poverty preschool program Head Start, which serves children across the nation, has long been a goal of conservatives, who argue it’s ineffective and wasteful. The Trump administration has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of funding that Congress approved for it, which provides families across the nation with free child care. And this week, officials are proposing significant deregulations, like new dietary and physical fitness requirements for students, reports The Post’s Todd Wallack.
Kennedy argues it will save money and better serve students. Critics say it’s a backdoor way to close down the program.
“After Congress and the nation forcefully rejected Trump’s efforts to destroy Head Start, this administration now wants to quietly gut Head Start by eliminating the basic health and safety standards our kids rely on,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), a longtime advocate for the program, said in a statement.
Trump has ramped up mass deportations this summer, surging immigration agents into communities across America. It led to chaos and violence, as it had in the past: In July, three people were killed within a week.
Trump defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carrying out his deportations, and they’ve since resumed traffic stops, begun arresting people at airports and are trying to leverage billions of dollars in grants to get cities to help arrest migrants.
July saw the most ICE arrests of Trump’s second term: an average of 1,450 arrests a day. Through the first seven months of the year, ICE has sent 238,000 people to detention facilities, The Post reports.
Trump has never really let up on his campaign to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible, despite the sinking popularity of his efforts after the controversial Minnesota operations. But ICE spent some time recalibrating how to do it, said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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