fda
Unclear clarification on Covid shots
Makary went on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday to clarify the federal government's position on Covid-19 vaccines. It didn't really work, Lizzy Lawrence reports.
Federal recommendations for whether pregnant people should get vaccinated are a key source of confusion. The FDA listed pregnancy as a risk factor that warrants a Covid shot, then health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the CDC to pull Covid vaccine recommendations for that population a week later.
Read more for Makary's response when host Margaret Brennan pressed him on that contradiction.
vaccines
Sowing discord over mRNA vaccines
Lizzy and Isabella Cueto track mRNA from its rise to a Nobel-winning biomedical advance that saved the world from Covid-19 during Trump's first term to a distrusted technology that Trump 2.0 health officials are casting away.
Some of the attacks are about the technology itself, while others stem from general vaccine skepticism and frustrations with vaccine mandates during Covid.
Either way, Kennedy is undermining investments in the technology, and public health experts worry the field will flounder, leaving Americans exposed to the next pandemic.
budet proposal
More details on proposed NIH cuts
Jonathan Wosen and Daniel Payne provide a rundown of how the NIH would be affected by the president's budget request for next fiscal year, which was released late Friday.
The "budget in brief" calls for cutting $18 billion from NIH's discretionary budget, a 40% reduction. It also details plans to collapse the agency's 27 institutes and centers into eight. The broad strokes of that had previously been disclosed, and Friday's budget summary spells out more clearly where these cuts would come from and how deep they would be.
Read more for the details.
congress
Tax bill update
As Senate Republicans return from recess, they'll be treated with official Congressional Budget Office projections of how many people could lose insurance from Medicaid cuts and Affordable Care Act reforms in the tax bill that House Republicans passed before break.
The One Big Beautiful Bill squeaked through the House, and Senate Republicans are as divided as their colleagues, with a similarly tight margin. Some want to reduce the deficit more than the House bill would, while others don't want to cut Medicaid, which would increase deficit spending unless they find other offsets.
There's also the matter of ACA reforms, some of which the CBO will assess for the first time this week, that could cut enrollment in marketplace plans by one-third. Those reforms haven't received much attention, but that could change. Enrollment in Affordable Care Act marketplace health plans has more than doubled since 2020, and most of that growth has been in states won by President Trump.
The CBO "score" will lay the foundation for those fights.
Republicans want to pass the bill by July 4, which is a self-imposed deadline. The deadline of real consequence is probably whenever the government reaches its borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling, because the House bill includes a debt limit increase. Treasury has asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling before August.
A court ruling blocking most of President Trump's tariffs could further complicate that timeline. The administration appealed that ruling, but if it loses, the government will have to pay back those who paid tariffs, which would likely mean the government would hit the borrowing limit sooner.
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