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A leading U.S. health official on Sunday urged people to get inoculated against the measles at a time of outbreaks across several states and as the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status.“Take the vaccine, please,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator whose boss has raised suspicion about the safety and importance of vaccines. “We have a solution for our problem.”Oz, a heart surgeon, defended some recently revised federal vaccine recommendations as well as past comments from President Donald Trump and the nation’s health chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the efficacy of vaccines. From Oz, there was a clear message on the measles.“Not all illnesses are equally dangerous and not all people are equally susceptible to those illnesses,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But measles is one you should get your vaccine.”An outbreak in South Carolina in the hundreds has surpassed the recorded case count in Texas’ 2025 outbreak, and there is also one on the Utah-Arizona border. Multiple other states have had confirmed cases this year. The outbreaks have mostly impacted children and have come as infectious disease experts warn that rising public distrust of vaccines generally may be contributing to the spread of a disease once declared eradicated by public health officials.Asked in the television interview whether people should fear the measles, Oz replied, “Oh, for sure.” He said Medicare and Medicaid will continue to cover the measles vaccine as part of the insurance programs.“There will never be a barrier to Americans get access to the measles vaccine. And it is part of the core schedule,” Oz said.But Oz also said “we have advocated for measles vaccines all along” and that Kennedy “has been on the very front of this.”Questions about vaccines did not come up later in a Kennedy interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Sunday Briefing,” where he was asked about what kind of Super Bowl snack he might have (probably yogurt). He also he eats steak with sauerkraut in the mornings.Critics of Kennedy have argued that the health secretary’s longtime skepticism of U.S. vaccine recommendations and past sympathy for the unfounded claim that vaccines may cause autism may influence official public health guidance in ways contrary to the medical consensus.Oz argued that Kennedy’s stance was supportive of the measles vaccine despite Kennedy’s general comments about the recommended vaccine schedule.“When the first outbreak happened in Texas, he said, get your vaccines for measles, because that’s an example of an ailment that you should get vaccinated against,” Oz said. The Republican administration last month dropped some vaccine recommendations for children, an overhaul of the traditional vaccine schedule that the Department of Health and Human Services said was in response to a request from Trump.Trump asked the agency to review how peer nations approach vaccine recommendations and consider revising U.S. guidance accordingly.States, not the federal government, have the authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. While federal requirements often influence those state regulations, some states have begun creating their own alliances to counter the administration’s guidance on vaccines.U.S. vaccination rates have dropped and the share of children with exemptions has reached an all-time high, according to federal data. At the same time, rates of diseases that can be protected against with vaccines, such as measles and whooping cough, are rising across the country. Kennedy’s past anti-vaccine activism Kennedy’s past skepticism of vaccines has come under scrutiny since Trump first nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.During his Senate confirmation testimony last year, Kennedy told lawmakers that a closely scrutinized 2019 trip he took to Samoa, which came before a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines.”But documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations said that Kennedy sought to meet with top Samoan officials during his trip to the Pacific island nation.Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists before the measles outbreak, which sickened thousands of people and killed 83, mostly children under age 5. Mixed messaging on autism, vaccines Oz’s comments mark a broader pattern among administration officials of voicing discordant and at times contradictory statements about the efficacy of vaccines amid an overhaul of U.S. public health policy.Officials have walked a fine line in criticizing past U.S. vaccine policy, often at times appearing to express sympathy for unfounded conspiracy theories from anti-vaccine activists, while also not straying too far from established science.During a Senate hearing Tuesday, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said no single vaccine causes autism, but he did not rule out the possibility that research may find some combination of vaccines could have negative health side effects.But Kennedy, in Senate testimony, has argued that a link between vaccines and autism has not been disproved.He has previously claimed that some components of vaccines, like the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, may cause childhood neurological disorders such as autism. Most vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella do not contain thimerosal. A federal vaccine advisory board overhauled by Kennedy last year voted to no longer recommend thimerosal-containing vaccines.Administration public health officials often cite the need to restore trust in public health systems after the coronavirus pandemic, when vaccine policy and the general public health response to the deadly pandemic became a highly polarizing topic in American politics.Misinformation and conspiracy theories about the public health system also spread during the pandemic, and longtime anti-vaccine activist groups saw a swell in interest from the wider public.Kennedy, who for years led the anti-vaccine activist group Children’s Health Defense, has been criticized for ordering reviews of vaccines and public health guidelines that leading medical research groups have deemed settled science.Public health experts also criticized the president for making unfounded claims about highly politicized health issues. During a September Oval Office event, Trump asserted without evidence that Tylenol and vaccines are linked to a rise in the incidence of autism in the United States. Matt Brown, Associated Press
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Some people love watching the Super Bowl for the game. Others love it for the commercials. If youre in the latter group, youll probably have noticed that the ad spots in between commercial breaks during Super Bowl LX last night were dominated by one big theme: artificial intelligence. As noted by AdWeek, the television advertising analytics firm iSpot found that nearly a quarter of all commercials during the 2026 Super Bowl featured AI in some way. To be more precise, 15 out of the 66 commercialsor 23% of themeither used AI in their creation (like the entirely AI-generated ad from the vodka maker SVEDKA) or were spots by big tech companies directly advertising their AI services. It’s the spots by those big tech companies that show how the race to capture the attention of non-techie consumers has heated up. Most of the big tech companies that advertised their AI during the Super Bowl last night have spent hundreds of billions combined building out their AI systems. Now they want to make sure their user numbers grow big enough to justify their capital expenditures. Here’s a list of tech companies that ran AI-related spots last night: Amazon The fun spot stars a paranoid Chris Hemsworth who distrusts the companys new Alexa+ AI assistant. Genspark The AI workplace assistant startups ad starred Mathew Broderick and is notable because its script was actually generated by the Genspark AI platform, notes iSpot. Google The search giants ad takes the heartwarming route, with a mother using Gemini to generate images of a familys new house in order to make her child feel better about the move. Meta/Oakley The ad, directed by Spike Lee, showcases the comapnies AI smart glasses. Microsoft The Redmond companys ad is all about a coach using Microsoft Copilot in Excel to find the best linebackers. It should be noted that while this ad ran during the Super Bowl, it aired online several weeks earlier. OpenAI The ChatGPT makers ad focuses on its new Codex software development tools.
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Telehealth company Hims & Hers dropped its plan to offer a knockoff version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy on Saturday two days after it announced the new drug and one day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications.Hims had said Thursday that it would offer a compounded version of the new Wegovy pill that drugmaker Novo Nordisk just began selling last month. Novo immediately threatened to sue Hims, and then the FDA said Friday that it plans to take decisive steps to limit access to the active ingredients in popular GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound.Hims’ own website still touted the new semaglutide pill offering Saturday afternoon hours after it announced on X that it will no longer sell the medicine. Semaglutide is the chemical name for Wegovy.“Since launching the compounded semaglutide pill on our platform, we’ve had constructive conversations with stakeholders across the industry. As a result, we have decided to stop offering access to this treatment,” Hims said in its statement. “We remain committed to the millions of Americans who depend on us for access to safe, affordable, and personalized care.”Hims didn’t say Saturday whether it will make any changes to the compounded versions of injectable weight-loss medications it has been selling as a result of the FDA action.The San Francisco-based company had planned to significantly undercut Novo’s price of $149 per month for the Wegovy pill by selling its version at $49 for the first month and $99 per month thereafter. Hims and other similar companies got started several years ago by offering cheap generic versions of drugs for hair loss, erectile dysfunction and other health issues before branching out into the multibillion market for obesity medications.Novo plans to tout its new FDA-approved Wegovy pill in a celebrity-filled Super Bowl ad on Sunday. The Danish pharmaceutical giant didn’t immediately comment Saturday on Hims’ decision to drop the knockoff. Rival drugmaker Eli Lilly has said that it expects the FDA to approve an oral version of its orforglipron weight loss medication later this spring. But Wegovy is the first pill to hit the market.The compounded medicine that Hims had planned to sell wasn’t approved and had not gone through trials to demonstrate that it would be effective.The FDA permits specialty pharmacies and other companies to make compounded versions of brand name drugs when they are in short supply. And the booming demand for GLP-1 drugs in recent years prompted companies like Hims to jump into the multibillion-dollar market for the drugs, with many patients willing to pay cash.In 2024, the FDA said that GLP-1 drugs were no longer in a shortage, which was expected to put an end to the compounding. But companies like Hims relied on an exception to keep selling their versions of the medications because the practice is still permitted when a prescription is customized for the patient. Josh Funk, AP Business Writer
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