← The Headlines
The Headlines
The Childhood Vaccine Under Threat, and Trump’s Newest Push for Gas-Powered Cars
00:11:11
Plus, the race to save music history.
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- [00:00]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
This podcast is supported by Doctors Without Borders. Around the world, the need for humanitarian aid is rising. Doctors Without Borders is working around the clock to meet this moment, but they can't do it without your Support. In over 75 countries, medical teams are responding to natural disasters, caring for patients in war zones, helping stop disease outbreaks and more. This giving Tuesday, you can make a life saving impact. Donate today at doctors without borders.org Headlines.
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Tracy Mumford
From the new York Times. It's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, December 4th. Here's what we're covering.
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Apoorva Mandavilli
Today. I'm in Atlanta for the meeting of a very important committee. This is a vaccine committee that makes recommendations, essentially guidelines for all the shots that adults and children in America get. And this week it seems like they are about to make some very big changes.
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Tracy Mumford
My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli is covering the meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices today. She says the panel seems poised to make a major switch up involving a vaccine that's been recommended for all newborns in the US for decades, the Hepatitis B vaccine. It protects against the highly contagious disease that can severely damage the liver. And since babies began getting vaccinated in the early 90s, infection rates for kids dropped by 99%. But the committee now seems likely to decide the vaccine should be delayed or no longer offered to children at all, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Has cast doubt on whether it's necessary. Apoorva says they're also going to discuss the safety of some vaccine ingredients and whether combination shots that are commonly used now, like those for measles, mumps and rubella, should be scrapped in favor of individual shots.
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Apoorva Mandavilli
The committee doesn't make laws or rules, but the guidelines that they come up with are very important because they essentially determine whether insurance companies and government insurance programs will cover the shots. So what they decide could affect people's ability to afford these shots or even have access to them.
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More broadly, the public health experts that I talk to are concerned that this committee is really elevating some anti vaccine tropes that have been circulating for decades. The committee members were all hand picked by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Who has made many unfounded claims about vaccines over the years that they were not tested properly, that they are toxic to children's brains, that they cause conditions like autism. So beyond any decisions that this committee makes, just having these conversations in this very public format by this important committee gives these fringe theories linked legitimacy and that makes public health experts worry that it will further erode confidence in vaccines. And we'll start to see the return of some diseases we have not seen in a long time, including things like polio and measles, which we have already seen very big outbreaks of this year.
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Tracy Mumford
Today On Capitol Hill, two two U.S. military commanders are expected to face sharp questions about one of the US's deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean and whether it was a war crime. For months, the administration has been targeting boats it claims are carrying drugs, killing over 80 people so far. While many use of force, experts and lawmakers have criticized that overall campaign as illegal. Today the focus will be on one strike in particular.
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On September 2, a boat from Venezuela carrying 11 people appeared to turn around after spotting a US military aircraft tracking it. SEAL Team 6 operators then launched a strike on the vessel. After the smoke cleared, surveillance video showed two people still alive in the wreckage, according to officials. The Times talked with contingency plans approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for the military to try and rescue any survivors of boat strikes who appeared to be shipwrecked and not posing any threat. But the military intercepted communications of the survivors radioing suspected cartel members for help. Officials say the military interpreted that distress call as meaning the survivors were still in the fight and Admiral Frank Bradley, who was overseeing the operation, ordered a follow up strike that killed both people. Lawmakers are expected to scrutinize these details of the attack since the Pentagon's own laws of war prohibit firing on shipwrecked people who aren't actively fighting. There's also the question of who bears the ultimate responsibility for the second strike, Bradley, who ordered it, or Hegseth, who signed off on the lethal operation. More broadly, the Defense secretary who was watching the mission live on video said he, quote, didn't stick around for the second strike and denied he ordered it, but said Bradley made the right call.
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Meanwhile, after an eight month investigation, the Pentagon is set to release its report today on the Signalgate scandal. The Times got access to the document which found that back in March, Hegseth risked endangering U.S. troops when he discussed military operations in a group chat. Hegseth was using the app signal to talk with the Vice President, the Secretary of State and others about upcoming airstrikes in Yemen. The editor in chief of the Atlantic had been accidentally added to the chat. The internal report says Hegseth using the app could have endangered U. S personnel and missions if it had been disclosed to a foreign adversary. Investigators also said that not all of the messages were properly preserved in compliance with federal law and that Hegseth refused to sit down for an interview during the inquiry.
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At the White House yesterday.
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President Donald Trump
My administration has taken historic action to lower costs for American consumers, protect American auto jobs, and make buying a car much more affordable for countless American families and also safer.
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Tracy Mumford
President Trump moved to significantly weaken federal fuel efficiency standards, getting rid of a Biden era rule that had encouraged automakers to sell more efficient and more electric vehicles. It's the administration's latest move to gut policy aimed at addressing climate change and double down on gas powered cars. The White House claims the new rules will save consumers money by lowering manufacturing costs. Economists told the Times that could happen to some extent, but it would come at the expense of public health and the environment. Additionally, Trump's own tariff policies, along with inflation, have helped drive up the cost of many cars. As Trump announced the new lowered standards, he was flanked by top auto executives who publicly celebrated the changes in private, though, many have expressed concerns about the whiplash of changing federal policies, as during the Biden administration, they already spent billions of dollars pivoting to electric vehicles.
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Apoorva Mandavilli
Foreign.
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Tracy Mumford
Got some blood work results back showing hormone imbalances. She pasted her full medical report into Chat GPT to ask what the problem could be. The chatbot told her it was, quote, most likely related to a tumor that was wrong. But when a 63 year old man who'd been feeling some discomfort while exercising asked a chatbot for advice, he used the info that he got there to persuade his doctor to take a closer look at his heart, where they found a significant blockage they were able to fix with a stent. These kinds of mixed results are the reality for millions of people around the world who have started using chatbots for health advice. Considering the bot's well deserved reputation for getting all kinds of things wrong, experts are concerned about the potential for misinformation, people thinking they're dying when they're not, or thinking something's not serious when it might be. But there have been some perhaps unexpected benefits that people point to. One woman who has metastatic appendix cancer told the Times it's been helpful to get ChatGPT's immediate overview of her test results, especially when they're bad. She felt like she could process the devastating news before her doctor's visit and then use her time with the doctor more effectively if she wasn't falling apart at the appointment. The other big concern around this trend is privacy. Some people are uploading their whole medical histories to chatbots, which can include a ton of sensitive information. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT said it has extensive safeguards in place to protect private users information, but hipaa, the federal health privacy law in the US doesn't apply to companies that operate the bots. One professor who specializes in biomedical tech told the Times, quote, you're basically waiving any rights that you have with respect to medical privacy.
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And finally, there is a race on To Save Music History Come make me.
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President Donald Trump
Find me.
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Come baby, remind me A.
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Tracy Mumford
Lot of artists studio recordings were originally captured on magnetic tapes, which are now decaying. And the times followed how one man in New Jersey, Kelly Pribble, has been at the forefront of audio restoration, working to save unique recordings from icons like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
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All analog recordings get more and more fragile over time, but some of the most vulnerable recordings are from the 70s and 80s, when changes in manufacturing introduced problems that have only become obvious over time. Pribble has his own glossary for how to describe those problems, everything from loss of lubricant syndrome to adhesion syndrome, where spools of tape get fused together into a huge solid chunk. And he's been patenting various Rube Goldberg esque techniques to save them, using products that you'd usually find in a waxing salon, for example, or drying out wet tape on a hand built rack of carefully angled hair dryers. One audio expert at the Library of Congress said Pribble is known as the Magician. He salvaged tapes from hundreds of artists, but the work is expensive. One record executive whose company owns a huge catalog of old recordings said it would cost millions of dollars to process and preserve all of their old tapes. So it becomes a difficult question of what can and should be saved. Adria Petty, the daughter of the music legend Tom Petty, told the Times she still gets calls from people who've dug up a new batch of rehearsal tapes or studio sessions that her dad played on. And then she's got to choose what to do about it. How fragile is history? She asked and said, quote, everything should be transferred, right? But at what cost?
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Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday News quiz.
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Podcast Sponsor Announcer
This podcast is supported by Doctors Without Borders. Around the world, the need for humanitarian aid is rising. Doctors Without Borders is working around the clock to meet this moment, but they can't do it without your Support. In over 75 countries, medical teams are responding to natural disasters, caring for patients in war zones, helping stop disease outbreaks, and more. This giving Tuesday, you can make a life saving impact. Donate today at doctorswithoutborders.org headlines.