The party is hoping they can integrate the public health message with grassroots concern, but leave behind conspiracy theories

Chellie Pingree remembers when she moved to Maine as a teenager in the 1970s – she was one “hippie” among thousands in the back-to-the-land movement, when baby boomers fled to the sticks to revitalize small organic farms.

Today, she’s a Democratic US Representative for Maine, but still knee-deep in the organic movement. And she’s starting to see a lot of new faces – many pulled in by the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement, largely led by the Trump administration’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Sharon Jacks, 74, alleges hospital removed left leg instead of her right during below-the-knee amputation in 2025

An Ohio woman is suing a hospital after doctors allegedly amputated the wrong leg during a scheduled operation last year.

Sharon Jacks, 74, of Meigs county, alleged that she went to Selby general hospital in September 2025 to undergo a planned below-the-knee amputation of her right leg. Instead doctors removed her left leg during the procedure, according to the lawsuit, which was filed earlier this month in Washington county court in Marietta, where the hospital is based.

The president’s empty advice that children should receive separate jabs against measles, mumps and rubella will only lead to less take-up by parents

Nobody wants to hurt a child. The howl of pain, the tears, the look of betrayed shock all make it very hard to deliver a cherished small person to the needle-wielding nurse. But that’s part of being a responsible parent. It becomes a lot tougher if mum or dad is being fed mixed and erroneous messages about the benefits and harms of vaccination.

Parents have to make a lot of decisions about what’s right for their child, from the school they should go to and the food they should eat to the hours they should spend on the phone or watching TV. In the US, Donald Trump wants them to add another: do they choose to give their children separate jabs against measles, mumps and rubella, involving six visits to the clinic, or should they opt for the combined MMR vaccine, which does the job in two? For decades, the vast majority of families have been taking the advice of doctors, accepting their assurance that the MMR vaccine is safe and very effective. But what are they to think when a US president announces that the triple jab could be “quite lethal” and signs an executive order advising states to offer separate vaccines?

New findings further call into question scientific judgment of current health leaders in the Trump administration

A French researcher whose work was praised by Donald Trump and Dr Mehmet Oz during the Covid-19 pandemic published hundreds of papers with “substantial” ethical and legal concerns, according to a new analysis.

An international team of scientists found concerns in 853 articles published by the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, or the IHU, hundreds more than previously flagged by past investigations into work at the large research hospital. Of those, institute founder Didier Raoult was listed as co-author on 758 of them, according to one of the researchers behind the new analysis.

Poll after poll shows the same thing. The American people know that the current economic system is rigged

The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated.

Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.

US president credits himself with lowest drug prices in 60 years, when article says drop is more likely due to Biden

The White House flooded social media on Saturday with an image of Donald Trump showing off the recent Washington Post headline “Prescription drug prices record sharpest drop in more than 60 years”, but failed to mention that experts cited in the article actually attributed the price drop to Joe Biden, not Trump.

On its official accounts, the White House triumphantly captioned the photograph of Trump: “POV: you bring the receipts.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also shared it.

Plea comes weeks before separate case is scheduled to start in New York, and could throw proceedings into disarray

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty on Friday in a federal case in relation to the killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in 2024.

Mangione confessed that he shot and killed Thompson outside a New York City hotel on 4 December 2024. In his federal case, he faced stalking charges, after other charges, including murder, were dropped.

This live blog is now closed.

• Progressive Peggy Flanagan sweeps Minnesota Senate primary in race defined by anti-ICE anger

• Sign up to the US Breaking News email

Pete Hegseth’s appointments to a key Pentagon advisory body include two men with ties to the venture capital fund where Donald Trump Jr is a partner, which has lucrative investments in military and space technology.

Defense Policy Board appointee Marc Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms and known by the name “a16z”, co-invests alongside the Trump partnership 1789 Capital in three defense contractors. Fellow DPB appointee Blake Masters also sits on the boards of three ventures tied to 1789 Capital.

South Carolina – 7pm ET

Vermont – 7pm ET

Alabama – 7pm local/8pm ET

Connecticut – 8pm ET

Minnesota – 8pm local/9pm ET

Wisconsin – 8pm local/9pm ET

President and RFK Jr, the health secretary, repeatedly referred to autism during signing, though studies show no link between it and vaccines

Donald Trump has signed an executive order with plans for sweeping changes to the childhood vaccination schedule that attempts to override the authority of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It is an attempt to undergird the changes made earlier this year to CDC vaccination recommendations, which were halted by a federal judge. The CDC is the federal agency tasked with recommending vaccines, not the White House.

AI’s danger isn’t just in experts losing the ability to reason. It’s that trainees may never learn how to do so in the first place

In healthcare, there’s growing concern over doctors becoming less clinically adept as they increasingly rely on AI tools. But what about the trainees – medical students, residents and fellows – who are using these tools before they’ve built their own clinical judgment? The idea of deskilling implies that someone possessed an ability and then lost it. Here, the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling. Although a doctor who has forgotten how to reason is recoverable, one who never learned how may not be.

OpenEvidence, essentially an AI chatbot for clinicians, has given this concern its most concrete form. About two-thirds of US doctors actively use OpenEvidence, asking about puzzling symptoms, drug interactions, and clinical guidelines, getting responses within seconds, anchored in the latest research. Trainees, unsurprisingly, have also begun to use this AI tool in many of the same ways – but at a far more formative stage.

The predictions market is planning to allow betting on clinical trial results and regulatory decisions as our family fights for his survival

My son is 12 years old. No matter how many Legos we get him, he will only build robotic mechs. He draws haunting pictures in pen and ink but refuses to take an art class. He was devastated to learn that Chuck E Cheese is phasing out its animatronics. His guidance counselor says he’s so kind, he’s really hard to say no to. He sneezes when he steps out into the sunlight. And he also has a very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.

Further, if Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival.

Joshua Pederson is professor of humanities at Boston University and the author of Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature

Health secretary, longtime vaccination skeptic, spent years boosting misinformation about vaccines including MMR

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, on Sunday told American parents that they should get their children vaccinated against measles, as the surge in infections has reached numbers not seen in the past 35 years.

Kennedy, a leading vaccination skeptic who has spent years amplifying misinformation about vaccines, including the shot that protects against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), made his call in the course of a contentious interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning.

Americans are dying younger than Europeans, despite being the wealthiest people on the planet. Wellness fads won’t change that

I’m just back from my home country, the United States. I always enjoy visiting, but every time I go between the US and my adopted home of Europe, I’m keenly aware of disparity in health: Americans live much shorter lives and spend more of their lifetime in poor health. This is despite Americans earning some of the highest salaries per capita in the world and spending twice as much as comparable countries on healthcare.

A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine of 74,000 adults found that even the wealthiest Americans had higher mortality rates than the wealthiest Europeans – and that the richest Americans had mortality rates comparable to the poorest residents of northern and western Europe. Across every wealth category, Americans were more likely to die younger than Europeans, suggesting that even wealth doesn’t insulate from larger factors that impact life expectancy.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

Adviser to Trump and Biden for pandemic says Republican senator has ‘unhinged obsession’ with him

• US politics – live updates

Dr Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions at a high-profile Senate committee hearing on the origins of Covid-19 and accused the Republican senator leading questioning of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.

Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic. The hearing was called by Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who has investigated Fauci for years.

Both restaurant work and medicine involve abusive training and relentless devotion to minutiae – and the joy of offering comfort

I pass a mother heaving in grief while her son’s heart monitors flatline. It is the last time she will ever hold his hand. For me, this is another day on call in the intensive care unit as a pediatric physician. For her, this is the day her life shatters.

Later that night, a striking, charismatic surgeon from work treats me to an exquisite meal. Served outside a trailer, humidity barreling through our scrubs, the food is neither extravagant nor decadent. It is, however, the most succulent Texas barbecue brisket I will ever taste. This is the night I rest my head on his shoulder and he doesn’t flinch. This is the night an “us” was born.

The latest milestone, a recorded 2,318 infections, makes 2026 the worst year for measles in the US since 1991

The US has officially surpassed last year’s record number of measles infections, marking the highest case count since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000.

New figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Friday show the country has recorded 2,318 measles cases in 2026, overtaking the 2,289 cases reported during all of 2025 – with five months still remaining in the year. The country crossed the 2,000-case threshold last month before climbing even higher in July.

Researchers tracked mother-child pairs for up to 11 years, finding Pfas mixtures may affect developing guts

Prenatal and early life exposure to Pfas mixtures is probably linked to higher levels of intestinal inflammation in children, new first-of-its-kind research shows. Intestinal inflammation can cause irritable bowel diseases, like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and colorectal cancer.

While Pfas has been linked to irritable bowel disease and intestinal inflammation in adults, the new peer-reviewed Mt Sinai study is the first to look at how the chemicals impact children during a critical developmental phase.

Vote from advisory group – whose members include people linked to peptides industry – likely to embolden RFK Jr

A panel of federal health advisers on Thursday narrowly recommended easing access to several peptides popular with wellness influencers and celebrities, despite warnings from government scientists that the chemicals have not been shown to be safe or effective.

In a series of votes, outside experts to the Food and Drug Administration advised the agency to drop current restrictions barring pharmacies from producing injectable peptides with names like BPC-157, TB-500 and KPV.

US health officials say source of Upper East Side cluster has likely been eliminated after 76 people fell ill

An outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in New York City has claimed a fourth life, officials have said, as they again expressed confidence the source of the exposure had been eliminated.

A statement from the city’s health department on Monday said the outbreak, which was traced to cooling towers in buildings in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had sickened 76 people – with 53 discharged after hospital treatment, and 12 others managing their recovery at home.

Authorities said inquiry into cyclosporiasis outbreak was continuing but early results pointed to salad greens and lettuce

• What is cyclosporiasis, the parasitic illness causing ‘explosive’ diarrhea?

State health officials in Michigan said on Monday they have identified lettuces and salad greens as a “potential source” of the thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis – a parasitic infection that causes “watery diarrhea”, loss of appetite and weight loss.

In a statement, the Michigan department of health and human services said the investigation is still continuing, but early results “point to lettuce or salad greens as a potential source for this outbreak”, though officials also cautioned it is too early to rule out other food sources.