TV News LIES

To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it "conducts critical science and provides health information" to protect the nation. But since President Trump's administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found.

Many of the CDC's newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC's Health Alert Network, haven't been dispatched since March. The agency's main social media channels have come under new ownership of the Department of Health and Human Services, emails reviewed by NPR show, and most have gone more than a month without posting their own new content.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Tuesday that it will limit access to seasonal Covid-19 boosters for healthy Americans under 65 without clear evidence of clinical benefit – a shift, critics say, that will make access difficult for people who are not high risk but want to be vaccinated against the disease.

Top officials at the FDA outlined a new framework for approving Covid-19 vaccines, saying that the US would make the boosters available for Americans over the age of 65 and for adults and children above the age of 6 months with at least one condition that increases their risk of severe Covid-19.

The newly installed FDA commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, the controversial director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, laid out the new guidelines in a commentary piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

More...

Wait, aren't "clean" rooms supposed to be, well, "clean" of germs and other pesky microscopic particles?

Maybe not: A new study reports 26 new bacterial species were found growing inside cleanrooms associated with NASA space missions. Specifically, scientists looked in the cleanrooms used to prepare the Phoenix Mars lander for its launch in August 2007.

In the study, scientists analyzed microorganisms growing in the NASA cleanrooms and discovered many of the new species had genes that made them resilient to decontamination and radiation.

"We are unraveling the mysteries of microbes that withstand the extreme conditions of space – organisms with the potential to revolutionize the life sciences, bioengineering, and interplanetary exploration," Kasthuri Venkateswaran, retired senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a lead author of the study, said in a statement.

More...