It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone.

So as regular listeners to this show know, we've been doing a health and climate section of the show on Tuesdays all this year.

Our premise is that with the blizzard of so much news about everything all at once, all year,

these topics, important as they are, risk getting lost in the shuffle. And I think this week is a

perfect case and point. We've had the surprising Trump-Mamdani meeting,

Audrey Taylor Green announcing her resignation from Congress, the real or fake peace plan for Russia's

war in Ukraine, the Epstein files bill, negotiations to avoid the Obamacare insurance premium

spike at the end of the year, the Jim Comey, Letitia James, and El Mar Kelly, Trump

investigations, Deep Breath.

So with all of that, you may have missed several pieces of striking RFK Jr. related health policy

news. One, the Centers for Disease Control has removed the statement on its website that vaccines do not cause autism

and replaced it with language claiming that's an open question. To cite NPR's reporting on this,

quote, the change comes even though a connection between vaccines and autism has long been debunked

by a large body of high-quality research. But health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been debunked by a large body of high-quality research.

But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long promoted the discredited claim.

The CDC's change is alarming public health experts.

They are already worried about a drop in childhood vaccination, which has led to a resurgence

of dangerous childhood diseases like measles and woping cough.

So there's that from NPR.

And there's the RFK Jr. aspect of the heartbreaking news that maybe you've heard that Tatiana Schlossberg,

daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy,

at the age of 35, has terminal cancer, specifically leukemia.

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