Food and Drug Administration advisers on Thursday recommended updating next season's COVID vaccines to target the dominant XFG variant, despite concerns about a shortage of surveillance data on evolving strains.
The big picture: The daylong meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee stood out for its measured tone after more than a year of dramatic changes to federal vaccine policy under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Data: Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health; Map: Sami Sparber/Axios; Editor's note: This chart was corrected to show that West Virginia earned a B grade (not a C).
The U.S. earned a C overall on maternal mental health care in 2026 — up from a C- last year — according to a new report from the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.
Why it matters: About one in five U.S. moms experience maternity-related mental health conditions like postpartum depression, and most don't get the treatment they need.
Americans exposed to Ebola in Africa will quarantine in Kenya and be moved to treatment facilities in Europe if they test positive, senior Trump administration officials said on Thursday.
Why it matters: The administration's plan to keep affected Americans from returning to the U.S. has angered some public health experts, who say there already are specialized facilities stateside to treat them.
Decades of failures by both political parties left the U.S. strategically vulnerable, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will argue in a speech Friday, and the Trump administration is focused on turning the tide.
Driving the news: Bessent's talk, titled "While America Slept," which invokes U.S. strategic failures before World War II, will argue that this has been an era of dangerous complacency and the deterioration of U.S. manufacturing strength, a Treasury official tells Axios.
A Trump administration plan to overhaul wage levels for visa holders is jolting hospitals and long-term care facilities that are heavily reliant on foreign-born workers.
Why it matters: It's the latest immigration-related policy change to loom over the health care workforce, coming after President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee and the suspension of certain immigrants' work authorization renewals.
Large numbers of children are dropping off the Medicaid rolls, even though the sweeping changes Congress made to the program last summer didn't target kids' eligibility.
Why it matters: The trend indicates that new Medicaid work rules and nearly $1 trillion in cuts to federal program spending are having spillover effects before they're broadly implemented.
