Parents in north London have been told their children could be excluded from school if they are not fully vaccinated against measles amid an outbreak of the highly-contagious disease. Unvaccinated pupils identified as close contacts of people with measles could be excluded for 21 days in accordance with national guidelines, Enfield Council said in a letter to all parents in the borough in late January. At least 34 children have contracted measles in Enfield so far this year, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said, and a number sent to hospital. A local health chief meanwhile told the BBC: We are worried because actually, this is a significantly increased number than what we're used to. Asking unvaccinated, close contacts of measles cases to stay off school is fairly standard practice when there are local outbreaks.

How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire--and a political force. Trust in American mass media has plummeted; more than three thousand newspapers have disappeared in the past two decades, and many people get their news from social platforms. In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a figure of singular influence. For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives--for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon. On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."

Among those Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently named to a federal autism committee are people who tout dangerous treatments and say vaccine manufacturers are "poisoning children." US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filled an autism committee with friends, associates, and former colleagues who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. Autism advocates are now worried the group could pave the way for dangerous pseudoscientific treatments going mainstream. Last week, Kennedy announced an entirely new lineup for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that recommends what types of autism research the government should fund and provides guidance on the services the autism community requires. The group is typically composed of experts in the area of autism research, along with policy experts and autistic people advocating for their own community.

Experts worry it will be used to further Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine agenda. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda.

Experts worry Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Health Department will use an internal AI tool to analyze vaccine injury claims in a way that furthers his anti-vaccine agenda. The US Department of Health and Human Services is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kenedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

RFK's Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks Kennedy has stacked another HHS panel with his fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism "by September." That didn't pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again--by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to "innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention" with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy's allies in the anti-vaccine movement.

Somber-faced Timothy Busfield appears in court for child sex abuse case as he's denied bail White House responds to Joe Rogan's warning that ICE behavior in Minneapolis resembles Hitler's Gestapo Shameless Gwyneth Paltrow, 53, pushes'miracle' $150 Goop serum... but plastic surgeon suggests she's neglected to mention a far more invasive secret behind her taut face and'TILTED' eyes Shocking truth about Minneapolis woman dragged from car by ICE while screaming that she was on her way to a doctor's appointment German troops'to touch down in Greenland in a matter of hours' as Danish leader says country is still stuck in a'fundamental disagreement' with the US over the island after'frank' meeting Benny Blanco fans left swooning after photo shows him with straight hair: 'Holy smokes' My night at America's'scariest' McDonald's that is so dangerous it does not even have a DOOR, with frightened locals renaming it'McStabby's' Progressive Portland Rep. squirms when asked about inflammatory statement she made after shooting of suspected Tren de Aragua gangsters Euphoria fans shocked over Sydney Sweeney's racy OnlyFans move: 'She's been oversexualized' Kiefer Sutherland told rideshare driver to pull over or'I'll kill you' before alleged assault in Hollywood MAGA goes wild for new scene in Landman with Glen Powell's glamorous love Michelle Randolph Six-year-old girl left all alone after ICE takes her dad away while he picked up dinner delivery: 'Where's papi?' Chicago's ultra-woke teachers' union makes glaring spelling error on flyer calling for'ultra wealthy to fund our schools' LeBron James distances himself from Rich Paul after agent pushed for Lakers to trade his client's teammates I was silenced for exposing Covid vaccine injuries in 2021... now the truth has finally come out A researcher who says she discovered that Covid vaccines could seriously injure the heart claims she was silenced during the pandemic, only to be vindicated more than four years later. Dr Jessica Rose, a Canadian researcher and expert in immunology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, said her 2021 study exposing a connection between Covid vaccines and myocarditis was mysteriously withdrawn just three weeks after it was published by the journal Current Problems in Cardiology without explanation. Myocarditis is a dangerous inflammation of the heart that can cause chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, irregular heartbeat, and swelling in the legs. In severe cases, it can lead to heart failure, blood clots, stroke, or sudden death. Using information from a government-run database to track vaccine side effects, Rose found a significant increase in heart damage weeks after people received the Covid vaccine.

As we look back on 2025, the world experienced a year of both remarkable achievement and profound challenge in global health. Multilateralism, science and solidarity were tested as never before, underscoring a fundamental truth: International cooperation is not optional. It is essential if we are to protect and promote health for everyone, everywhere in 2026 and beyond. Perhaps the most significant milestone was the adoption by WHO Member States of the Pandemic Agreement, a landmark step towards making the world safer from future pandemics. Alongside this, amendments to the International Health Regulations came into force, including a new "pandemic emergency" alert level designed to trigger stronger global cooperation.

The new paradigm of fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a new attack surface for Large Language Models (LLMs): a few harmful data uploaded by users can easily trick the fine-tuning to produce an alignment-broken model. We conduct an empirical analysis and uncovera \textit{harmful embedding drift} phenomenon, showing a probable cause of the alignment-broken effect. Inspired by our findings, we propose Vaccine, a perturbation-aware alignment technique to mitigate the security risk of users fine-tuning. The core idea of Vaccine is to produce invariant hidden embeddings by progressively adding crafted perturbation to them in the alignment phase. This enables the embeddings to withstand harmful perturbation from un-sanitized user data in the fine-tuning phase. Our results on open source mainstream LLMs (e.g., Llama2, Opt, Vicuna) demonstrate that Vaccine can boost the robustness of alignment against harmful prompts induced embedding drift while reserving reasoning ability towards benign prompts.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to bring up various topics discussed or debated on social media. In order to explore the impact of pandemics on people's lives, it is crucial to understand the public's concerns and attitudes towards pandemic-related entities (e.g., drugs, vaccines) on social media. However, models trained on existing named entity recognition (NER) or targeted sentiment analysis (TSA) datasets have limited ability to understand COVID-19-related social media texts because these datasets are not designed or annotated from a medical perspective. In this paper, we release METS-CoV, a dataset containing medical entities and targeted sentiments from COVID-19 related tweets. METS-CoV contains 10,000 tweets with 7 types of entities, including 4 medical entity types (Disease, Drug, Symptom, and Vaccine) and 3 general entity types (Person, Location, and Organization). To further investigate tweet users' attitudes toward specific entities, 4 types of entities (Person, Organization, Drug, and Vaccine) are selected and annotated with user sentiments, resulting in a targeted sentiment dataset with 9,101 entities (in 5,278 tweets). To the best of our knowledge, METS-CoV is the first dataset to collect medical entities and corresponding sentiments of COVID-19 related tweets.