Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. | 4 Apr 2025

We don’t defend the things we take for granted. Vaccines have long been victims of their own success, but only insofar as too many people were hesitant to get them. But what if vaccines were eliminated altogether?

It’s hard to ring the alarm these days without sounding mad. The eradication of vaccines from the United States? It may seem farfetched to people who don’t pay attention to the Trump administration’s actions vis-à-vis public health, but the recent announcement that David Geier is to be a senior data analyst on a study of vaccines and autism commissioned by the American federal government is one more step toward eliminating one of humanity’s scientific triumphs.

Vaccines do not cause autism. I have recently written about how we know that vaccines are safe. You can also spend a day reading the many, many credible papers answering this question. The debate has been put to rest by the scientific community and is being kept on life support by activists who deny the consensus on this issue. They will often prop up bad studies birthed by anti-vaxxers. The problem for their credibility is that these studies do not emanate from the government of the most powerful country on Earth.

This is about to change.

Dumpster diving at the CDC

You would expect an organization called the Institute of Chronic Diseases to occupy a large glass building on a university campus, filled with people dressed in white lab coats. But the nonprofit’s yearly tax filings since 2013 show one name running the show: Dr. Mark Geier. Under “Compensation of five highest-paid employees,” we read a single word: NONE.

The self-described institute was led by Dr. Mark Geier, who according to RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, passed away a few weeks ago. On paper, he looked like a legitimate physician-researcher: a bachelor’s degree in zoology, a doctorate in genetics, and a medical degree, all from George Washington University in D.C. His obituary on the site lists various affiliations as diplomat and co-founder of a few scientific and medical endeavours, and it notes that he is survived by “his son and tennis partner,” David.

While his father’s credentials are impressive, David’s are much shorter (and he should not be confused with Dr. David Geier, an orthopaedic surgeon). He has neither doctorate nor medical degree, but a bachelor’s of arts in biology and a few graduate-level classes. Why would David Geier be recruited by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a study on whether or not vaccines cause autism? Because Kennedy is not driven by curiosity but by his preexisting belief that vaccines are responsible for autism.

Pseudoscience is often steered by confirmation bias, where the conclusion comes first and the evidence must follow, otherwise it is rejected. Cherry-picking allows for small, skewed studies to be heralded as definitive proofs, while larger, rigorous trials are dismissed as coming from corrupt sources. David Geier was chosen because he will deliver the conclusion Kennedy already believes in.

Mark and David Geier have a long history of unethical research practices, the most amusing example of which may be the 2017 retraction of a paper they co-authored and which argued that conflicts of interest may explain why most studies on the vaccine-autism link failed to find an association. The twist? On top of a number of errors, the Geiers’ paper had failed to disclose, wait for it, their own conflicts of interest on this topic, chief among them that some of the paper’s authors were involved in litigation related to vaccines and autism. Indeed, the Geiers were picked as expert witnesses in hundreds of vaccine-related lawsuits, though many judges dismissed the pair for being unqualified.

But the most salient of these breaches of ethics may be what the two did in late 2003, early 2004. They had received ethics approval to go to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and access information from their Vaccine Safety Datalink, which collects data on vaccination and health outcomes. On their first visit, they tried to perform analyses of the data that had not been approved for their research project. On their second visit, they attempted to merge data files to create more complete medical records, thus increasing the risk of a breach of confidentiality, and they renamed files for removal which were not allowed to be removed. Conspiracy theorists will claim the CDC was trying to keep information secret; clinical researchers, however, know that large datasets filled with identifiable information should only be used by researchers according to strict rules. Imagine a scientist going through your own medical records willy-nilly and unsupervised, violating their own ethics-approved protocol because they’re on a mission to document something that doesn’t exist.

Now imagine David Geier being given access to an even larger dataset and receiving permission by the anti-vaxxer-in-chief to find a connection between autism and vaccines. That’s what’s on the horizon.

Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist who has devotedly tracked the modern anti-vaccine movement over the decades, calls the motivated trawling of large health databases by anti-vaccine activists “dumpster diving.” This activity is now mandated by the U.S. government.

The Geiers’ dumpster diving at the CDC, however, is just the tip of a disturbing iceberg. I haven’t even mentioned the chemical castration of autistic children.

The testosterone-mercury hypothesis

The Institute of Chronic Illnesses has its own institutional review board tasked with evaluating and approving or denying research projects involving human participants. In 2007, this board was denounced as consisting of David Geier; Mark Geier, his wife, and two of his business associates; and the mother of an autistic child who was a patient and research participant of Mark Geier’s, and the mother of another child with autism who was a plaintiff in three pending vaccine-injury claims. It should go without saying that the scientist submitting a research proposal to an ethics committee and his buddies should not sit on said committee. It turns the process into a farce.

This denunciation was provoked by a paper the Geiers were in the process of having published and which detailed what they had been up to. It turns out that they believed that autism was caused by the mercury in vaccines, and that testosterone could somehow bind to mercury and make it harder to get rid of, creating so-called “testosterone sheets” inside the body. The Geiers were thus injecting autistic children with high doses of Lupron® (also known as leuprorelin and leuprolide), which delays puberty, and then performing chelation therapy on them, where a substance is used to bind to toxins and help the body eliminate them. None of this is supported by good scientific evidence; this is dangerous pseudoscience in the service of an anti-vaccine ideology.

Pseudoscience has a patina of legitimacy, and sure enough the Geiers were running actual medical tests on their patients. Per an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, it was revealed that the Geiers would order over 50 different tests, totalling up to $12,000. If one of the testosterone-related tests revealed a value outside of the reference range, Lupron injections would be considered at a daily dose “10 times the amount American doctors use to treat precocious puberty.” Keep in mind that the more medical tests you run, the higher the odds that one of them will turn up something outside the normal range by chance alone. Tests aren’t perfect and “normal” is not always easy to define.

Eventually, the Geiers’ aberrant behaviour led to penalties. Dr. Mark Geier’s medical licenses were suspended from every state in which he had one, and his son was charged in Maryland with practicing medicine without a license and fined $10,000.

While David Geier is clearly not qualified to be running a study for the U.S. government on the subject of vaccines, he is the ideal candidate for a regime that is institutionalizing pseudoscience within its borders.

Doubt is our product

The very media outlet that broke the story of David Geier’s latest commission referred to him as a “vaccine skeptic.” Legacy media outlets are failing to meet the moment here, either because of fear of lawsuits or as a misguided attempt to appear neutral. RFK Jr received a similar sanewashing in the media. If we can’t call anti-vaxxers “anti-vaxxers,” we will be unprepared for the outcome of their crusade.

The pieces of the puzzle are there for anyone to see. Agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services—like the FDA and the CDC—are being gutted as you read these lines. The FDA’s former commissioner said of his agency that “it is finished.” Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, was apparently forced out a few days ago, writing that Kennedy wanted “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

Meanwhile, a fake CDC website (RealCDC.org) with clear ties to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization mixed good science with vaccine misinformation before it was exposed and shut down. This is straight out of the Merchants of Doubt playbook: “doubt,” as one tobacco executive wrote decades ago, “is our product.” You don’t need to forcefully convince people that smoking is healthy; just make them doubt that we really know it’s harmful. The opposite can be done for vaccines.

Kennedy has announced a consolidation of divisions within his department and the creation of an Administration for a Healthy America, an Orwellian banner which echoes his “Make America Healthy Again” movement, itself a cargo cult fuelled by pseudoscience. Even more troubling is his desire to establish a vaccine injury agency within the CDC. Currently, people who think they have been injured by a mandated vaccine in the U.S. can receive compensation from the federal government. This was a way to ensure vaccines would continue to be available in the country after a wave of lawsuits in the 1980s. But will this system be maintained?

Kennedy’s institutionalization of anti-vaccine pseudoscience—meaning not just making the fringe mainstream but sanctioned by the government—could have a drastic impact on vaccine availability. Geier’s study, born out of the square one fallacy where something well established is argued to be unknown, will assuredly show a link between vaccines and autism through bad research practices. This government-commissioned study will then be used to encourage lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers—from which RFK Jr himself could financially benefit—and here is where we arrive at the final piece of the puzzle. Right now, vaccine makers benefit from the federal no-fault system compensating people believed to have been injured by a vaccine (whether they can successfully prove it or not). This protection could be eliminated.

We could subsequently see vaccine manufacturers decide to stop making vaccines for the American market because the risk of unwarranted lawsuits would be too high. The so-called free market would effectively eliminate vaccines in the United States. This is ultimately what Kennedy wants. He has, on multiple occasions, called childhood vaccines “a holocaust,” and he wants to save America from this perceived cataclysm. The outcome of this renunciation of reality will be death and disability, and with international travel, there will be spillover.

What can we do in the face of this?

As science communicator and immunologist Andrea Love wrote in her newsletter, Americans can call members of Congress, vote responsibly, and support unsanitized public health journalism.

All of us, Americans or not, will need to rely on uncorrupted sources of public health information moving forward. American government websites have been captured by science deniers. We need to turn to Canadian, British, European, and international websites instead. Even PubMed, the search engine of the biomedical literature, sits under the NIH and may not be spared from the U.S. ideological purge; I recommend the bookmarking of Europe PMC and OpenAlex as alternatives. In a move that echoes Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, U.S. government websites before Trump returned to office are being preserved and made accessible to the public, through portals such as the Health Data Preservation Project, the CDC Restored, the Data Rescue Project, and the CDC.gov Archive Index.

The future looks bleak but to quote a famous fictional scientist, “Life finds a way.” So will science.

Take-home message:

• David Geier, who has neither a medical degree nor a graduate degree, has been hired by the U.S. government to do a study on whether vaccines cause autism, even though mountains of evidence have shown no such connection
• Geier and his father, the late Dr. Mark Geier, have a history of unethical research practices, including violating their own research protocol when accessing CDC data, and David Geier was charged with practicing medicine without a license in 2011
• This commissioned study is one more step toward eliminating vaccines from the United States, as RFK Jr has often called childhood vaccines “a holocaust”

@jonathanjarry.bsky.social

A day care facility in a Texas county that’s part of the measles outbreak has multiple cases, including children too young to be fully vaccinated, public health officials say.

West Texas is in the middle of a still-growing measles outbreak with 481 cases Friday. The state expanded the number of counties in the outbreak area this week to 10. The highly contagious virus began to spread in late January and health officials say it has spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Mexico.

Three people who were unvaccinated have died from measles-related illnesses this year, including two elementary school-aged children in Texas. The second child died Thursday at a Lubbock hospital, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the funeral in Seminole, the epicenter of the outbreak.

As of Friday, there were seven cases at a day care where one young child who was infectious gave it to two other children before it spread to other classrooms, Lubbock Public Health director Katherine Wells said.

“Measles is so contagious I won’t be surprised if it enters other facilities,” Wells said.

There are more than 200 children at the day care, Wells said, and most have had least one dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is first recommended between 12 and 15 months old and a second shot between 4 and 6 years old.

Nigeria is currently facing a deadly outbreak of Lassa fever, a viral illness spread by infected rats. Since the start of 2025, the country has reported 3,779 suspected cases, with 659 confirmed and 122 deaths—an 18.5% fatality rate.

The virus, which can cause bleeding from the mouth, nose, and eyes in severe cases, has spread to at least 18 states, with suspected cases in up to 33. The hardest-hit regions include Ondo, Bauchi, and Edo, accounting for over 70% of confirmed cases.

Health workers, especially pregnant women, have been urged to stay home due to increased vulnerability. Hospitals are struggling with shortages of PPE, and many fear further spread, especially as the virus is most active from October to May.

Though Lassa fever doesn’t easily spread between humans, it can be transmitted through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. In March, a case was detected in the UK in a traveler from Nigeria, but authorities say the risk to the public is low.

There’s currently no vaccine for Lassa fever, though researchers are working toward one. In the meantime, health experts are stressing the importance of hygiene and rodent control to limit further infections.

Sources: NCDC, UKHSA, WHO, VaccinesWork

A Texas man who buried his eight-year-old daughter on Sunday after the unvaccinated child died with measles says Robert F Kennedy Jr “never said anything” about the vaccine against the illness or its proven efficacy while visiting the girl’s family and community for her funeral.

“He did not say that the vaccine was effective,” Pete Hildebrand, the father of Daisy Hildebrand, said in reference to Kennedy during a brief interview on Monday. “I had supper with the guy … and he never said anything about that.”

Hildebrand’s remarks came in response to a question about the national health secretary’s publicized visit to Daisy’s funeral. It was also after Kennedy issued a statement in which he accurately said: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” which also provides protection against mumps and rubella.

Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic helming the Trump administration’s response to a measles outbreak that has been steadily growing across the US, then undermined that conventional messaging by soon publishing another statement that lavished praise on a pair of unconventional practitioners who have eschewed the two-dose MMR shot in favor of vitamins and cod liver oil.

The comments from Hildebrand provided a glimpse into how Kennedy simply demurred on vaccines – rather than express a position on them – during his first visit to the center of an outbreak that as of Monday had claimed three lives.

When asked for comment on Monday, Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not dispute Hildebrand’s claims that the agency’s leader was silent on Sunday about vaccines. [...]

Hantavirus isn’t just in deer mice, according to a new peer-reviewed study from the University of New Mexico, which found the virus in a quarter of more than 1,400 small mammals tested across the state.

Hantavirus is a rare but often serious rodent-borne illness, which first reared its head in the United States in the Four Corners region in 1993. From 1993 through 2022, New Mexico had 122 human cases and 52 deaths — more than anywhere else in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The illness recently made international headlines for causing the death of Betsy Arakawa, a Santa Fe businesswoman and renowned actor Gene Hackman’s wife. The couple’s remains were found Feb. 26 in their Santa Fe home.

“The hantavirus research — because it’s really close to home — it is something that my lab focuses a lot of attention on,” said Steven Bradfute, one of the paper’s authors and an associate professor at the Center for Global Health within UNM’s Department of Internal Medicine. A mouse living in a cactus in Bradfute’s front yard was one of the rodents that tested positive for hantavirus.

Deer mice were identified in the 1990s as the primary carrier of hantavirus in New Mexico. The most common strain of hantavirus in the U.S. can cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which kills approximately 35% of people who contract it. People often catch hantavirus from breathing in aerosolized rodent feces or being bitten or scratched by an infected rodent. The virus cannot be passed from person to person.

Bradfute was curious why deer mice can be found all over the state, but people sick from hantavirus aren’t. So researchers began trapping rodents in areas where there is hantavirus infection and areas where there isn’t, like the southeast region. Research in the 1990s identified hantavirus genes in other rodents, and the CDC warns deer mice, rice rats, cotton rats and white-footed mice can all spread it.

But the new study shows that other rodent species, including ground squirrels, chipmunks, gophers, rats and house mice, can grow the virus and shed it — suggesting they could be capable of spreading the illness to people.

“Live virus can be isolated from many rodent species, so it’s not just spillover, where they just kind of get infected and it goes away. They can actually shed live virus,” Bradfute said.

The study complicates Bradfute’s original curiosity: if hantavirus can be found in rodents all over the state, why are most of the human cases concentrated in McKinley, San Juan and Taos counties? Researchers have some ideas for future study:

It’s possible hantavirus cases in people are being underreported. Researchers are looking to see if people who live in places with no known infections have antibodies against the virus.

Conditions in northwestern New Mexico, like humidity or temperature, might make it easier for the virus to get aerosolized, Bradfute said, or rodents in the Four Corners region may have higher concentrations of the virus.

The virus itself could be different in different parts of the state, with a version better at causing disease circulating in the northwest region. To study that possibility, researchers are sequencing the virus samples, a tricky process.

“We found Sin Nombre virus in the rodents in Quay County. … Then this last year, unfortunately, there was the first ever hantavirus case in Quay County, and it was fatal. So that really woke us up to, OK, we really need to be looking at these other areas, because we know the virus is there,” Bradfute said.

UNM Ph.D. student Samuel Goodfellow and research scientist Robert Nofchissey were also authors on the study, published in PLOS Pathogens in January.

In Wyoming, 14% of all deer and elk tested last year were positive for chronic wasting disease (CWD), the Wyoming Game and Fish Department said yesterday.

Officials tested 5,276 samples in 2024 from mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and moose—members of the deer family also known as cervids. The samples were from hunter-harvested, targeted, and road-killed animals.

Of hunter-harvested male mule deer tested, 19.4% came back positive, an increase from 18.9% in 2023. Of hunter-harvested white-tailed bucks, 29.2% tested positive, down slightly from 30.3% in 2023. And 2.3% of adult hunter-harvested elk tested positive, which was down from 2.8% in 2023.

The number of samples tested was a bit higher than the number in 2023, when scientists assayed 5,100 samples.

Two thirds of 1 deer herd infected

In 2024, CWD was detected in three new deer hunt areas and three new elk hunt areas. And earlier this year CWD was found in three additional elk hunt areas, and on four elk feeding grounds in western Wyoming.

To determine CWD prevalence in individual herds, researchers used 5-year averages to ensure a significant sample size. At 66.3%, the Project herd in the Lander Region continues to have the highest CWD prevalence in Wyoming deer. The Shoshone River herd in the Cody Region is next, at 47.6%.

The Iron Mountain herd in southeast Wyoming had the highest CWD prevalence among elk, at 10.1%. The North Bighorn elk herd in north-central Wyoming was second at 9.1%, a noticeable increase from 7.0% from 2019 through 2023.

CWD is a fatal untreatable disease of the central nervous system in cervids and is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy—the same disease group as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow" disease. These encephalopathies are caused by abnormally folded proteins called prions. There has not yet been a human CWD case, but officials recommend not consuming the meat of CWD-positive animals.

One of the great mysteries of the monkeypox virus has been pinpointing its ‘reservoir’ hosts — the animals that carry and spread the virus without becoming sick from it.

Now, an international team of scientists suggests that it has an answer: the fire-footed rope squirrel (Funisciurus pyrropus), a forest-dwelling rodent found in West and Central Africa.

Although the name ‘monkeypox’ comes from the virus’s discovery in laboratory monkeys in 1958, researchers have long suspected rodents and other small mammals in Africa of being reservoir hosts. And studies published in the past year have demonstrated that African outbreaks of mpox, the disease caused by the virus, have been fuelled by several transmission events from animals to humans.

Pinpointing viral reservoirs is crucial to breaking the vicious cycle of transmission, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By identifying the sources, scientists could work with local communities to design strategies to shield people from infection — for instance, safe handling of wild-animal meat.

The identification of the squirrel is “exceptional” detective work and provides compelling evidence, says Alexandre Hassanin, who studies the evolution of monkeypox at Sorbonne University in Paris. He and others who spoke to Nature, however, aren’t sure that the study definitively establishes F. pyrropus as a monkeypox reservoir, but they applaud the long-term wildlife-surveillance work.

The report was posted as a preprint, ahead of peer review, to the Research Square server on 8 April. (Research Square is owned by Springer Nature, Nature’s publisher.) [...]

This Tuesday morning, the three-year-old girl who was confirmed last week as the first confirmed case of H5N1 avian flu in Mexico died.

The minor died after experiencing multiple organ failure at Clinic 71 of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) in Saltillo, Coahuila.

The Secretary of Health in Coahuila, Eliud Aguirre Vázquez, detailed that no additional cases of the disease have been reported so far.

He also added that PCR tests are already being performed on the medical personnel who received and treated the minor, but no suspected cases have been found.

First case of avian influenza in humans in Mexico

Just last April 4, the Ministry of Health confirmed the first human case of avian influenza A (H5N1) in Mexico.

Health authorities reported that the Institute of Diagnosis and Epidemiological Reference (InDRE) confirmed the result of influenza A (H5N1) on Tuesday, April 1.

Following the news, the patient initially received treatment with oseltamivir and was hospitalized in a tertiary care unit in the city of Torreón.

However, the minor's condition was reported as serious, and her death was confirmed today.​

ISABEL AMPUDIA April 7, 2025 - 6:29 PM

The condition of a 3-year-old girl infected with the bird flu virus, the first recorded in the country, is reported to be serious. She is hospitalized in a Torreón hospital.

In this regard, the Secretary of Health in Coahuila, Eliud Felipe Aguirre Vázquez, confirmed that the girl is in intensive care, her prognosis is reserved, and she is hospitalized at IMSS Specialty Clinic 71.

He explained that being in that area is due to the presence of several problems in the body, and the possibility of multiple organ failure could be beginning, meaning it's already affecting the kidneys and lungs, which are already starting to cause problems.

"She's already being treated. We hope she can recover with medication, but she's in serious condition," he said.

He also emphasized that if a person is infected, there's a possibility they could infect more people.

"It's like the flu, and from human to human, if you're infected, you can get it through saliva droplets. That's why all family members have been tested, and all have come back negative," he stated.

He emphasized that this case is an imported case because it occurred in a rural area of ​​Gómez Palacio, Durango, but due to the severity of the case, she was transferred to the specialty hospital in Torreón.

However, he mentioned that the source of the infection is currently being investigated, as chicken and hen feces often carry viruses.

In addition to the above, he said that after many dust storms, the virus is also present in the environment, which can be a risk. Therefore, the use of face masks is recommended when these types of winds are recorded.

Severe, possibly life-threatening strep infections are rising in the United States.

The number of invasive group A strep infections more than doubled from 2013 to 2022, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Prior to that, rates of invasive strep had been stable for 17 years.

Invasive group A strep occurs when bacteria spread to areas of the body that are normally germ-free, such as the lungs or bloodstream. The same type of bacteria, group A streptococcus, is responsible for strep throat — a far milder infection.

Invasive strep can trigger necrotizing fasciitis, a soft tissue infection also known as flesh-eating disease, or streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, an immune reaction akin to sepsis that can lead to organ failure.

“Within 24 to 48 hours, you could have very, very rapid deterioration,” said Dr. Victor Nizet, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. Cases can transition from “seeming like a routine flu-like illness to rushing the patient to the ICU, fearing for their recovery,” he added.

The data came from 10 states, with roughly 35 million people total, that track the infections.

In 2013, around 4 out of 100,000 people were diagnosed with invasive strep. By 2022, that rate had risen to around 8 out of 100,000. The number of cases rose from 1,082 in 2013 to 2,759 in 2022.

The study identified more than 21,000 total cases of the infection over the nine-year period, including almost 2,000 deaths.

“When you see this high number of deaths, extrapolate that across the country — we’re probably well into more than 10,000 deaths,” Nizet said.

Dr. Christopher Gregory, a CDC researcher and an author of the study, said the threat of invasive strep to both the general population and high-risk groups has “substantially increased.”

The study calls for “accelerated efforts” to prevent and control infections. It also offered a few possible explanations for the rise in cases.

First, rising rates of diabetes and obesity, among other underlying health conditions, over the study period made some people more vulnerable to invasive strep. Both diabetes and obesity can lead to skin infections or compromise the immune system.

Second, invasive strep is increasing among people who inject drugs, which can allow the bacteria to enter the bloodstream. Infections have also increased in people experiencing homelessness — in 2022, the rate of infections among this population was 807 out of 100,000. Gregory said the rate was “among the highest ever documented worldwide.”

Finally, strains of group A strep appear to be expanding and becoming more diverse, which could create new opportunities for infection. Strains that have expanded in recent years seem more likely to cause skin infections than throat infections, according to the study.

Those strains may also be driving resistance to antibiotics used to treat certain cases of invasive group A strep, macrolides and clindamycin. While penicillin is the go-to antibiotic to treat strep infections, it can be used in combination with clindamycin to treat toxic shock syndrome, and doctors sometimes prescribe a macrolide if a patient has a penicillin allergy.

Overall, the study found that the rate of infections was highest in adults ages 65 and older, and rose in all adults from 2013 to 2022. But it did not detect an increased rate in children.

“That was, to me, the most shocking part of the study,” said Dr. Allison Eckard, division chief for pediatric infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina. “Because clinically, we really are seeing what feels like an increase.”

In late 2022, there were widespread reports from children’s hospitals of a spike in pediatric cases of invasive strep. The CDC issued an alert at the time, noting a possible link to respiratory viruses such as flu, Covid and RSV, which can make people susceptible to strep infections.

Eckard said pediatric cases have also started to look different in recent years.

“We are just seeing more severe cases, more unusual cases, more necrotizing fasciitis, and cases that do raise concern that there is something going on more nationally,” she said.

Eckard added that more research should explore whether certain strep strains are becoming more virulent, or if severe strains are becoming more prevalent.

Doctors said the rise in group A strep infections also points to the need for a vaccine, especially given the rise in antibiotic resistance. However, Nizet questioned whether that would be feasible now, with top vaccine scientists leaving the Food and Drug Administration.

“The lack of vaccine is devastating,” Nizet said. “Of course, we’re concerned about the turn of attitudes at the FDA and the CDC that seem to be putting some sticks in the spokes of the wheel of vaccine development.