According to a new study, influenza vaccination may help protect against heart attack and stroke even when it does not prevent people from getting the flu.
Read more: ow.ly/8fmv50YGL7R— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 3:43 PM
USA: Epidemic trend summary: April 10, 2026
COVID-19
As of April 7, 2026:
🔹0 states have COVID-19 infections growing or likely growing
🔹38 states has infections declining or likely declining
🔹5 states show no change
Source: cdc.gov/cfa-modeling…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 10:14 PM
Influenza
As of April 7, 2026:
🔹0 states have Influenza infections growing or likely growing
🔹43 states has infections declining or likely declining
🔹5 states show no change
Source: cdc.gov/cfa-modeling…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 10:14 PM
RSV
As of April 7, 2026:
🔹0 states have RSV infections growing or likely growing
🔹42 states has infections declining or likely declining
🔹6 states shows no change
Source: cdc.gov/cfa-modeling…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 10:14 PM
#Flu season is now officially over, but pediatric flu death reports continue to flow to #CDC. In the wk ending 4/4, CDC learned of 12 more kids who died from flu in 2025-6, bringing the total to 139. It will rise over coming weeks. CDC also belatedly learned of another death, the 296th, in 2024-5.
— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 1:28 PM
It’s not too late to make sure you are protected against RSV. It's never too late to make sure you are protected against measles.
— Angie Rasmussen (@angierasmussen.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 9:01 PM
New study: Long COVID is tied to a higher risk of heart disease, even after mild infection.
The study also reveals that women with long COVID experience more heart problems than men.
Read more: ow.ly/UfV850YHftb— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 5:54 PM
A new study links post-COVID ocular symptoms such as blurred vision and dry eyes to worse overall health and greater socioeconomic challenges.
Read more: ow.ly/tu6W50YFR5h— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 3:53 PM
According to a new study, RSV is associated with high rates of complications and death among older adults hospitalized with the condition, and older RSV patients may have worse health outcomes than older adults hospitalized for influenza.
Read more: ow.ly/Cf9E50YIpwo— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 2:45 PM
"Skin as a potential entry point for SARS-COV-2"
Study finds inflamed skin may increase SARS-CoV-2 entry. Cytokines raise ACE2/TMPRSS2 levels, boosting viral entry—suggesting skin could be an overlooked infection route.
Source: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6…
PDF: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 10:11 PM
Study finds long COVID leaves a distinct immune signature in the blood.
Study finds long COVID is linked to lasting immune changes, especially inflammation and neurological signals. Vaccines didn’t worsen these responses. The findings could improve biomarkers, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment.— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 1:11 AM
Study: Divergent inflammatory and neurology-related protein levels in long COVID following primary and breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections
Published: 13 April 2026
www.nature.com/articles/s43…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 1:11 AM
"Covid Virus May Spread More Widely by Turning Lung Cells Into Targets, Study Finds"
"COVID-19 may spread through the lungs by turning resistant cells into infection targets, helping explain severe inflammation and organ damage, and pointing to potential new treatments."
Source: archive.md/18Rth— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 1:01 AM
Study: Unveiling alternate pathways for SARS-CoV-2 infection via extracellular vesicle-mediated transfer of ACE2 and TMPRSS2
Published: 10 April 2026
www.nature.com/articles/s41…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 1:01 AM
Long COVID costs Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries up to $135 billion each year.
A report last week by the OECD projects that long COVID’s significant social & financial costs will continue well into the next decade. ow.ly/e35t50YIuaX— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 5:53 PM
CIDRAP's Vaccine Integrity Project posted protocols for their systematic reviews of 3 immunizations against respiratory pathogens.
Research protocols show methodological rigor & transparency.
🧵1/3— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 2:21 PM
Once posted, they can't be changed based on what researchers find. They also allow for duplication of work.
Details of the systematic reviews are available publicly. ⬇️
💉COVID-19: ow.ly/bhPS50YIYqw
💉Influenza: ow.ly/e0si50YIYqy
💉RSV: ow.ly/lWuv50YIYqx— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 2:21 PM
More information on the Vaccine Integrity Project: vaxintegrity.cidrap.umn.edu
3/3— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 2:21 PM
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A new poll suggests that vaccine skepticism now the norm for many Americans.
Read more on the poll results: ow.ly/WZhL50YJ5Gk— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 5:33 PM
A new poll today in Politico suggests that vaccine skepticism is now just as prevalent as vaccine confidence for Americans, with one-third of respondents reporting they see reducing vaccines as a core principle of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Overall, 46% of poll respondents said facts on vaccines are still up for debate and it is damaging to enforce their uptake. Thirty-nine percent said science on vaccines is clear and it is damaging to question it. Results were further split daily neatly down political lines, with Trump supporters the most likely to question vaccine safety and argue against vaccine mandates.
Forty-four percent of polled adults said they believe vaccines should be mandatory for children to attend school. In a telling question, 47% of the more than 3,800 adults polled said the return of measles was not worth the risk of having personal freedom to make decisions about vaccines, compared to 39% who said it was worth the risk and preferred personal freedom over vaccine mandates.
Of note, 49% of Republican voters said the return of vaccine-preventable diseases was a price worth paying for the ability to refuse vaccines.
Age was a major factor in how respondents thought about the personal duty of vaccination as a tool to prevent others from illness.
Two-thirds of adults 65 and older, who are old enough to remember a time before vaccines controlled serious childhood illnesses, said it was their duty to get vaccinated to protect others, Politico said. So did two-thirds of adults who said they voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
20 years later: New research highlights strong benefits of HPV vaccines beyond helping to prevent cervical cancer.
Read more: ow.ly/1Iw050YJ4eT— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 4:05 PM
A study suggests that earlier-life HPV vaccination doesn’t increase vaccine hesitancy.
Initiating the vaccine series at ages 9 to 10 also makes it easier to complete the multi-dose series before adolescence.
Read more: ow.ly/MGtl50YFgrS— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 4:51 PM
💊 Tylenol during pregnancy is not tied to increased risk of autism in children.
Researchers initiated the study after President Trump’s 2025 remarks discouraging pregnant women from using acetaminophen because of a purported link to autism.
Read more: ow.ly/Nk0l50YJ56G— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 5:11 PM
Polls show that most Americans still prefer providers to AI for health advice.
Overall, 75% of Americans say it’s highly important that their health information sources have medical training. 🩺
Read more: ow.ly/yPxi50YFgzQ— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 5:10 PM
Burials of unclaimed people in NYC soared early in COVID pandemic, suggesting worsened disparities.
The study findings highlight the particularly devastating effects of COVID-19 on economically and socially vulnerable groups.
Read more: ow.ly/mktO50YGKrS
📷: Ron Cogswell / Flickr cc— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 3:08 PM
Very sad yet completely unsurprising to see data censorship of a study showing the positive benefits of the COVID vaccines in preventing hospitalizations. This is anti-science in action and also harmful to public health. I expect better from the NIH/ acting CDC director but alas.
— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 6:17 PM
USA: "RFK Jr’s CDC is withholding Covid vaccine report showing benefits of jab"
"The research indicated that healthy adults who received the Covid vaccine reduced their risk of urgent care and emergency visits by 50% and Covid-related hospitalizations by 55%"
www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/new…— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 8:44 PM
@lizzylawrence.bsky.social reported this last fall. Pretty wild to learn that the nation’s top vaccine regulator abused his power to pull a paper out of peer review because it showed Covid vaccines still work, are safe, and benefit most people. Also scary that’s FDA
www.statnews.com/2025/11/12/f…— Angie Rasmussen (@angierasmussen.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 10:44 AM
CIDRAP Op-Ed: Don’t be distracted—ACIP was never the only play
While we were distracted, vaccine-injury lawyer Aaron Siri submitted a petition demanding that hundreds of conditions be added to the Vaccine Injury Table.
Full Op-Ed from @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social's Jess Steier: ow.ly/OqV650YIT9m— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 10:59 AM
… The ruling was good news for the plaintiff (the American Academy of Pediatrics) and for all of us. Judge Brian Murphy looked at what had been done to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the firing of qualified experts, the ideological replacements, the unilateral schedule changes—and said the process was likely illegal. The March 18-19 ACIP meeting was canceled, and the altered childhood immunization schedule was frozen in its pre-January state. People who have spent the better part of a year watching federal vaccine infrastructure get dismantled allowed themselves a moment of relief. It was a much-needed (even if temporary) victory…
Four days after the ruling, while attention was still fixed on the temporary legal victory, Aaron Siri, vaccine injury lawyer and longtime ally of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., submitted a petition to HHS on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, demanding that more than 300 new conditions be added to the Vaccine Injury Table. He gave Kennedy 60 days to act, telling an audience at the Kennedy Center shortly after filing: “If not, we do intend to bring [federal] lawsuits.”…
The Vaccine Injury Table sits at the heart of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), the no-fault system created in 1986 to compensate people harmed by vaccines without requiring them to sue manufacturers directly. It currently lists 47 vaccine-injury pairs, each pairing a specific injury with a specific vaccine and a time window for onset. If your injury appears on it, you receive expedited compensation without having to prove the vaccine caused it. The program works better than most people realize, and it often compensates claims more efficiently than civil litigation. It also keeps vaccine manufacturers in the market by giving them defined liability protection. However, this all depends on the table being grounded in scientific evidence.
Siri’s petition argues that the federal government’s mere consideration of a potential vaccine injury—studying it, identifying it as hypothesis-generating—is a legally sufficient “association” and enough to require adding it to the table. Dorit Reiss, PhD, a vaccine law expert at UC Law San Francisco, has stated that the petition “argues that simply analyzing potential harms establishes an association, even if the government found no evidence of one”—an interpretation that stretches the legal definitions. Richard Hughes, the attorney who led the legal effort that produced the Boston ruling, called the reasoning “ridiculous” and warned it would chill future government research into vaccine injuries. The logic collapses on itself: If studying a potential harm automatically establishes legal causation, why would anyone study anything?
Kennedy has previously suggested the table could be expanded to include symptoms associated with autism. The scientific record has examined that question exhaustively and does not support it. But as Politico reported, the more likely play—one that a Kennedy adviser floated publicly at a September Make American Healthy Again event—is broadening the definitions of encephalopathy and encephalitis, both already on the table under tightly drawn clinical criteria, so that autism cases qualify through the back door rather than through an explicit addition that would directly challenge existing legal precedent…
About 16,000 children who are vaccinated will eventually be diagnosed with profound autism each year—not because vaccines cause autism, but because that’s the baseline prevalence in our largely vaccinated population. If those cases become eligible for VICP compensation, the program would face roughly $32 billion in annual claims. The VICP Trust Fund currently holds about $4 billion, accumulated over nearly 40 years. Its sole income is a $0.75 excise tax per vaccine dose, generating around $250 million per year. Because claimants can file for injuries diagnosed within the past three years, the program could face an initial docket approaching $100 billion in claims on day one.
The fund would be insolvent almost immediately…
www.phillymag.com/news/2026/04…
— Anne Laurie (@annelaurie.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 6:43 AM
As part of my efforts to combat the COVID Amnesia Project, let's accurately remember what 3 influential laptop class doctors from Stanford said 6 years ago as COVID overflowed hospitals and morgues.
They won't remind you.
I will.
My latest.— Jonathan Howard (@joho.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 10:56 AM
The covid amnesia shell game happened DESPITE THE DATA, in part bc we never had a reckoning or real memorialization
The *moment* we replace this regime, they will memory-hole everything they did. If we don't keep clear records and then make them into public memory, they'll get away with it.— Erin Kissane (@kissane.myatproto.social) April 14, 2026 at 7:43 PM
Have to say when CBC Fifth Estate does a deep dive you know they got the receipts
#biohazard grifters
#cbc #cdn— TopKat_GlassDragon (@topkatglassdragon.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 1:49 PM
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The United States measles case count total surpassed 1,700 cases this past week. ⬆️
The US measles case count grew by 43 cases, reaching 1,714 infections. The US is on pace to top last year’s measles total by summer.
Read more: ow.ly/6Kbl50YHekR
Map source: CDC— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 4:49 PM
South Carolina sees no new measles activity as Utah becomes the epicenter of US outbreaks.
Utah now has the most active outbreak in the country, with officials recording 24 new cases in the last five days.
Read more: ow.ly/kx3X50YFUnL— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 4:53 PM
Babies too young to be vaccinated are among the most vulnerable in a measles outbreak and depend entirely on herd immunity, where at least 95% of a community must be vaccinated to prevent measles outbreaks.
https://to.pbs.org/4dI3Om3— PBS News (@pbsnews.org) April 11, 2026 at 7:02 PM
Is it measles or the flu? 🤧
With measles becoming more common, experts recommend learning to recognize the symptoms and taking precautions to protect yourself and others.
Read more: ow.ly/MCGz50YHaUa— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 1:37 PM
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It's not gone: #USDA reports 5 more dairy herds in Idaho have tested positive for #H5N1 #birdflu, the first in months.
In the 2+ years since the virus was first detected in cows in the US, 1,093 herds in 19 states have tested positive for the virus. www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-po…— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 9:57 AM
Officials say Arkansas' largest bird flu outbreak of the year reported in Clay County.
www.5newsonline.com/article/news…— Data Report (@datareport.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 9:22 PM
The US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) reported more avian flu activity at commercial poultry facilities in Indiana, which has seen high levels of H5N1 activity this spring.
Read more: ow.ly/vXnG50YGLS5— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 5:07 PM
Two new H9N2 avian flu cases reported on mainland China.
Read more: ow.ly/igB950YJ5k2
📷: Garrett Heath / Flickr cc— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 14, 2026 at 5:24 PM
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The turning point for rare diseases, which affect >300 million people around the world.
A call to get rid of its many structural obstacles, to consider it as molecular surgery unlike drug treatments
gift link:
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/o…— Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social) April 12, 2026 at 10:52 AM
If you're interested in viruses — you kinda gotta be, if you're following me — this podcast may appeal. Deep dive into how viruses work, hosted by Florian Krammer, one of my go-to experts for flu. Lotsa detail, but the episodes are a manageable length. Enjoy! virological.podigee.io/episodes
— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 6:05 PM
Two TB vaccine candidates offered limited protection in a phase 3 trial.
The two vaccines, VPM1002 and Immuvac, were evaluated in a trial involving 12,717 household contacts of recently diagnosed TB patients in India.
Read more: ow.ly/lCvb50YIpF9— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 3:51 PM
New study: A substantial proportion of survivors of Nipah virus infection experience long-term neurologic deficits and fatigue.
More on the study: ow.ly/48qB50YHgVa
📷: Jan Arendsz/Flickr cc— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Shionogi secures BARDA contract for cefiderocol for resistant infections & bioterror threats.
💊 The $119 million contract seeks to establish a US manufacturing site for the antibiotic & assess its potential as a treatment for plague & melioidosis.
Read more: ow.ly/K3Bh50YGuCN— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 10:14 AM
Insecticide resistance in South American mosquitoes signals trouble for malaria control. 🦟
New research warns of growing insecticide resistance among mosquitoes, the primary vector of malaria in South America.
Read more: ow.ly/K3BK50YFgWN
📷: AirmanMagazine / Flickr.— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 5:50 PM
🦇 Vampire bats in Mexico may feed on CWD-positive deer 🦌, spreading disease and posing species-jump threat.
The bats' range is expanding northward, while CWD is creeping southward, creating a worrisome overlap.
Read more: ow.ly/nOtI50YGMLo
📷: Peter E / Flickr cc— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 9, 2026 at 5:37 PM
New Public Health Alert: Emergence of Medetomidine in New York’s Illicit Drug Supply
The report highlights state, local work to detect emerging substances of concern in the illicit drug supply & implement data-guided programmatic responses.
Full alert from NEJM Evidence & CIDRAP: ow.ly/78F750YHifR— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) April 10, 2026 at 5:12 PM
Plagues & Pandemics Update – April 15, 2026Post + Comments (48)