Decision allows manufacturers to begin shipping doses, but confusion remains about insurance coverage

The US Food and Drug Administration approved updated Covid-19 vaccines on Thursday, allowing manufacturers to begin shipping doses to pharmacies and doctors’ offices across the country.

The FDA approved Moderna, Novavax-Sanofi and Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated Covid vaccines, the companies ⁠said on Thursday, ⁠after ​an advisory panel recommended that the shots should target ⁠the dominant XFG variant.

Newly obtained records indicate health secretary lied about Samoa trip during Senate confirmation hearings last year

A senior Democratic senator is calling for a criminal investigation into the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, following reporting by the Guardian that indicated he lied during Senate confirmation hearings last year.

Ron Wyden of Oregon said: “RFK’s platform is built on lies and grifts that leave a trail of dead children in their wake. There are consequences for lying to Congress.”

Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’

Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times.

Lillian Smart of Ruston infected with fatal Naegleria fowleri, likely after swimming in Lake Claiborne, health officials say

An eight-year-old Louisiana girl has died after contracting a rare, typically fatal brain-eating amoeba after a swim in Lake Claiborne.

Lillian Smart, of Ruston, died on Saturday, one day after celebrating her birthday, her family announced in a public Facebook post on the “Love for Lillian” page.

New findings further call into question scientific judgment of current health leaders in the Trump administration

A French researcher whose work was praised by Donald Trump and Dr Mehmet Oz during the Covid-19 pandemic published hundreds of papers with “substantial” ethical and legal concerns, according to a new analysis.

An international team of scientists found concerns in 853 articles published by the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, or the IHU, hundreds more than previously flagged by past investigations into work at the large research hospital. Of those, institute founder Didier Raoult was listed as co-author on 758 of them, according to one of the researchers behind the new analysis.

Despite the recent hearings in Congress, we seem to be even further from the goal of understanding Covid-19’s origin’s than we have ever been

As a microbiologist and infectious disease clinician, it has been tough to watch the recent devolution of public discourse on Covid-19 origins. It has been especially difficult for me to read the comments of Anthony Fauci about the origins debate in his now-public diary. And it has been painful to watch the televised spectacle hosted by the US senator Rand Paul on 29 July involving a hostile interrogation of Fauci.

Despite many early pleas, including my own, for a dispassionate, objective assessment of what we know, don’t know and need to know about Covid-19 origins, we seem to be even further from this goal now than we have ever been – plagued by politicization, polarization and illogical thinking.

David Relman is a professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford University. He was an inaugural member of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America