Health
State Department Permits Distribution of H.I.V. Medications to Resume — for Now
![State Department Permits Distribution of H.I.V. Medications to Resume — for Now State Department Permits Distribution of H.I.V. Medications to Resume — for Now](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/28/multimedia/28HIV-bcql/28HIV-bcql-facebookJumbo.jpg)
The Trump administration on Tuesday issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, offering a reprieve for a worldwide H.I.V. treatment program that was halted last week.
The waiver, announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seemed to allow for the distribution of H.I.V. medications, but whether the waiver extended to preventive drugs or other services offered by the program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was not immediately clear.
Still, PEPFAR’s future remains in jeopardy, with potential consequences for more than 20 million people — including 500,000 children — who could lose access to lifesaving medications. Without treatment, millions of people with H.I.V. in low-income countries would be at risk of full-blown AIDS and of premature death.
“We can very rapidly return to where the pandemic is exploding, like it was back in the 1980s,” said Dr. Steve Deeks, an H.I.V. expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
“This really cannot happen,” he said.
On Monday, the Trump administration ordered health organizations in other countries to immediately stop distributing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid. The directive stemmed from a freeze — which may become permanent — in the activities of PEPFAR, a $7.5 billion program overseen by the State Department.
Since it started in 2003, PEPFAR is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives; more than 5.5 million children have been born free of H.I.V. who otherwise would have been infected.
In South Africa alone, PEPFAR’s shutdown would add more than a half million new H.I.V. infections and more than 600,000 related deaths over the next decade, according to one estimate.
The organization employs 270,000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health workers. They had been told not to report to work or to serve patients.
PEPFAR’s end would “create instability and potentially collapse several countries’s AIDS programs that will be difficult to repair, if and when PEPFAR funding becomes available again,” said Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.
Dr. Abdool Karim said countries should stop relying on PEPFAR and support their own citizens, a goal that the program’s staff and partners had been working toward. But ideally that shift would happen gradually, over years during which PEPFAR would train local health workers and prepare them for the transition, he said.
“This is not a bad opportunity for countries to take greater responsibility,” he said. “But I think they can’t do it if it’s done in this kind of haphazard and unplanned way.”
Here’s what he and others expect from PEPFAR’s unexpected pause.
Sudden stops to H.I.V. treatment can quickly turn dangerous.
Every day, more than 220,000 people pick up H.I.V. medications at clinics funded by PEPFAR; the number included more than 7,400 children under 15, according to data published on Tuesday by AMFAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.
The drugs work by suppressing H.I.V. in the body. When patients go off the drugs, the virus grabs the opportunity to rebound — and quickly. Within a week, H.I.V. levels will skyrocket from undetectable levels to more than 100,000 copies per milliliter of blood.
“That may be a time where you are very much at risk of passing the virus on to others,” Dr. Sallie Permar, a pediatrician and H.I.V. expert at Weill Cornell Medicine, said.
Then, the virus will start attacking a certain type of immune cell, crippling the body’s ability to fend off other infections, including tuberculosis, which frequently accompanies H.I.V. infection.
Spiking H.I.V. levels at first may cause flulike symptoms, including sore throat, swollen glands and fatigue. The immune system will likely marshal enough force to suppress the virus temporarily, but H.I.V. is adept at hiding until it finds the right opportunity to re-emerge.
When that occasion arises, “they can develop AIDS and progress,” Dr. Deeks said.
Children may be among the hardest hit.
PEPFAR is best known for financing H.I.V. treatment programs, but its funds also go to drugs for prevention, outreach and testing, and to support for orphans and women experiencing gender-based violence.
The loss of resources for each of these efforts will derail the fight against AIDS, said Dr. Glenda Gray, a pediatric H.I.V. expert at Wits University in South Africa.
“If H.I.V. testing falls by the wayside, it’s unlikely that we will be able to even diagnose people who need to go into treatment,” she said.
If a pregnant or breastfeeding woman has H.IV. but is not tested and not treated, she may pass the virus to her child. The higher her viral load, the more likely this is to occur.
Children with H.I.V. are less likely to be diagnosed than adults, and may not be treated till the virus makes them visibly very sick. This progression can be much more rapid in children than in adults, Dr. Gray said, “and obviously, children who are untreated are likely to die.”
Inconsistent treatment drives drug resistance.
As people lose access to medications, they may try to spread out their supplies by alternating days or to share their pills with others. If the virus replicates in people with only partial protection, it can learn to evade those defenses and become resistant to the medications.
People living with the virus may then pass the resistant virus on to others.
“That becomes a big problem, because now, suddenly, our cheap first-line drugs might not work when we have to restart them on treatment,” Dr. Abdool Karim said.
A virus that is resistant to treatments will also be better at evading vaccine candidates being tested.
“Not only are we looking at more drug resistance, but we’re looking at losing whatever ability we had to make an effective vaccine,” Dr. Permar said.
PEPFAR’s end may affect Americans, too.
More than one million Americans are living with the virus, and more than 30,000 become infected each year. If H.I.V. becomes resistant to available medications, it isn’t likely to remain in low-income countries. Americans, too, will be at risk.
They may also face indirect harms from ending PEPFAR. Creating huge populations of immunocompromised people may mean that other pathogens have an opportunity to spread. For example, dangerous Covid variants, including Omicron, are thought to have evolved in immunocompromised people with H.I.V.
At the same time, people worldwide have benefited from trials conducted under PEPFAR’s auspices, showing the importance of treating H.I.V. early, demonstrating that pregnant women can safely breastfeed as long as they are treated and that H.I.V. infections can be prevented with long-acting drugs.
“America has gotten an amazing amount of love around the world because of what it’s done,” Dr. Deeks said.
“From a humanitarian perspective, I can’t imagine anyone really wants to go along this pathway,” he added. “This doesn’t make any sense on any level.”
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Health
Trump Will Withhold Money From Schools That Require Covid Vaccines
![Trump Will Withhold Money From Schools That Require Covid Vaccines Trump Will Withhold Money From Schools That Require Covid Vaccines](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/14/multimedia/14school-mandates-qwkt/14school-mandates-qwkt-facebookJumbo.jpg)
President Trump ordered on Friday that federal funding be withheld from schools and universities that require students to be vaccinated against Covid, White House officials said, another step in the administration’s campaign against coronavirus vaccine requirements.
It was not clear how widely impactful the order would be. No states require K-12 students to be vaccinated against Covid. Only 15 colleges still required Covid vaccines for students as of late last year, according to No College Mandates, an advocacy group.
Riding the same wave of anti-vaccine sentiment, 21 states had already moved to outlaw student Covid vaccine mandates, the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan research group, has said. And Republican elected officials across the country have pursued a tide of anti-vaccine measures, including a proposed ban in Montana on administering mRNA vaccines, which include some Covid shots, and a ban on a local health department in Idaho offering any Covid vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that monitoring has shown that Covid vaccines are safe for children.
Younger people are much less likely to be severely sickened by the coronavirus, but doctors have said that the virus has still harmed many children.
For Mr. Trump, whose first administration accelerated the development and rollout of Covid shots, saving some 140,000 lives in their early months of availability, the latest executive order was a turn toward reining in efforts to promote the vaccines.
Shortly after returning to office last month, Mr. Trump also said he would reinstate more than 8,000 troops who had been dismissed for refusing the Covid vaccine.
The executive order on Friday largely took aim at mandates implemented in 2021, shortly after Covid vaccines became available. Some local school districts, especially in more liberal regions, required the shots for students participating in sports or other extracurricular activities, or for adult visitors to school buildings, including parents.
School-based mandates tend to raise vaccination rates among children, researchers have found. Those vaccinations, in turn, can protect students who might be vulnerable to more serious illness and dampen circulation of the virus, potentially sparing parents or grandparents from being exposed.
But even in more liberal areas, school mandates won only modest support. Some researchers argued they were counterproductive, polarizing communities and damaging trust in scientific institutions. As the pandemic progressed, resistance to mandates mounted. Most of the policies were short-lived.
Covid vaccine mandates at colleges also improved vaccination rates, researchers have found, with health benefits that extended to surrounding communities. In counties whose colleges all mandated vaccines, one study found, fewer residents died from Covid.
Few teachers and school staff members are working under Covid vaccine mandates, either. No state requires them, and the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, both lifted teacher Covid vaccine requirements in 2023.
The order applies only to Covid vaccines, leaving untouched state requirements that school children be vaccinated against measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox. States excuse children who, for medical reasons, cannot receive vaccines, and many also allow exemptions for religious or other reasons.
At least some medical schools require Covid shots for students. It was not immediately clear if those rules would be affected by the new order.
Dana Goldstein and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
Health
Woman with 5% chance of survival after ski accident makes 'miracle' recovery
![Woman with 5% chance of survival after ski accident makes 'miracle' recovery Woman with 5% chance of survival after ski accident makes 'miracle' recovery](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/02/woman-given-5-c-1322541.jpg)
A young woman who was given just a 5% chance of survival after suffering a horrific skiing accident is calling her recovery a “miracle.”
Olivia Corbiere, 23, suffered a brain bleed, lung damage, a broken pelvis and three fractured vertebrae when she fell 15 feet down a ravine in Bansko, Bulgaria, during a ski outing in March 2024, news agency SWNS reported.
Initially, doctors told Corbiere’s parents, Linzi Corbiere and Sebastien Corbiere, that their daughter had a limited chance of pulling through — and might never talk again if she did.
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“We were told she had a 5% chance of living and may not speak,” the mother said, according to SWNS.
Corbiere, a kitchen designer from England, had gone on the five-day spring ski trip with a group of close friends and her 19-year-old-sister, Phoebe.
Left to right, a group of friends — including Olivia Corbiere, center — just moments before Corbiere suffered a life-threatening accident. (SWNS)
On March 17, the group got up early for a day of skiing in the mountains. But shortly before lunch, things took a terrible turn.
“We were having a conversation about where we were going to eat,” said Corbiere. “That was one of the last things I remember before my accident.”
As she was heading along a ski path, her right ski crossed over her left and she began to lose control. The warm weather had melted the snow in such a way that Corbiere couldn’t turn her skis as she normally would, SWNS reported.
Corbiere slipped and then tumbled over the edge and down into a ravine.
“The actions of my sister and my friends that day are the reason why I’m here.”
Three of her fellow skiers jumped into the ravine to rescue her while the others called emergency services.
“The actions of my sister and my friends that day are the reason I’m here,” she said via SWNS. “They didn’t even think for a second not to jump in, and they could have hurt themselves. They are incredible. They’re fabulous. They’re amazing.”
PREGNANT WOMAN AND BABY SAVED AFTER DOCTORS FIND GRAPEFRUIT-SIZED TUMOR: ‘EXTREMELY RARE’
Corbiere was rushed to the hospital, where medics said they had “never seen” a head injury like hers.
The accident also left her with three fractured vertebrae, a broken pelvis, a broken eye socket and a broken nose, as reported by SWNS.
Given a life-threatening brain bleed, she endured four hours of emergency surgery, during which specialists removed part of her skull.
![A young woman, Olivia Corbiere, smiling into the camera, one of her eyes is shut due to an accident she suffered skiing in Bulgaria.](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/02/1200/675/woman-given-5-c-1322528.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Olivia Corbiere suffered serious injuries during a skiing accident in 2024. She had to undergo four hours of emergency surgery, during which specialists removed part of her skull. She is still working on a full recovery. (SWNS)
Once she was back in the U.K. for continued medical treatment, doctors warned her parents to prepare for a long recovery lasting several months or perhaps years.
But Corbiere, who has no recollection of the five-week period following her accident, began to improve more quickly than expected.
“When I moved from the intensive care ward onto the neuro ward, it was about three or four days after that, my memory started to come back,” she said.
WOMAN SUFFERS PAIN FOR 20 YEARS UNTIL HER MYSTERY AILMENT IS FINALLY DIAGNOSED
Corbiere still has some hearing loss and nerve damage on the right side of her face — affecting her eyelid movement — along with a wound at the back of her head.
However, Corbiere’s mother said her daughter’s progress since the accident feels like a miracle.
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“We were told she had a 5% chance of living and may not speak, but she’s done all that, she’s proved them wrong. She’s getting stronger every day.”
The mom added, “Now, she can laugh and joke about herself and things like that – that’s really, really good. We’re absolutely over the moon.”
Corbiere has now returned home — and she’s even been able to enjoy meals out with her family.
![Olivia Corbiere and her family enjoy a meal out after her miraculous recovery.](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/02/1200/675/woman-given-5-c-1322729.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
A grateful group out for a meal. From left, dad Seb Corbiere, translator Vicky, mom Linzi Corbiere, Olivia Corbiere, her boyfriend Tom, and her sister Phoebe Corbiere. (SWNS)
Her story has been widely shared, including on a fundraising page — and she said she’s stunned by how many people from all over the world have offered their sympathies after hearing about her accident, per SWNS.
“There are just so many good people in the world,” she said. “I can’t be any more grateful.”
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One supporter wrote to the family, “Thinking of you all. I can’t imagine how tough this must be for you.”
Despite the traumatic injuries, Corbiere said she hopes to hit the slopes again soon.
“I’ve skied for years. I absolutely love it, and I shouldn’t let something that was a complete accident put me off something I enjoy doing,” she said.
“When I’m fully better and well, I’d love to try it again.”
Health
Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54
![Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54 Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/15/multimedia/13maguire-01-gfcb-print1/13maguire-01-gfcb-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.
Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia.
Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain — like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.
An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”
In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith’s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.
Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’”
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.
Dr. Maguire’s study, published in March 2000, generated headlines around the world and turned London taxi drivers into unlikely scientific stars.
“I never noticed part of my brain growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, told the BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”
Dr. Maguire wondered, too: Why (and how) did their hippocampi grow?
She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”
But recalling information was only half the story.
In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.
“The whole point of the brain is future planning,” Dr. Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan’s book “Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future” (2020). “You need to survive and think about what happened when I was last here, is there a scary monster that will come out and eat me? We create models of the future by recruiting our memories of the past.”
Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.
Growing up, Eleanor was obsessed with “Star Trek.”
“My first scientific hero was fictional — Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she told the journal Current Biology in 2012. “He embodied so much of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, honest, meticulous, calm, fearless in facing the unknown, innovative and unafraid of taking risks.”
She graduated from University College Dublin in 1990 with a degree in psychology, and returned to earn her doctorate there after receiving a master’s degree from the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University).
Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995 and never left.
She is survived by her parents. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, also of cancer.
At Dr. Maguire’s memorial service, Dr. Price spoke about the energy and excitement her friend and longtime colleague generated at the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mother had called nightly to remind her daughter to go home.
“It wasn’t just a job,” Dr. Price said. “It consumed us, day and night.”
There was a sense that they were onto something big.
“We were among the first to use cutting-edge technology to peer inside the healthy, living human brain and witness its functions in action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity were instrumental to numerous discoveries.”
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