“The Agriculture Department will not require poultry companies to limit salmonella bacteria in their products, halting a Biden Administration effort to prevent food poisoning from contaminated meat,” the AP reports.

“The rule would have required poultry companies to keep levels of salmonella bacteria under a certain threshold and test for the presence of six strains most associated with illness, including three found in turkey and three in chicken.”

“HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weighing pulling the Covid-19 vaccine from the government’s list of recommended immunizations for children,” Politico reports.

“Eliminating the vaccine from the CDC schedule would not bar kids from receiving it. But the change would represent an extraordinary intervention by Kennedy to override the agency’s scientific decision-making and reverse a recommendation backed by the CDC and a slate of independent advisers just three years ago.”

“The spread of measles in the Southwest now constitutes the largest single outbreak since the United States declared the disease eliminated in 2000,” the New York Times reports.

“Clinics around the country that provide contraception and other reproductive health services to low-income patients are running out of funds as they await word from the Trump administration on tens of millions of dollars in grants frozen last month,” Politico reports.

“The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division,” Reuters reports.

“The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new effort to study autism,” CBS News reports.

“In addition, a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism.”

“In his first attempt to significantly change the nation’s food supply, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, will direct food manufacturers to phase out eight petroleum-based food dyes that are found in hundreds of thousands of grocery-store staples,” the New York Times reports.

Jonathan Cohn: “The likelihood of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income Americans—and, in the process, rolling back a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act—has increased significantly in the last two weeks.”

“The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric.”

“But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.”

“The Food and Drug Administration is drawing up plans that would end most of its routine food safety inspections work and effectively outsource this oversight to state and local authorities,” CBS News reports.

“The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services,” the Washington Post reports.

“HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the unusual step of publicly contradicting one of his own agencies’ autism studies on Tuesday, suggesting at a press conference that ‘environmental factors’ including drugs, not improved screening, were causing a spike in confirmed cases,” Axios reports.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in largely off-the-cuff remarks, asserted that the “Deep State” is real, referenced past CIA experiments on human mind control and accused the employees he was speaking to of becoming a “sock puppet” of the industries they regulate, Politico reports.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that “by September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” Roll Call reports.

“All of the full-time employees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program are now off the job, gutting the agency’s ability to investigate outbreaks and conduct health inspections on cruise ships,” CBS News reports.

“The steep cuts to the program’s inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team’s staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confronting his first disease outbreak as Health and Human Services secretary. His response to the spread of measles in and beyond Texas has managed to alarm serious scientists while also drawing criticism from his Make America Healthy Again movement,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“On Sunday, Kennedy endorsed the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, known as the MMR shot, amid an outbreak that has resulted in the deaths of two children and sickened hundreds of people. He reiterated that people should get the vaccine during a CBS interview this week. Following his long and well-documented history of vaccine skepticism, Kennedy’s backing of the shot—which health officials say is safe and effective—has been criticized by key allies, revealing fractures in his fervent base.”

Politico: “Shortly after Donald Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead his health department, a group of pharmaceutical executives traveled to Mar-a-Lago to personally express their reservations about the man who the president promised would ‘go wild’ on health care.”

“But Trump, confronted with their concerns about his history of anti-vaccine work and lack of government experience, waved the executives off, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Don’t worry about Bobby, he assured them. I’ll keep Kennedy under control.”

“Five months later, federal health officials, industry executives and the public health community say they’re more worried than ever.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday said he plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention soon to stop recommending fluoridation in communities nationwide, the AP reports.

Kennedy also said he’s assembling a task force to focus on the issue.