Nearly 800,000 doses of mpox vaccine pledged to African countries working to stamp out devastating outbreaks are headed for the waste bin because they weren’t shipped in time, according to reporting by Politico.
The nearly 800,000 doses were part of a donation promised under the Biden administration, which was meant to deliver more than 1 million doses. Overall, the US, the European Union, and Japan pledged to collectively provide 5 million doses to nearly a dozen African countries. The US has only sent 91,000 doses so far, and only 220,000 currently still have enough shelf life to make it. The rest are expiring within six months, making them ineligible for shipping.
“For a vaccine to be shipped to a country, we need a minimum of six months before expiration to ensure that the vaccine can arrive in good condition and also allow the country to implement the vaccination,” Yap Boum, an Africa CDC deputy incident manager, told Politico.
Global health officials say USAID cuts upended their work, as billionaire claims he will fix any defunding ‘right now’
Although Elon Musk said Doge didn’t cut Aids programs, global health officials describe widespread and disastrous effects resulting from the White House’s throttling of foreign aid. The disruptions have caused new HIV infections to surge in recent months and threaten to derail plans to eradicate the virus as a public health threat by 2030.
In one stark case, the cuts have cast uncertainty over the rollout of a newly developed injectable that scientists have hailed as “the closest thing to a vaccine that we have ever had in HIV response”.
For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.
In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.
Tech billionaire plans to hang up the chainsaw as he steps away from ‘efficiency’ role amid Tesla sales slump
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” screamedElon Musk, wielding the power tool before a cheering crowd at a rightwing political conference. The tech titan promised to slice and dice the US federal government and save taxpayers a trillion dollars. Oozing confidence, the world’s richest person seemed unstoppable.
That was February. Last week Musk announced that he is hanging up his chainsaw and stepping back from his role overseeing the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, to focus on Tesla, his beleaguered electric vehicle company. The news led some to hope the chaos unleashed by Doge is finally waning.
At a moment when leaders of tech companies, law firms, media corporations and academic institutions have bent the knee to Donald Trump, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation insists that charitable organisations choose resistance over capitulation.
Under Pete Marocco’s lead, nearly all USAID staff was fired, with funding slashed and contractors dismissed
Pete Marocco, the Trump administration official who played a major role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has left the state department, a US official said on Sunday.
Donald Trump’s administration has moved to fire nearly all USAID staff, as billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” has slashed funding and dismissed contractors across the federal bureaucracy in what it calls an attack on wasteful spending.
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is finalizing the dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development, ordering the firings of thousands of local workers and US diplomats and civil servants assigned to the agency overseas, two former top USAID officials and a source with knowledge of the situation said on Tuesday.
On Friday, Congress was notified that almost all of USAID’s own employees were being fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, and some functions absorbed into the state department.
According to a memo circulating among State Department staff and reviewed by WIRED, the Trump administration plans to rename the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as US International Humanitarian Assistance (IHA), and to bring it directly under the secretary of state. The document, on which Politico first reported, states that as part of its reorganization, the agency will “leverage blockchain technology” as part of its procurement process.
“All distributions would also be secured and traced via blockchain technology to radically increase security, transparency, and traceability,” the memo reads. “This approach would encourage innovation and efficiency among implementing partners and allow for more flexible and responsive programming focused on tangible impact rather than simply completing activities and inputs.”
The memo does not make clear what specifically this means—if it would encompass doing cash transfers in some kind of cryptocurrency or stablecoin, for example, or simply mean using a blockchain ledger to track aid disbursement.
A second federal judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration must now reinstate jobs across 18 agencies and departments, at least for the next two weeks.
Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
A federal judge has ruled that fired workers in 18 government agencies must be reoffered jobs on Monday.
That includes the USAID, CFPB, and Departments of Veterans Affairs and Education.
The ruling is temporary and lasts only two weeks for now.
A federal judge ruled on Thursday that probationary employees in 18 agencies fired by the Trump administration must be reinstated for at least two weeks.
Senior US District Judge James Bredar is now the second federal judge to rule against the mass layoffs after US District Judge William Alsup made a similar decision earlier on Thursday in a separate lawsuit.
Bredar’s new temporary restraining order — from the Maryland district court — goes much wider.
His ruling targets 12 departments, including the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Transportation, State, and Homeland Security. It did not cover the Defense Department, though Alsup’s ruling did.
Bredar and Alsup didn’t buy into the Trump administration’s stated reason for firing employees without notice: that the workers’ individual performance or conduct wasn’t good enough.
“Here, the terminated probationary employees were plainly not terminated for cause,” Bredar wrote in his memo.
“The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct,” he added.
Many of these cuts were made under the recommendations of the White House’s DOGE office, which has spearheaded President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce the federal workforce.
Reinstating jobs will be tough, but appropriate, judge says
Bredar, an Obama appointee, wrote that the 18 departments and agencies he named must reinstate their employees by Monday, March 17, at 1 p.m. ET.
Under this ruling, the terminations are to be suspended for 14 days.
Bredar added that he knew this would likely be a mammoth effort.
“When, as is likely the case here, the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce, it is inevitable that the remediation of that scheme will itself be a significant task,” he wrote.
Their legal challenge argues that the Trump administration ignored protocol and bypassed federal laws requiring employers to notify state governments when conducting mass layoffs.
With their lawsuit proceeding, Bredar wrote in his memo that the court would likely soon consider a longer-term decision regarding the return of the probationary workers.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Bredar’s ruling sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted Alsup’s ruling on Thursday.
“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” she said in a statement. “The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch — singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda. If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for President themselves.”
Thursday’s rulings are among the first in a mounting series of high-profile legal challenges and orders seeking to regulate DOGE’s sweeping moves.
