Ping Huang

The longer they feed, the more likely they are to transmit certain diseases like Lyme and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

And if you get a rash or fever in the days and weeks after being in the woods or in other places that might have many ticks, go and seek medical care promptly.

Ping Huang, NPR News.

Every spring, after the winter peaks of cold and flu, the CDC reports on how well seasonal vaccines worked.

For those who got them, how much less likely were they to get hospitalized or to die from the disease?

This March, CDC staff published a paper on flu vaccine effectiveness in the agency's flagship weekly publication, and they plan to do the same for the COVID vaccine.

But Acting Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya held the COVID paper for weeks.

Now, the planned publication has been canceled.

The stoppage was first reported in the Washington Post and confirmed by Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Nixon cited concerns about how the paper estimates vaccine effectiveness, even though the CDC's methodology has been the same for years.

Ping Huang, NPR News.

Maybe they heard us and they were like, okay, we'll show you that we're the Amigos and that we're friends.

Yeah.

So she is a preventive medicine doctor with a lot of credentials.

She has a medical degree from Brown, a law degree from the University of Maryland, and a master's in public health from the Uniformed Services University.

She's had a long career as a military doctor, mostly in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

And she spent a lot of that time in the Coast Guard becoming its chief medical officer in 2015, charged with keeping all their service members healthy.

She also served as deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration, where she took on a big role with the COVID testing strategy.

And a few years ago, she retired as a rear admiral, left public service, and now Trump is inviting her back.

If she gets the role, she's going to be the face of a public health system that's been really struggling.