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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.

First, let’s check in on vaccines. On Thursday and Friday of last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, met to review and vote on recommendations for official U.S. vaccine guidelines. Back in June, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, dismissed all sitting members of the committee. Several of the 12 new panel members, all handpicked by Kennedy, have publicly expressed doubts about the safety of vaccines or the severity of the COVID pandemic.

An agenda released ahead of last week’s meeting stated that the ACIP would propose recommendations for the hepatitis B, COVID and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccines.

Here’s Lauren Young, associate editor for health and medicine at Scientific American, with a quick update as of Friday.

Lauren Young: So far we’ve seen a few votes come through. The first one that they focused on was the MMRV vaccine. This is the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine. Varicella is commonly known as chickenpox, and they decided not to recommend the single combined shot for kids younger than age four.

Another vaccine that was discussed was the hepatitis B vaccine. There wasn’t really any changes to this, but members did vote in support that all pregnant people should be tested for hepatitis B infection, which is the current standard practice of care.

ACIP also considered an additional recommendation to remove the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine, with the first dose not given earlier than one month of age, [for infants born of people who test negative for the virus]. But they decided to table that vote because there was some confusion around some of the phrasing around that recommendation. That’s been a really big theme around these meetings this past week. There’s just been a lot of confusion.

So that’s just come to show how much these meetings have changed since RFK, Jr., has overhauled the ACIP panel. We’ve seen the shift away from science and away from scientific evidence of reviewing, very rigorously, vaccine data. And now it’s turned more into a lot of confusion and a lot of discourse around questioning the evidence in ways that just don’t quite always make sense. And our staff is watching this super closely. So check out our website for the latest updates.

Feltman: Speaking of vaccines, last Tuesday AHIP—the national trade association representing the health insurance industry—put out a statement on vaccine coverage. The organization said its member insurance plans would continue to cover all immunizations recommended by ACIP as of September 1, 2025, through the end of 2026. This includes updated flu shots and COVID vaccines.

Now for some public health news on a very different topic: head injuries in sports. You’ve probably heard of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. This progressive neurodegenerative disease, which can only be diagnosed with certainty via autopsy, is believed to be caused by repeat brain trauma, including the kind of repetitive head injuries one might endure while playing contact sports. It can include symptoms such as headaches, confusion, memory loss, poor judgment, depression, dementia, sensory-processing disorders, and other potentially debilitating issues. CTE symptoms generally appear some years after repetitive brain trauma occurs. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers reported that brain degeneration may be detectable in young athletes before CTE starts to set in.

Researchers studied frozen brain tissue from 28 adult men. Some of the study subjects hadn’t played contact sports at all, and others had played American football or soccer but hadn’t been diagnosed with CTE. The rest of the study subjects played contact sports and had been diagnosed with early stages of CTE.

The researchers found signs of inflammation and vascular injury, including a marked drop in the number of neurons, in all the contact athletes they studied—even those who did not have the telltale signs of full-blown CTE. According to the study authors, this suggests that all athletes who frequently hit their heads could be at risk of experiencing some amount of brain damage.

A separate study also published last Wednesday, this one in the journal Neurology, found an association between headers, or a player using their head to control or pass a soccer ball, and changes in the brain. The study asked 352 amateur adult soccer players to estimate their number of head impacts over the course of a year. The use of headers varied pretty widely. When divided into four groups, the top head-users cited an average of 3,152 headers, while those at the other end of the spectrum estimated just 105 a year.

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Above: Maciej Rogowski/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images; Below: Chris Leduc/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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