Happy Monday, listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

Hope your February is off to a great start. Let's kick off the week by catching up on all the science news you might have missed.

First, a quick note on some presidential moves that might impact health and science.

Robert Off Kennedy Jr. faced at least some bipartisan pushback during confirmation hearings for his nomination

for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

On Thursday, the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Republican

Bill Cassidy, pressed Kennedy to take a definitive pro-vaccine stance.

Cassidy, who practiced medicine for decades, claims he has constituents who

credit Kennedy, at least in part, for their decision not to vaccinate. After a lot of back and

forth, Cassidy asked Kennedy to agree that if he were confirmed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

would not, quote, deprioritize or delay review and or approval of new vaccines, and that

vaccine review standards will not change from historical norms. Kennedy replied in the affirmative,

but it's important to note that the nominee has a long history of promoting vaccine misinformation.

You can read more about RFK Jr's health health care track record at Scientificamerican.com,

and we'll keep you updated on the confirmation hearings as they proceed. Last week was also pretty

chaotic in terms of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and more. As of last Friday afternoon,

there were reports of web pages disappearing from government health agency sites.

Stat News reported that data from the youth risk behavior surveillance system, which is a large national survey on youth behavioral habits that includes information on gender and sexual identities, had disappeared and was no longer accessible to researchers.

The CDC's social vulnerability index,

which highlights groups particularly vulnerable to disasters because of factors like poverty,

also appeared to be down on Friday, as did some resources about HIV. That's not an exhaustive

list by any means, and this story was very much still developing as of the time of this recording

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