There have been 2,318 measles cases reported across the nation this year, according to the CDC. That's higher than in any year since a significant nationwide measles epidemic from 1989 to 1991.
World Cup economic impact on L.A., beer sales soar
© Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times
The Trump administration may have just signed an agreement so controversial that President Donald Trump himself is opposed to it.
On Wednesday, the US and Saudi Arabia signed a 30-year, multibillion-dollar nuclear energy cooperation agreement. The terms of the deal signed by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart have not been released, but some of the details discussed by officials in reporting by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times earlier this week raised eyebrows, mainly the fact that in addition to helping the Saudis construct nuclear reactors, the US could potentially help the Saudis construct facilities to enrich their own uranium.
The timing is particularly awkward with the US currently at war with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran, in large part due to concerns about that country’s nuclear enrichment program.
It is also happening in the context of an emerging new nuclear world, where last century’s arms control agreements are falling by the wayside, regimes like Russia are increasingly employing nuclear threats, and longtime US allies are increasingly nuclear-curious due to both growing military threats and skepticism about the value of American security guarantees. It could raise the risk that other countries will seek the capability to raise the bomb, even if they don’t immediately build one.
“It’s unprecedented in the history of US nuclear policy,” said Matthew Kroenig, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the book, Exporting the Bomb. “Never before have we helped another country build a uranium enrichment facility. All the way back to Eisenhower, the deal has been: If you want nuclear energy, terrific. We’re happy to help you, but you can’t make the fuel because once you make the fuel, it’s too dangerous.”
Whether the deal will even happen is getting less clear. The agreement was already going to face significant opposition in Congress, where it must be sent for review, but Trump added to the confusion on Thursday morning with a Truth Social post that contradicted much of what had been reported the day before. Trump wrote that there would be “no enrichment of material” under the deal and that the agreement is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” referring to the series of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Muslim countries signed during Trump’s first term. This was not reported in any of the media accounts earlier in the week, which were based on statements from US officials.
The Saudi government has not yet responded to Trump’s latest statement, but sources close to the talks have indicated that no such pledge was included in the negotiations.
Saudi Arabia has long insisted that it will not normalize relations with Israel until the creation of a Palestinian state, and if they had caved on that position prior to the agreement, it seems unlikely that no one would have mentioned it before today. At a press briefing on Thursday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt affirmed that the deal would be “off” unless Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords. Asked for clarification on the discrepancy between Wednesday’s reporting and Trump’s announcement on Thursday, the White House press office referred Vox to Leavitt’s statement.
At the moment, there’s more confusion than clarity around the deal, and what it means for the future of both the Middle East and global efforts to control nuclear weapons.
This idea behind the Saudi deal isn’t new: Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration pursued a civilian nuclear deal with the kingdom. It’s been a controversial notion for just as long, given Saudi Arabia’s often aggressive foreign policy, human rights record — including the high-profile murder of US citizens — and the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said in the past that his country would seek to build its own nuclear bomb if Iran ever acquired one.
Saudi Arabia insists that its interest in nuclear energy is purely peaceful — part of a larger goal to diversify its economy away from oil and gas and to generate power for a nascent artificial intelligence industry. Proponents in the US argue that a deal would deepen ties between the US and an important security partner. It would also, they argue, head off the risk of Saudi Arabia cooperating instead with China or Russia to build a nuclear program and be a potential windfall for the US nuclear power industry.
The US has previously entered into 29 nuclear cooperation agreements — commonly known as “123 deals” for Section 123, the legislation that governs them — involving 49 countries. The deals require countries to submit to a number of safeguards to prevent them from weaponizing these nuclear programs, including requiring US consent for any enrichment of uranium for the US-built nuclear plants.
In more recent US deals, most countries have agreed to give the International Atomic Energy Agency even more stringent inspection authorities. Some have gone further: Under the deal signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 and Taiwan in 2013, the countries agreed to forswear any enrichment of uranium on their soil, including for projects in which the United States is not involved. This has been called the “gold standard” for nuclear sharing deals, and it’s what the US pushed for in previous nuclear sharing negotiations with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis have long balked at some of the stricter provisions in some more recent US deals, such as additional IAEA inspections and a pledge to enrich no uranium at all. The kingdom has argued these are intrusive infringements on its sovereignty, particularly given that Iran was allowed to continue enriching under previous agreements with the US. But, Kroenig said, there’s little plausible reason to oppose these restrictions if Saudi Arabia is only interested in civilian energy.
“They probably haven’t decided to build nuclear weapons yet, but it seems like they want the option,” Kroenig said.
Saudi Arabia is not going to build a bomb overnight. It’s not even going to start enriching uranium for some time. Under the deal — at least the version that was reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal — US companies would immediately begin work on building nuclear power plants when the deal goes into force, while US and Saudi officials would conduct a two-year study to determine “value of enrichment for Saudi Arabia.” (This, notably, would likely be concluded during Trump’s term.)
In this respect, the deal may in fact be tougher than the never-concluded Biden agreement, which reportedly would have allowed enrichment to begin immediately.
If the study concludes Saudi Arabia needs to enrich, the enrichment facility would be constructed in a secretive “black box” to prevent the Saudis from acquiring sensitive technology. If the US objects to Saudi enrichment after the study, the Saudis couldn’t enrich for another 10 years. After that, it’s not clear what happens.
The safeguards do not mollify many nonproliferation experts.
“Skeptical is a mild way of putting it,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. “Even if you black-box the technology, Saudi Arabia could still nationalize the facility. This is a country that has overtly declared an interest in proliferation. Once it’s on Saudi soil, you have very limited options to stop it from misusing that technology if it decides to do so.”
The most difficult and expensive part of building a nuclear device is uranium enrichment, and the US will have helped Saudi Arabia a long way down that path. That doesn’t mean the kingdom is necessarily planning to build a bomb, but if it decides on that course of action down the road, it will have a significant head start.
“Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program does not pose a near-term proliferation risk,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. Rather than trying to quickly build a bomb, she suggested that “the more likely scenario is that Saudi Arabia will continue to acquire the capabilities that would be necessary to weaponize and move to the threshold of nuclear weapons, which would enable a rapid move to build the deterrent if the decision were made.”
This, she added, would both complicate ongoing nuclear talks with Iran and “set a terrible precedent” for future nuclear agreements.
“Look, there are some benefits to the deal,” said Robert Einhorn, a former State Department special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control. “It will give a boost to the US nuclear industry. It will help cement US-Saudi strategic relations. It will deny Russia and China a foothold in an important element of the Saudi economy. But the Trump administration will have to work hard to convince the Congress and the American public that the shortcomings of the deal are not disqualifying.”
That process starts this week. The agreement will now be submitted to Congress for a 90-day review period. This isn’t a formal treaty that requires approval. Congress has to pass a joint resolution opposing it.
The deal is likely to draw opposition on both sides of the aisle. In 2019, then-Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), now secretary of state, sponsored legislation that would require any 123 agreement with Saudi Arabia to be affirmatively approved by Congress. (“I miss Sen. Rubio,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a co-sponsor of the House version of the bill, said during a hearing on Wednesday.)
In addition to security concerns, the potential conflicts of interest around the bill may also draw scrutiny. Tom Barrack, a close Trump confidante who is now US ambassador to Turkey and an adviser on Middle East policy, was investigated by federal authorities and was the subject of a House probe during Trump’s first term for lobbying for nuclear deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE while he had significant real estate investments in those countries and ties to the government.
ProPublica also reported in 2019 that Barrack had sought a major financial stake in Westinghouse, the nuclear reactor builder. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Westinghouse Electric is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of the deal to build nuclear reactors in the Kingdom.
It still seems unlikely that opponents of the deal in Congress will be able to cobble together a veto-proof majority to block it. The better question is whether Trump is effectively blocking it. If he is really going to insist on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, that could be a nonstarter for Mohammed bin Salman.
Events in recent years have led Saudi leaders to doubt the extent to which the US would really come to their aid in a worst-case scenario. There have been mixed reports about whether Saudi Arabia backed or opposed Trump’s decision to launch this year’s war on Iran — the Saudi government denies supporting it — but either way, if this war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, in possession of its uranium stockpile, and in control of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, the doubts in Riyadh about America’s reliability will only increase, along with their nuclear ambitions.
In the coming weeks, the White House will make the case that this deal is safer and more comprehensive than the ones the US would not agree to in the Biden administration and Trump’s first term. But that argument will be harder to make against the notion that Saudi Arabia’s incentive to build a bomb has only grown since then.
© Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
Crisscrossing the country — from Virginia to California, Florida, Maryland and finally New York — Andrew Truelove moved between the streets, jails, homeless shelters and psychiatric facilities.
© Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times
The Trump administration has pressed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to 'thumbs-up, thumbs-down' the Flores settlement agreement, a decades-old case in Los Angeles federal court that sets the rules for how the government can detain migrant children.
Abdul El-Sayed is among America’s most prominent proponents of Medicare-for-all.
The frontrunner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary literally wrote the book on that policy (or at least, a book on it). In El-Sayed’s view, Medicare should cover “all necessary healthcare” for every American — without co-pays, premiums, or deductibles — and be “accepted everywhere.”
• American healthcare is expensive largely because our hospitals, doctors, and drugmakers charge unusually high prices.
• American physicians earn about twice as much as Canadian doctors and four times as much as Swedish ones.
• To make Medicare-for-all affordable, we need to push down many doctors’ salaries, which is politically difficult.
• Expanding the supply of doctors — by funding more residencies and easing barriers for foreign-trained physicians — would lower costs and make universal coverage more feasible.
Alas, despite his many years of advocacy, El-Sayed has seemingly failed to persuade his wife of that last point: According to a recent report from the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed’s partner, the psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, does not accept Medicare as a form of payment at her private practice.
This bit of gossip is of little importance, in and of itself. The Free Beacon’s story does nothing to refute the case for El-Sayed’s candidacy or his healthcare plan (his wife’s business is, well, her business). As hit pieces go, it’s weak tea.
Nevertheless, the tension between El-Sayed’s healthcare proposals and his wife’s business practices is real. And it is illustrative of a major challenge facing anyone who wishes to reform our nation’s misbegotten healthcare system: To meet the medical needs of all Americans, reformers will need to defy the interests of most doctors — and in many cases reduce their compensation.
And that won’t be easy. Few people feel a deep fondness for insurance companies. But El-Sayed is far from the only American who loves a physician.
To understand why Medicare-for-all would be bad news for many doctors — and how the Free Beacon’s story illustrates that point — we must first dwell on one fundamental fact about America’s healthcare system: It’s a rip-off.
The US spends about twice as much per person on medical goods and services as other wealthy countries. And yet, all that money does not actually buy us much more care. Compared to our peers abroad, Americans are less likely to see a doctor, secure a long hospital stay, or access a timely appointment for medical treatment. On the other hand, we do have the privilege of paying radically higher healthcare prices.
To take just one telling example: In the United States, a coronary bypass surgery will typically cost more than $89,000; in Australia, it costs just $17,741.
Such exorbitant prices are the chief obstacle to any version of universal healthcare. Even with one-third of working-age Americans uninsured or underinsured — and thus, consuming too little medical care — the bill for America’s health sector ran to $5.7 trillion in 2025.
In El-Sayed’s vision, Americans would consume vastly more medical services than they do today: The uninsured would suddenly have access to every doctor in the country, while everyone else would see their co-pays and deductibles drop to zero, encouraging them to schedule far more doctors’ visits.
This would be a costly proposition in any country. At America’s current healthcare prices, it would be prohibitively expensive. There is simply no way to realize anything approaching the left’s healthcare ambitions without slashing the amount of money that Americans pay per medical service.
Medicare-for-all advocates are aware of this fact. And they’re typically eager to talk about one source of America’s high healthcare prices: The inefficiencies of our private health insurance model.
In America’s byzantine system, each insurer needs its own teams of auditors, claims reviewers, and myriad other specialists, while every major healthcare provider needs a horde of administrators to navigate the idiosyncratic rules of all these different insurance companies. Americans pay dearly for this bureaucratic bloat. By one estimate, our system’s administrative costs are $500 billion higher than they would be if the insurance industry was consolidated into a single public insurer.
And yet, as large as that figure may seem, it still represents a fraction of America’s excess healthcare costs. The primary cause of our nation’s exorbitant medical prices is simpler than administrative redundancies: our healthcare providers charge exceptionally high rates.
Hospitals are the biggest culprits on this front. But physicians are also part of the problem.
According to a 2026 study from economists at the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the US Census Bureau, American physicians earn about twice as much as Canadian ones — and four times as much as Swedish doctors.
Critically, this does not merely reflect America’s greater wealth or wage inequality. It is true that educated professionals of all kinds — financial analysts, lawyers, software engineers, etc. — earn more in the US than they do in other rich countries. But American doctors don’t just earn unusually high absolute incomes — they also occupy an atypically rarified place within their own country’s class hierarchy. About 42 percent of American specialty physicians are in the top 1 percent of their nation’s income earners. Among Canadian specialists, that figure is just 27 percent; for Swedish ones, it is 7 percent.
The main driver of these disparities is straightforward: America imposes fewer price controls on its healthcare sector than other nations do.
And this is where Jukaku’s practice reenters the picture.
The public parts of America’s insurance system — Medicare and Medicaid — pay rates that are only modestly above international norms. It is when American doctors bill private insurers — or the rich consumers of boutique medicine — that they really make bank.
As a result, top clinicians like Jukaku often decline to take Medicare. If you’ve got affluent patients beating down your door, accepting Uncle Sam’s rates just doesn’t pay.
Unless the government forces doctors and hospitals to swallow steep pay cuts, however, Medicare-for-all won’t pencil out. According to a widely cited 2018 analysis by the economist Charles Blahous, if a single-payer system kept provider payments constant, national health spending would rise by $3.25 trillion over a decade, even with administrative savings taken into account. By contrast, if all providers were forced to accept Medicare’s rates, health spending would actually fall by $2.05 trillion over the same period.
Thus, there is a clear conflict between progressives’ healthcare ambitions and medical providers’ material interests.
Yet the left is often reluctant to acknowledge this reality. El-Sayed tends to portray insurers as the sole economic beneficiaries — and political defenders — of America’s inequitable healthcare system. The fact that hospitals and doctors also profit off the status quo’s dysfunctions does not feature prominently in his rhetoric. To the contrary, El-Sayed suggested in 2020 that doctors like his wife are actually underpaid, even though American psychiatrists earn far higher salaries than their counterparts abroad.
To be fair, progressives aren’t alone in eliding providers’ culpability. Virtually all Democratic politicians do the same. And not without reason. Politically speaking, it is one thing to denounce the greed of private insurers — the faceless bureaucracies standing between Americans and their desired treatments. It’s quite another to call for reducing the wages of doctors, men and women who perform laudatory work and enjoy widespread admiration.
Precisely for this reason, however, reformers must grapple with healthcare providers’ investment in the current system. The American Medical Association (AMA), the lobby representing our nation’s physicians, was instrumental in killing past attempts to move toward single-payer. And at least some segments of the medical profession would surely mobilize against any contemporary Medicare-for-all bill that imposed substantial cost controls on the healthcare sector. What’s more, in doing so, they would be able to draw on a resource the private insurance industry lacks — the public’s trust.
There is no easy answer to the problems all this presents. But part of the solution is to chip away at providers’ payment rates where progressives already have the power to do so. This would not only help drive down costs for existing healthcare in the short term, an urgent priority all its own, but also would smooth the path to universal coverage in the long run.
That project can take many forms. One would be state-level payment regulations. In Maryland, hospitals receive the same rates, no matter whether their patients pay with Medicare, private insurance, or cash. And their budgets are also fixed, so that they aren’t able to milk fees out of unnecessary care. Rhode Island, meanwhile, caps the growth of its hospital reimbursement rates at the pace of overall inflation. Other states could follow their lead.
But policymakers should also address the supply constraints that undergird American doctors’ high salaries. US physicians’ ability to command high pay doesn’t just reflect America’s weak cost controls but also a persistent shortage of working doctors. The US has roughly 2.7 physicians for every 1,000 of its residents; the average among comparable countries is 3.9, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.
In this context, forcing down doctors’ pay might seem perilous. After all, doing so would reduce young people’s incentive to pursue a medical career, potentially deepening the shortage.
In reality, however, there is no dearth of qualified people who want to practice medicine in the US. We just don’t let many of them do so.
This is partly because American policymakers consciously sought to restrict the number of doctors in the country, beginning in the 1980s. As Robert Orr of the Niskanen Center explains, the US government issued a report in 1981 warning of an imminent “physician surplus” and recommending “immediate action to curtail both the domestic training of physicians as well as the admittance of those trained outside of the country.”
The report’s argument rested on false premises; it failed to anticipate that Americans’ demand for healthcare would rise sharply as they grew wealthier. Nonetheless, its recommendations were largely implemented: Federal support for medical-school scholarships was pared back while funding for residencies has been capped since 1997.
At the same time, policymakers maintained high barriers to the immigration of fully-trained foreign doctors: Even physicians with years of experience, and credentials in nations with high medical standards, are typically required to complete a multi-year residency before being able to practice in the US.
Ending the federal freeze on residency funding will require congressional action. But states can immediately make it easier for foreign doctors to practice within their borders. In fact, Tennessee established a pathway for such physicians to ply their trade in the state, without having to repeat a residency, in 2023. And many states subsequently enacted similar reforms.
Removing the bottlenecks on America’s doctor supply won’t eliminate the political hurdles to Medicare-for-all. But it would put downward pressure on doctors’ salaries, reduce the risks of capping physician pay, and make the left’s vision of healthcare abundance more feasible. After all, you can’t actually eliminate the care rationing that so many Americans resent by extending insurance coverage or enacting price controls alone. No matter how we pay for our medical services, we can only deliver as much care as our health sector’s resources allow.
In saying all this, I don’t mean to convey disdain for the medical profession. Like El-Sayed, some of my best friends are doctors! In fact, my mother, father, brother, and sister-in-law are all physicians. And they all have contributed far more to American society than I ever will. My brother spends his workdays providing lifesaving treatments to cancer patients; I often spend mine sitting at a desk in my pajamas, arguing about politics on the internet.
Physicians deserve to be well-paid for their strenuous labor. But if we want healthcare in America to be universally affordable and widely accessible, we will need to pay many of them a bit less.
The U.S. war with Iran escalated and global oil prices surged again Thursday as Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
During his campaign to become mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani famously vowed that he’d arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next time he visited the Big Apple.
This week, Netanyahu essentially called his bluff. He’s expected to address the United Nations in September. And after a whole lot of hemming, and hawing, and hedging, Mamdani admitted in a video Tuesday night that he does not actually have the legal authority to arrest a foreign dignitary on US soil.
The retreat is not surprising to legal experts, who had long questioned how Mamdani would pull this particular promise off. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court — a tribunal recognized by 125 countries, not including Israel, China, Russia, or the US — did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of starvation, murder, persecution, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians.
But the US does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. And even if it did, the job of executing its warrants would presumably not fall to New York City cops. So, why did Mamdani suggest he’d arrest Netanyahu when he actually knew he could not?
Mamdani’s allies argue that the principle here mattered, that the mayor needed to issue some kind of denunciation, even if he couldn’t act. But there’s another, more cynical read here, too: For Democrats, critiquing Israel is good politics.
This is a seismic, generational shift, with far-ranging implications for both Democrats and US foreign policy. The party’s left flank has criticized Israel for years, but older and more moderate Dems only soured on Israel recently.
“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” said Hamid Bendaas, of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced.”
For many of these voters, the turning point only came after President Donald Trump took office again. Severe famine swept across Gaza last summer — the consequence of ongoing conflict and Israeli restrictions on food and aid shipments. Netanyahu also allied himself closely with Trump, particularly around the war in Iran. Support for Israel has consequently grown more GOP-coded, rather like Kid Rock or Bass Pro hats.
Now, even Democrats far to the right of Mamdani are looking to retool the US-Israeli relationship. Listen to Tuesday’s Today, Explained podcast episode for even more about the shift (!).
➨ Beat the endless scroll at its own game. Social media is compelling — and compulsive — because it hijacks your sense of curiosity. But my colleague Constance Grady has come up with a delightful (and delightfully simple) antidote: To reclaim your time, just find the thing that fascinates you even more than your feed.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump has seemingly called off a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia after his energy secretary already formally signed it.
What happened? On Wednesday, the Trump administration formally concluded what’s called a “123 Agreement” to work with Saudi Arabia on the development of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure. This kind of deal allows the United States to provide another country with nuclear fuel and equipment on the condition that they submit to safeguards against building a nuclear weapon.
But on Thursday morning, after the negotiations were quite literally concluded, Trump threw a monkey wrench into things — posting on Truth Social that the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”
The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements from Trump’s first term that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some nearby Arab states. In effect, then, Trump is saying that Saudi Arabia will not get its 123 Agreement unless it formally recognizes the State of Israel. Which the Saudis are unwilling to do absent the creation of a Palestinian state.
Why is Trump doing this? As is often the case with his strange last-minute decisions, no one really knows. There are a few leading guesses, though.
The first is that the agreement with Saudi Arabia was a bad idea on the merits. Experts on nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and international relations more broadly all said that the deal gave Saudis exactly what they wanted with virtually nothing in return, effectively surrendering a key piece of leverage Washington has on Riyadh.
The second is that other American friends in the Middle East got angry. The Israelis are a leading candidate, as they have long opposed any agreement that might bring the Saudis closer to a nuke. The Emiratis, often in competition with Saudis for regional influence, are another; their nuclear deal with the US, inked in 2009, is a lot stricter.
The third is bipartisan opposition in Congress, which would need to approve any deal.
What’s the takeaway: Unless something changes radically, Trump has blown up a nuclear deal that’s already been signed — humiliating his negotiators and angering the Saudis.
As of today, we are officially two weeks away from the NFL’s first preseason game. Our long national nightmare of calling soccer “football” is almost over.
What caused the ongoing outbreak of cyclospora, the diarrhea-causing parasite currently spreading across the United States? Michigan officials have been saying for weeks that they believed the outbreak may be linked to bagged salad or salad kits. What we were waiting to learn was the specific brands and specific products in question.
And late last week, it looked like we finally had the answer — but then things quickly got cloudy.
On July 16, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that the outbreak had been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms. A day later, Taylor Farms said it was withdrawing products from US stores and restaurants based on information from the FDA.
But then on July 19, per NBC News, the FDA said that there had been a false positive for cyclospora when testing a sample of Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce; Taylor Farms said in its own statement that the FDA had “apologized” for the mix-up. The next day, the company and the federal government were stuck in a semantic argument: Per NOTUS, the FDA insisted it did not “officially apologize” to Taylor Farms but “explain[ed] factually the issues” with the false positive.
So where does that leave us right now? Officials still believe that Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce was the source of the Michigan outbreak. But whether those are the only products driving the outbreak remains unclear, with almost every state now reporting at least one cyclospora case in 2026. And on Thursday afternoon, the FDA announced that it was tracking a second outbreak linked to other unspecific products, though details were otherwise scarce.
Any outbreak of food-borne illness requires careful public communication. Officials need to tell people how to avoid contaminated food without scaring them away from eating fresh fruits and vegetables altogether.
But instead, many Americans have been left wondering what, exactly, they’re supposed to do. As one frustrated Reddit user put it: “So is the damn lettuce bad or not????” (If you need some advice on what foods are safe and what foods to be cautious about, we have a story for you.)
It may sound like a funny question, but it’s a profoundly serious one. The problem isn’t just that people are confused about their lettuce. The Trump administration’s handling of the cyclospora outbreak — from its conflicting public messages to accusations of political favoritism — has left many Americans even more confused about whether they can trust anything they’re hearing from the government. That’s a dangerous place to be during any public health emergency.
We are approaching 10,000 cyclosporiasis cases across the US this year: Michigan alone has recorded 7,664 as of this morning, Ohio has seen more than 1,200, and more than 40 states have now reported at least one case in 2026. The country usually sees a few hundred cases at most in a given year. Cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by the cyclospora parasite, leads to what public health experts describe as “watery” and “frequently explosive” diarrhea. While it isn’t typically life-threatening, it can cause serious complications: 160 people have been hospitalized in Michigan since the outbreak began.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here.
And so for those of us who very much hope to eat fresh produce but do not want diarrhea, there’s a bit of urgency to figure out where the cyclospora is coming from. Food-borne illness investigations are already inherently difficult because of how globalized our food supply has become: Produce can travel all over the country and the world before it comes to your grocery shelf, and the process of government health workers interviewing the people who get sick and cross-checking to identify the shared foods that they might have in common is laborious.
Once investigators find a source, the information has to be shared clearly and responsibly. That is where the Trump administration has tripped up this week.
Trump — and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in particular — came into office criticizing the public health establishment. They accused officials of misleading the public about the novel coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it, while failing to convey the nuances of the pandemic. But now, as they grapple with the incomplete picture of the cyclospora emergency, they are making many of the same mistakes.
“They’re very similar problems, even if on the outside, they don’t look quite the same,” said Michael Mackert, director of the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. “The underlying commonality is very much that we are dealing with imperfect information all the time.”
In any outbreak, some uncertainty is to be expected. Investigators have struggled to identify the source of earlier cyclosporiasis outbreaks too. And the FDA maintains that the likely source of the outbreak is Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce, based on the information they have gathered from sick patients and other sources, no matter the false positive result that has sparked so much confusion.
“The epidemiological evidence is so strong that the lack of a positive test is almost meaningless,” said Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.
But the mistake that the Trump administration made was in sharing preliminary results and then having to issue a seemingly contradictory statement shortly afterward.
“FDA should have waited for confirmation of the presumptive results before going public,” Diez-Gonzalez said.
Investigations like these are hard enough — but when you add in the public health funding cuts of the past 18 months and the casual and widespread corruption characteristic of the Trump administration, trust in the government’s public health apparatus has sunk even lower.
It’s created just the conditions for conspiracies to bloom. “Unfortunately our FDA is compromised,” wrote one top commenter on Reddit. “I would not trust what comes out of it during this administration.”
Several news outlets and influential social media accounts noted that Taylor Farms had donated $1 million to Trump’s MAGA super PAC and, in the middle of the controversy, received a private White House meeting. According to the New York Times, Taylor Farm officials used that meeting to dispute the findings that their products were responsible for the outbreak — and shortly thereafter, the FDA made its “false positive” announcement.
The administration insists that their decision-making is being guided by science, but even the appearance of impropriety has become a common theme in the press coverage. The broader uncertainty and distrust may help to explain why it’s not only Taco Bell and Taylor Farms taking a hit right now: According to Market Watch, Chipotle and the fast-casual salad chain Chopt have also seen a decline in traffic in recent weeks.
Public health requires public confidence. Perceived influence from special interests is a problem, even if the interactions didn’t alter the FDA or CDC’s actions.
Kennedy, who helms our government’s health department, should understand this well: His Make America Healthy Again movement made restoring public trust a central part of its message while accusing the existing public health establishment as being in league with special interests.
The cyclospora outbreak has revealed how difficult that is to do in practice.
In trying to communicate nuanced information during an active outbreak — while consulting interested parties like Taylor Farms itself — the administration has instead fueled doubts about the credibility of its messaging
Even before cyclospora turned eating salad into a leap of faith, Trump had a poor track record: His administration has slashed CDC staff, brought on vaccine skeptics to set vaccine policy, and clashed with the scientific establishment on a number of high-profile issues, like the time Trump held a televised press conference to argue a disproven theory that Tylenol can cause autism.
“Unfortunately, this is another example of a missed opportunity to establish credible and trusted communications to prepare the public to understand the real risks from the pathogen and confidence in the food safety and information from the FDA,” Scott Ratzan, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, told me. “Faith in our institutions continues to erode. We could do better.”
We are lucky cyclospora is not a deadly disease. Next time, the stakes for these miscues could be much higher.
This week, OpenAI revealed that one of its AI models broke out into the wild and did a bunch of hinky stuff. How many times do we need to hear this story before someone does something to protect humans?
Login