Bob Park’s What’s New: April 24, 2026

No, Bob Park — the physicist who wrote the What’s New newsletter for years — did not write this. Instead, I am imagining what Park would have said were he alive today. The opinions are mine and not necessarily those of Bob Park (but they should be).

What’s New, by Bob Park

Friday, April 24, 2026

1. ERICA SCHWARTZ NOMINATED AS CDC DIRECTOR

Some good news for a change. President Trump has nominated Erica Schwartz to direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Schwartz has a medical degree, served for over twenty years in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and became deputy surgeon general during Trump’s first term. As best I can tell, she would be an island of sanity among this administration’s sea of crackpots. What’s New foresees her tenure playing out in three possible ways: 1) She abandons her good sense and follows Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s anti-science policies, 2) she follows her good sense and RFK Jr fires her, or 3) she and RFK Jr bicker and disagree, and public health policy stumbles along one step forward, one step back. My guess is choice 3, at least until the midterm elections.

2. ROBERT F KENNEDY JR TESTIFIES BEFORE THE SENATE

RFK Jr testified before multiple Senate committees this week. He said “I have nothing to do with the measles outbreak” despite promoting anti-vax views for decades, such as claiming the measles vaccine causes autism. He also said that yearly flu vaccines shots for schoolchildren “simply don’t work,” despite evidence that they reduce hospitalizations and deaths. And he said “China is now eating our lunch” in science, while not acknowledging the drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the CDC Acting Director (sort of) Jay Bhattacharya has blocked publication of a report showing the effectiveness of the covid vaccine, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has eliminated the requirement for soldiers to have the flu vaccine. What we could use now is a determined, vocal advocate for vaccines and for science at a high level in the federal government, like maybe a pro-vax CDC Director or an enlightened Surgeon General.

3. THE PILE OF EVIDENCE SUPPORTING VACCINES GROWS HIGHER

This week Eurosurveillance — Europe’s journal on infectious disease surveillance, epidemiology, prevention and control — published an article about the clinical and economic benefits of covid vaccination in Germany. They concluded that “COVID-19-vaccinated individuals experienced lower hospitalisation rates associated with COVID-19, respiratory or cardiovascular diseases, as well as reduced all-cause mortality and long COVID diagnoses. This translated to lower healthcare costs and fewer sick leave days compared with unvaccinated individuals… With SARS-CoV-2 remaining endemic, our findings highlight the continued health and economic benefits of COVID-19 vaccination.” This article is open access, so you don’t need a subscription to the journal; just click the link. My advice: read it.

4. TERRIBLE TEAM: SUPER EL NINO AND CLIMATE CHANGE

According to an article by Marc Alessi published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a combination of a super-sized El Niño and climate change could lead to record-breaking global temperatures this year and next. Alessi writes “what happens when El Niño interacts with fossil fuel-caused climate change — the long-term increase in global temperatures that is already turbocharging extreme weather events around the world? Unfortunately, the two of them together might be bad news for our climate system.” Apparently some climate models are predicting that this El Niño could be the strongest on record. Strap yourself in, because we’re about to take off.

[embed]Climate scientist Ella Gilbert discusses the coming El Niño.

5. GHOST MURMUR

I’ve worked off and on in the field of biomagnetism since the mid 1980s, when as a graduate student I recorded the magnetic field of a single nerve axon. But I have not been directly involved in clinical measurements of the magnetic field of the heart: the magnetocardiogram. So I was surprised when Deni Béchard, a reporter for Scientific American, called to ask me about “Ghost Murmur.” My initial response was: what’s that? Béchard explained how the Trump administration is claiming that one of the downed American pilots was found and rescued from Iran by detecting his heartbeat from 40 miles away. Is this possible? Magnetic measurements of the heart’s magnetic field have been made for decades (see my review article “Biomagnetism: The First Sixty Years”), but they are just barely detectable a few inches from the heart. The source of the heart’s magnetic field is usually represented as a current dipole, and a dipolar magnetic field falls off as the inverse square of the distance. Compare current technology (measuring the field about 60 mm from the heart) to the claim made by the Trump administration (measuring the field about 60 km from the heart). The ratio of these two distances is one million. With the inverse square fall off, that means the magnetic field 60 km from the heart would be a million-million, or one trillion, times weaker than the field 60 mm from the heart. One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000. I’m extremely skeptical. To learn more, see Béchard’s Scientific American article.