Get your kids the chickenpox jab to stop anti-vaxxers, parents told

Conspiracy theorists who spread misinformation must be defeated, a health minister said, as he urged parents to take up the new chickenpox jab.

The vaccine, which currently costs around £150 at private clinics and pharmacies, will be rolled out on the NHS in England from January.

It will form part of a new combined immunisation on the childhood vaccination programme, and ministers hope it will protect some youngsters from severe complications from the virus.

Health minister Stephen Kinnock argued it is “common sense” for parents to vaccinate their children, amid what he described as a rise in “vaccine hesitancy” following the Covid pandemic.

New data reveals none of the main childhood vaccines in England reached the 95 per cent uptake target in 2024/25.

Some 91.9 per cent of five-year-olds received one dose of the MMR vaccine, unchanged from 2023/24 and still the lowest level since 2010/11, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

Just 83.7 per cent of five-year-olds had received both MMR doses, down year-on-year from 83.9 per cent and the lowest level since 2009/10.

Uptake of the first MMR dose at 24 months stood at 88.9 per cent in 2024/25 – unchanged on the previous year, but again the lowest figure since 2009/10.

Speaking to LBC, Mr Kinnock said: “There’s been a 10-year trend in declining take-up of vaccines, and I think obviously the vaccine hesitancy that came after the pandemic has definitely not helped.

“These conspiracy theorists, who are peddling this nonsense and rubbish, we’ve got to take them on, we’ve got to defeat them in our arguments and drown out the noise that they’re making.”

The government is working with GPs, schools and public health authorities to create local and national campaigns in a bid to increase take-up, Mr Kinnock said.

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said information shared online that is not rooted in scientific evidence could be one reason for the decline in vaccine uptake.

“I think there is a lot of misinformation around vaccines, particularly around the MMR vaccine,” he told The Independent. “They are seeding doubts into people’s minds that probably wouldn’t have been there before.”

He stressed that we need to “get into marginalised communities that might be fearful and make sure they understand what’s going on, and vaccinate them”.

Dr Ben Kasstan-Dabush, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, urged people “to be cautious” of vaccine information on social media as “it may not be based on scientific evidence”. Instead, he suggested reading the NHS website or calling a GP surgery.

Chickenpox is a common childhood illness and is usually mild.

The main symptom is an itchy, spotty rash over the body, but, before this appears, children may have a high temperature, a loss of appetite, and may feel generally unwell.

Chickenpox usually gets better on its own within one to two weeks, although some children can develop complications, including bacterial infections such as group A strep.

In rare cases, the virus can cause swelling of the brain, serious lung inflammation and stroke, sometimes leading to death.

The chickenpox vaccine – also known as the varicella jab – will form part of a new combined MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella and varicella) vaccine.

It will be offered at GP practices from January 2026, and is expected to offer protection to around 500,000 children every year.

The MMRV will eventually replace the MMR, which is offered to babies at 12 months and 18 months.

It is the first time protection against another disease has been added to the routine childhood vaccination programme since 2015.

Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam, deputy director of immunisation at the UKHSA, said: “Most parents probably consider chickenpox to be a common and mild illness, but for some babies, young children and even adults, chickenpox can be very serious, leading to hospital admission and tragically, while rare, it can be fatal.

“It is excellent news, that from next January, we will be introducing a vaccine to protect against chickenpox into the NHS routine childhood vaccination programme – helping prevent what is for most a nasty illness and for those who develop severe symptoms, it could be a life saver.”

According to the Department of Health and Social Care, chickenpox causes an estimated £24m in lost income and productivity every year in the UK, with parents forced to take time off work to care for their children.

The rollout of the vaccine is also expected to save the NHS £15m a year in costs for treating the illness.

Mr Kinnock said: “We’re giving parents the power to protect their children from chickenpox and its serious complications, while keeping them in nursery or the classroom where they belong and preventing parents from scrambling for childcare or having to miss work.

“This vaccine puts children’s health first and gives working families the support they deserve.”

The chickenpox vaccine is already part of the routine vaccine schedules in a number of countries, including Germany, Australia, Canada and the US.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises UK health departments, recommended the introduction of the jab on the NHS in November 2023.

Private jabs at pharmacies and clinics currently cost around £150 for a full course.

Amanda Doyle, national director for primary care and community services at NHS England, said: “This is a hugely positive moment for families as the NHS gets ready to roll out a vaccine to protect children against chickenpox for the first time, adding to the arsenal of other routine jabs that safeguard against serious illness.

“We will work with vaccination teams and GP surgeries across the country to rollout the combined MMRV vaccine in the new year, helping to keep children healthy and prevent sickness from these highly contagious viruses.”

Inside Putin’s campaign of ‘psychological terror’ in Kyiv

Less than two weeks after Donald Trump promised an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine, Russia pounded Kyiv with the second-worst aerial assault of the war so far on Thursday, killing at least 23 people and injuring 48.

Residents of the Ukrainian capital, which lies hundreds of miles from the front line, have been forced to adapt to a constant cycle of devastating missile and drone strikes since the beginning of the war in February 2022. The sound of air raid sirens and the retreat to bomb shelters have become a daily reality.

In the past few months, Russia has ramped up strikes on towns and cities in a move experts say is a deliberate attempt to sow fear among civilians and break their morale.

“Russia is pressuring Ukraine through psychological methods and intimidation. This is a strategy to exhaust our moral and instil psychological terror,” Liliya Sky, a PhD student from Kyiv, told The Independent.

“It is a methodical, constant campaign of moral and physical exhaustion so that people surrender and agree to give up territories for the sake of simply ending the war,” Ms Sky said. “But Ukrainians have a different mentality: I would rather die than submit.”

At least 100 buildings, including a shopping mall, were damaged in the overnight attack. Rescuers dug through rubble on Kyiv’s left bank to recover bodies while firefighters battled blazes in residential buildings.

Keir Giles, a fellow of the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, told The Independent that Moscow was seeking to “cause the maximum possible misery and suffering among the civilian population”.

“That’s the principle we saw applied in Syria, in Chechnya and in countless others of Moscow’s wars dating back decades and centuries,” he said.

Natia Seskuria, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said that the “systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure forms a central element of Russia’s strategy, designed to terrorise the Ukrainian population and erode public morale”.

“The underlying calculation is that a war-weary society subjected to sustained attacks might exert pressure on the government to accept almost any settlement that promises an end to hostilities,” she told The Independent. “Thus far, however, this strategy has proven ineffective, as Ukrainians have demonstrated remarkable resilience and determination in the face of ongoing aggression.”

Some 629 missiles and drones hit Ukraine on Thursday, most of which hit the capital. Only one other Russian air attack has surpassed this scale since June: an attack comprised of 741 missiles and drones on 9 July which targeted the city of Lutsk.

“As usual, Russians are not achieving results on the battlefield and are trying to make up for it by terrorising peaceful cities,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to the minister of strategic industries, told The Independent.

Mr Giles said Ukraine was “the victim of Russia’s attempts to demoralise its victims through inhumanity. “That’s the reason for attacks on maternity hospitals, and nurseries, targeting the most vulnerable in society, as well as for the systematic torture and starvation of Ukrainian military and civilian captives – not for any objective purpose other than deliberate and demonstrative cruelty.”

Western leaders continue to accuse Vladimir Putin of avoiding any serious attempt at ending the war. The Kremlin maintains it remains interested in peace talks despite Thursday’s air attack.

“The most recent wave of Russian strikes underscores that Putin has neither the intention of pursuing peace nor of altering his political and military objectives in Ukraine,” RUSI’s Ms Seskuria said.

Earlier this month, a summit held in Alaska between the US and Russian presidents failed to produce a deal. Mr Trump said the meeting was “very productive”, but the latest diplomatic push to end the war has yet to yield any results. Two Ukrainian envoys are due to meet members of the Trump administration on Friday to discuss the next steps.

“Russia chooses ballistics instead of the negotiating table,” Ukraine’s President Zelensky said after the attack. “It chooses to continue killing instead of ending the war. We expect a response from everyone in the world who has called for peace but now more often stays silent rather than taking principled positions.”

The attack on Kyiv damaged the European Union’s mission and British Council offices in the city, prompting London and the EU to summon their Russian envoys. But Mr Giles at Chatham House warned that the attack carries broader dangers: “Russia’s other neighbours know that the same treatment awaits them if Ukraine falls and Moscow looks for its next victim. But nobody should think that because they are far from Russia they are immune. Russia has been practising delivering death and destruction at immense ranges, and western Europe, including the UK, is well within reach of the same kinds of inhuman wave attacks that are currently being delivered against Kyiv.”

On Thursday it was revealed that European leaders are considering the creation of a 40km buffer zone between the Ukrainian and Russian front lines as part of a deal to end the war.

Five diplomatic sources told Politico that such a zone could form part of a postwar or ceasefire agreement in Ukraine. The US is not currently involved in the talks, and it is unclear whether the plan would be accepted by Kyiv as it could involve territorial concessions.

Obama slams Trump after president threatens to clamp down on Chicago

Barack Obama has slammed Donald Trump after he threatened to clamp down on crime in Chicago, as part of a major national crackdown.

On Thursday, internal documents obtained by the New York Times revealed the Trump administration was plotting a mass immigration operation in Chicago – involving 200 homeland security officials and the use of a naval base outside of the city as a staging area.

In response, the former president said “all Americans [are] at risk” in response to an op-ed on Trump’s paramilitary efforts by renowned Times’ columnist Ezra Klein. In Klein’s piece, he interviews journalist Radley Balko, who has been documenting the militarization and law enforcement efforts under Trump, in his Substack, The Watch.

“This interview […] provides a useful overview of some of the dangerous trends we’ve been seeing in recent months regarding federalization and militarization of state and local police functions,” said Obama in a tweet on X Thursday.

“The erosion of basic principles like due process and the expanding use of our military on domestic soil puts the liberties of all Americans at risk, and should concern democrats and republicans alike,” Obama continued.

Border czar Tom Homan confirmed “discussions” about the use of a naval station in Illinois were being held in an interview with reporters Thursday.

“It’s under discussion. The planning is still being discussed. So, maybe by the end of the day, but yeah, it’s being discussed,” he said. “Chicago still has a crime problem. So President Trump, again, made a promise to the American people he will make the country safe again.”

Trump has long targeted Chicago for its issues with crime, calling it “a mess,” while blaming fragmented Democratic leadership for its problems.

“Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent. And we’ll straighten that one out probably next,” Trump said.

Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called Trump’s threat to send the National Guard to Chicago, “uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound,” in a statement last Friday.

In the city’s most recent report on crime, published Monday, overall violent crime was recorded as being down by 21.6 percent, along with a 33 percent reduction in homicides and a 38 percent reduction in shootings, in the first six months of 2025.

Trump has spent weeks condemning the crime rate in cities such as Washington. D.C., and brought in the National Guard – who were spotted picking up trash near the White House recently – and federal agents to help D.C. police in their efforts to reduce crime.

Angela ‘Three homes’ Rayner has done nothing wrong – and the Tories know it

An MP has bought a flat and paid the stamp duty that is due on the transaction. Those are the facts of a news story that has been spun into yet another attack on Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, by a right-wing newspaper.

The headline on the front-page lead story in The Daily Telegraph today is: “Angela Rayner dodges £40,000 stamp duty.” The word “dodges” implies that she has done something wrong, whereas the article itself makes plain that she has not.

The only reason for thinking that she should have paid more in stamp duty is that journalists assumed that she still owned a share of a house in her constituency, Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester. If she had, she would have been liable for the higher rate of stamp duty payable on buying a second property.

The actual news uncovered by The Telegraph, though, is that she no longer owns the Ashton-under-Lyne house, which has presumably been transferred to her husband, Mark Rayner, whom she is divorcing.

So all those headlines a few days ago, when the Sunday newspapers discovered that she had bought a flat in Hove – where she had been photographed enjoying herself on the beach – have turned out to be wrong.

She has not bought a “third home” to add to her “property empire”. She is allowed to live in a (quite grand) government flat in Admiralty Arch, which comes with the job, and she has just bought the only property that she owns.

Not only was the reporting of her flat purchase snobbish, as Flic Everett wrote for The Independent – “it’s classist, sexist, ad hominem and profoundly unfair” – it was also based on outdated information. Perhaps Rayner should have volunteered all the facts as soon as the flat purchase was reported, but she guards her family’s privacy fiercely and can be stubborn when intrusive questions are asked, including about her teenage sons, who live with their father in Ashton-under-Lyne.

Her obstinacy kept the story going when there was a fuss about her living arrangements before – whether she should have paid capital gains tax when she sold her former council house before becoming an MP. She might have been better advised to have disclosed all the facts up front, but her reluctance to give in to the right-wing press that was hounding her was understandable, and she was not found to have done anything wrong then, either.

Once again, the double standards of the right-wing press are extraordinary. Having discovered that she paid the right amount of stamp duty on the Hove flat, The Telegraph’s story then branched off into an attempt to suggest that she ought to be paying council tax on the Admiralty Arch flat – although the convention is that the government pays the council tax on ministers’ grace-and-favour residences.

The Telegraph concludes in the fifth paragraph of its story that Rayner’s arrangements are “entirely legal”, but goes on to say they “will raise questions over whether she has deliberately conducted her property affairs to pay less stamp duty and council tax”. In other words, she has chosen not to pay more tax than she has to. Given that most of The Telegraph’s money pages are devoted to providing advice to its readers on how they may do the same, the only difference must be that she is a Labour politician.

How many Conservative MPs who have bought property and paid the tax due have been accused of “dodging” by The Telegraph? How does the paper think that her behaviour compares with that of Boris Johnson, who got the taxpayer to pay for the redecoration of the prime minister’s Downing Street flat, but was eventually and reluctantly forced to pay for it himself?

The Conservative Party is making a mistake by joining in the right-wing press vendetta against Rayner. What does the Tory party think it says about working-class aspiration that it is criticising a working-class woman who has risen to the top in politics, for buying a flat by the sea and paying the right amount of tax on it?

Raducanu trails dominant Rybakina in US Open after 6-1 first set

Emma Raducanu takes on Elena Rybakina in the third round of the US Open as the British No 1 faces her toughest test so far in New York.

Raducanu has breezed through the first two rounds while playing some of her best tennis since famously winning the US Open as an 18-year-old qualifier four years ago. It sets up a blockbuster tie against former Wimbledon champion and Australian Open finalist Rybakina, who is also coming into form after a difficult couple of years.

Raducanu said that she has taken confidence from how she pushed World No 1 Aryna Sabalenka across their two battles at Wimbledon and the Cincinnati Open, but the scale of the 22-year-old’s task is made clear by the fact that the big-hitting Rybakina, the ninth seed, recently toppled Sabalenka in straight sets in their Cincinnati quarter-final.

Later at the US Open, Cameron Norrie will take on Novak Djokovic, who has struggled for form so far. Norrie is the last British player standing in the men’s singles after Jacob Fearnley’s defeat to Alexander Zverev and Jack Draper’s withdrawal before his second-round match due to an arm injury.

Follow Raducanu v Rybakina and latest updates from the US Open, below:

Make the most of London this summer with this stadium experience

Whether you’re experiencing London for the first time or you’re a family with kids keen to create unforgettable memories during the holidays, a visit to this world-famous stadium in North London is a must.

After 90 years at their beloved Highbury stadium, Arsenal’s ambitions outgrew their original home and in 2006, the club opened the Emirates. With a seating capacity of over 60,000, the Emirates stadium is one of the largest in England. The sheer scale of this field of dreams must be seen to believed — and thanks to its easy-to-reach location, you can hop on a bus or train and get there in no time.

Once there, Arsenal’s award-winning tours open the doors to parts of the stadium that are usually off-limits to the public. For sightseers who prefer to go at their own pace and for those with little ones who tire easily, the club’s self-guided audio-visual tour is a great option.

Fans and families can take their time to soak in the atmosphere and stroll in the footsteps of footballing legends, imagining the roar of the crowd as you step into the players’ tunnel. Afterwards, feel the tension rise in the dugout and experience the best seats in the house in the directors’ box.

It’s a rare opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of a prestigious football club and explore normally restricted areas that also include the home and away dressing rooms, the media lounge and the exclusive members-only Diamond Club.

Available in seven languages on a state-of-the-art handheld device, the tour is narrated by Arsenal presenter David Frimpong, otherwise known as ‘Frimmy’, as well as featuring commentary from Arsenal legends Alex Scott and David Seaman.

As well as audio, the tour recreates the electric atmosphere of matchday using 360-degree augmented footage and includes brand new interactive elements. You can also take souvenir photos with iconic Arsenal trophies, including that of the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

The Arsenal Legend Stadium Tour is a more bespoke alternative to the self-guided tour, where visitors can explore the stadium for 90 minutes alongside an Arsenal hero. Tour guides include Nigel Winterburn and Perry Groves, as well as former women’s captain Faye White MBE.

During the tour, the Arsenal legend will share memories, anecdotes and behind-the-scenes stories from their time on the pitch, offering a unique insider’s perspective on life at the club. Expect plenty of humour, fascinating insights and a chance to hear back-room gossip straight from the legends themselves. There’s also a chance for a Q&A and photo opportunity with your Arsenal legend of choice.

Included with every tour ticket is entry into Arsenal’s interactive museum situated right next door to the stadium. Chart the club’s evolution from humble origins in Woolwich in 1886 to its modern powerhouse status with a global following of over 100 million fans.

The museum features two impressive video theatres, showing highlights from the club’s origins to the present day as well as twenty major displays of Arsenal’s proud history. Feast your eyes on silverware from the club’s most successful eras, Michael Thomas’s boots from Anfield 1989 and Jens Lehmann’s goalkeeper gloves worn for every league match of the unbeaten Invincibles season in 2003/4.

For lifelong Gooners, it’s a trip down memory lane. For families and tourists, it’s an eye-opening lesson in why football matters so much to the UK and is the perfect outing to experience London at its most authentic.

This content is brought to you by Living360, a digital lifestyle destination keeping you up to date with health and fitness, food and drink, homes and gardens, beauty, travel, finance trends and more.

Getting rid of the ECHR won’t stop a single boat of migrants

The thing about human rights – as highlighted in the title of the first such international commitment to them, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – is that they are, indeed, “universal”. They are for everyone and for all time.

The 1951 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) campaign, which Winston Churchill was a leading figure of, gave them, on our continent, some force in law. The Human Rights Act of 1998, passed by the Blair government, then made them more accessible through the British courts – British, not “foreign” judges, can adjudicate (albeit with the possibility of appeal to the multinational European Court).

They are not, therefore, supposed to be subject to the rule of the Overton window of slowly shifting “respectable” opinion. They are for all time in all places for all people.

Opinion polls are not supposed to come into it. Indeed, that’s the whole point; they are there as an immutable barrier to the kind of populist movements or coups that can lead to freedom-crushing fascism or communism. Human rights are supposed to be inconvenient to governments and contrary to the “will of the people” – and an international constraint on any domestic political system captured by demagogues and dictators.

So what’s happening now – the mainstreaming of the view that the ECHR is no longer workable or needed – is deeply depressing. Unless you’re one of those people who think that, by some divine law, the UK uniquely can never fall to autocracy because of its ancient traditions and protections. Not so. And it’s a pity that Lords including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Malcolm Rifkind – along with some Red Wall Labour MPs, led by Jo White in the archetypal seat of Bassetlaw – wish to partially derogate from some clauses, temporarily suspend or entirely scrap the UK’s membership.

It feels that Kemi Badenoch will follow shortly, and, of course, Nigel Farage has always wanted out of anything “European”. Even Tony Blair, ex-human rights lawyer and the man who “brought human rights home” in the 1998 legislation, thinks it’s out of date and poorly equipped to deal with the challenge of this century.

In fact, ever the pragmatist, Blair has held this belief for a surprisingly long time. Back in 2003, as prime minister during a similar moral panic about migrants, he declared of his own Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act: “If the measures don’t work, then we will have to consider further measures, including fundamentally looking at the obligations we have under the convention on human rights.”

Well, he was wrong then, and he’s wrong now. The “emergency” is overdone. Irregular arrivals numbers are lower than in, say, 2022 – a modest figure in absolute terms, at 50,000, and small in relation to much higher regulated lawful migration, which would be untouched even by the Farage plans for the ECHR.

The fears about crime and terrorism are also exaggerated. Any serious crime, including sexual offences, should be prosecuted with the full force of the law – whether that’s someone fresh in from Eritrea or who can use an ancestry website to prove their DNA is 100 per cent from these shores. Crime is crime, and sexual molestation is intolerable, in any colour.

But even if the worst possible slant is placed on the asylum seekers – that they’re all “fighting age men”, sex-crazed illiterate killers, ready to milk the benefits system, take our jobs and bomb our trains – then abolishing the ECHR would make no difference. As people such as Farage stress, we still have our Magna Carta rights, the Bill of Rights, and common law to protect us.

Suspending human rights only applies to “illegal migrants”. Well, up to a point. Take habeas corpus, the right to freedom under the law, which predates Magna Carta. Should anyone be subject to being detained by the police on no charge indefinitely and even deported with no “due process”? How can that be done without someone at some point being brought before a court to verify that they are not a British citizen or a legal immigrant – and, therefore, lawfully subject to such arbitrary detention?

Without such a safeguard, anyone could be “detain and deported” off the street if a copper says so. At some point you have to be be given the right to say you are a citizen, and prove it. That is only a safeguard for everyone if it applies in all circumstances, to everyone. Without that, you have the danger of a police state and being sent to some pliant foreign country on the whim of a Reform UK minister.

Last, while it would certainly speed up removals, it would make no difference to the average asylum seeker readying themselves for the journey across the English Channel. All it means, as with most of these draconian measures, is that an asylum seeker, or economic migrant, for that matter, no longer has any incentive to try to claim asylum, because they would indeed be sent back summarily.

But the incentives to come to the UK remain – whether fleeing for your life or seeking the chance of starting anew. There would simply be another switch in the tactics of the people smugglers towards entirely clandestine arrivals on the English coast, in the dead of night, undetected and entirely out of control. Or you could simply overstay a work, visit or student visa, and spend the rest of your days evading the authorities, working and living in a criminalised grey economy. Not ideal.

So we really don’t have any need to abolish the ECHR or suspend any other rights to cope with an admittedly intractable problem. We simply need faster processing and a system of ID cards that can detect all those irregular migrants who have no right to be here, and who may not have arrived on small boats. But, ironically, people such as Farage say that ID cards offend our human rights, which they actually don’t.

I’d have much more time for the politicians who want out of the ECHR if they just said that the reason they want to do so is because of public opinion and they want to get elected next time. They could simply argue that the British people plainly don’t like all this immigration, because they feel their culture, jobs, or safety are being attacked, and they would rather not have it – probably not even most of the legal stuff except the odd football player. That, at least, would be wrong, and still a betrayal of the British people, but honest.

Overton window or not, it’s dishonest to pretend that human rights are a “problem” and getting rid of them is the key to reducing any kind of migration. It’s a lie.

JD Vance says he’s prepared to become president ‘If, God forbid, a terrible tragedy happens’

JD Vance has said he is ready to take on the presidency “If God forbid, a terrible tragedy happens” to Donald Trump.

In a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY, the vice president said he was “confident” President Trump would see out the rest of his term, but added he has had a lot of “on-the-job training”.

He also insisted to White House Correspondent Francesca Chambers Trump was in “incredibly good health”, despite recent questions about the president’s physical wellbeing.

Vance said: “He’s got incredible energy, and while most of the people who work around the President of the United States are younger than he is, I think we find that he actually is the last person who goes to sleep, he’s the last person making phone calls at night, and he’s the first person who wakes up and the first person making phone calls in the morning.

“Yes, terrible tragedies happen, but I feel very confident the President of the United States is in good shape, is going to serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people.

“And if, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy, I can’t think of better on-the-job training than what I’ve gotten over the last 200 days,” he added.

According to the 25th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the vice president assumes the full title and responsibilities of the president if they die, resign, or are removed from office. There have been nine instances of a vice president succeeding their president during a term.

For example, Calvin Coolidge was vice president under Warren G. Harding and became president after Harding died suddenly on August 2, 1923.

Vance’s comments follow recent concerns over Trump’s health after visible bruising was spotted on his hands. In a later appearance, the bruising appeared to be covered up by poorly-applied makeup.

The marks first appeared last summer, when then-campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt — now White House press secretary — attributed them to Trump “constantly working and shaking hands all day, every day”.

But questions resurfaced last month after a series of photographs showed Trump’s ankles to be very swollen, prompting a memorandum from Physician to the President Dr. Sean Barbabella linking the swelling were a result of “chronic venous insufficiency,” which he called a “benign and common condition” for someone of Trump’s age.

Earlier this month, President Trump Vance as his heir apparent while praising a number of cabinet members that continue the MAGA project into 2028.

Trump was asked by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy who would lead MAGA in the next presidential race.

“This weekend, Secretary of State Rubio said that he thought JD Vance would be a great nominee. You could clear the entire Republican field right now. Do you agree that the heir apparent to MAGA is JD Vance?” Doocy asked.

“Well, I think most likely. In all fairness, he’s the vice president, and I think Marco is also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form,” Trump replied.