WASHINGTON (AP) — A Food and Drug Administration official is getting his job back as the agency’s top vaccine regulator, less than two weeks after he was pressured to step down at the urging of biotech executives, patient groups and conservative allies of President Donald Trump.

Dr. Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the FDA center that regulates vaccines and biotech therapies, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement Monday.

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Prasad left the agency late last month after drawing ire of right-wing activists, including Laura Loomer, because of his past statements criticizing Trump.

A longtime a critic of FDA’s standards for approving medicines, Prasad briefly ordered the maker of a gene therapy for Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy to halt shipments after two patient deaths. But that action triggered pushback from the families of boys with the fatal condition and libertarian supporters of increased access to experimental medicines.

Prasad’s decision to pause the therapy was criticized by The Wall Street Journal editorial board, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and others. The FDA swiftly reversed its decision suspending the therapy’s use.

Loomer posted online that Prasad was “a progressive leftist saboteur,” noting his history of praising liberal independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But Prasad has had the backing of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have both called for scrutinizing the use of COVID-19 vaccines. Under Prasad, the FDA restricted the approval of two new COVID-19 shots from vaccine makers Novavax and Moderna and set stricter testing requirements for future approvals.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By BRUCE SCHREINER, Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Ford Motor Co. will invest nearly $2 billion retooling a Kentucky factory to produce electric vehicles that it says will be more affordable, more profitable to build, and will outcompete rival models.

The automaker’s top executive unveiled the new EV strategy Monday at Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant which, after producing gas-powered vehicles for 70 years, will be converted to manufacture electric vehicles.

“We took a radical approach to solve a very hard challenge: Create affordable vehicles that are breakthrough in every way that matters — design, technology, performance, space and cost of ownership — and do it with American workers,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a release.

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The Big Detroit automakers have continued to transition from internal combustion engines to EV technology even as President Donald Trump’s administration unwinds incentives for automakers to go electric. Trump’s massive tax and spending law targets EV incentives, including the imminent removal of a credit that saves buyers up to $7,500 on a new electric car.

Yet Farley and other top executives in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future and there is no going back.

The first EV to roll off the revamped Louisville assembly line will be a midsize, four-door electric pickup truck in 2027 for domestic and international markets, the company said Monday.

The new electric trucks will be powered by lower-cost batteries made at a Ford factory in Michigan. The Detroit automaker previously announced a $3 billion investment to build the battery factory.

The automaker sees this as a “Model T moment” for its EV business — a reference to the mass-produced vehicle that launched the venerable automaker more than a century ago. But Ford says it’s also a nod to the future and the vastly different way Ford says it will build electric vehicles.

The company said it will use a universal platform and production system for its EVs, essentially the underpinning of a vehicle that can be applied across a wide range of models, from sedans to SUV, and include both electric internal combustion vehicles.

The Louisville factory — one of two Ford assembly plants in Kentucky’s largest city — will be revamped to cut production costs and make assembly time faster as it’s prepared to churn out electric vehicles.

The result will be “an affordable electric vehicle that we expect to be profitable,” Farley said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. “This is an example of us rejuvenating our U.S. plants with the most modern manufacturing techniques.”

The new platform enables a lineup of affordable vehicles to be produced at scale, Ford said. It will reduce parts by 20% versus a typical vehicle, with 25% fewer fasteners, 40% fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant and a 15% faster assembly time, Ford said. The traditional assembly line will be transformed into an “assembly tree” at the Louisville plant, it said. Instead of one long conveyor, three sub-assembly lines will operate simultaneously and then join together, it said.

“Nobody wants to see another good college try by a Detroit automaker to make an affordable vehicle that ends up with idled plants, layoffs and uncertainty,” Farley said in the release. “So, this has to be a good business. From Day 1, we knew there was no incremental path to success. … We reinvented the moving assembly line.”

Other specifications for the midsize electric truck – including its reveal date, starting price, EPA-estimated battery range, battery sizes and charge times — will be announced later, the company said. Ford revealed in its release that the truck will have a targeted starting price of about $30,000.

Ford said its investment in the Louisville plant will secure 2,200 hourly jobs.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that the automaker’s plans for the Louisville plant will strengthen a more than century-old partnership between Ford and the Bluegrass State.

“This announcement not only represents one of the largest investments on record in our state, it also boosts Kentucky’s position at the center of EV-related innovation and solidifies Louisville Assembly Plant as an important part of Ford’s future,” Beshear said.

Ford said its combined investment of about $5 billion at the Kentucky assembly plant and Michigan battery plant is expected to create or secure nearly 4,000 direct jobs between the two plants while strengthening the domestic supply chain with dozens of new U.S.-based suppliers.

Ford previously forecast weaker earnings growth for this year and further losses in its electric vehicles business as it works to control costs. Model e, Ford’s electric vehicle business, posted a full-year loss of $5.08 billion for 2024 as revenue fell 35% to $3.9 billion.

Ford’s new EV strategy comes as Chinese automakers are quickly expanding across the globe, offering relatively affordable electric vehicles.

“We’re not in a race to build the most electric cars,” Farley told the AP when asked about competition from China. “We’re in a race to have a sustainable electric business that’s profitable, that customers love.

“And this new vehicle built in Louisville, Kentucky, is going to be a much better solution to anything that anyone can buy from China,” he added.

By STAN CHOE, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting near their record heights on Monday as Wall Street waits for an upcoming update on inflation.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged and flirting with its all-time high set two weeks ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 77 points, or 0.2%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was down 0.2%, coming off its own record.

The highlight of this week for Wall Street is likely to arrive on Tuesday, when the government will report how bad inflation was across the country in July. Economists expect it to show U.S. consumers had to pay prices for groceries, gasoline and other costs of living that were 2.8% higher in July from a year earlier, a slight acceleration from June’s 2.7% inflation.

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Inflation has remained stuck above 2%, even if it has improved substantially from its peak above 9% three years ago. And the worry is that President Donald Trump’s tariffs could push it higher.

That in turn is raising fears about a potential worst-case scenario called “stagflation,” where the economy stagnates but inflation remains high. The Federal Reserve has no good tool to fix both problems at once, and it would likely need to concentrate on either the job market or inflation first. But helping one of those areas by raising or lowering interest rates would likely hurt the other.

A top Fed official, Michelle Bowman, said on Saturday that she believes the job market is the bigger concern. She is still backing three cuts to interest rates by the Fed this year following this month’s stunning, weaker-than-expected report on the U.S. job market. Trump himself has also been angrily calling for cuts to interest rates to support the economy.

Other Fed officials, led by Chair Jerome Powell, are more hesitant. Powell has said he wants to wait for more data about how Trump’s tariffs are affecting inflation before the Fed makes its next move, and Tuesday’s update on the consumer price index may offer a big clue about that.

Strategists at Stifel are warning that stagflation may already be on the way, with spending by U.S. consumers slowing, and they warn that it could cause the U.S. economy to slow to a crawl by the second half of the year. That in turn could create a reckoning for investors after they sent stock prices soaring to records from their low point in April.

“Rate cuts cannot save an overvalued S&P 500,” according to the strategists, led by Thomas Carroll and Barry Bannister.

One way companies can make their stock prices look less expensive is by delivering bigger profits.

Micron Technology climbed 4.8% Monday after raising its forecasts for profit and revenue in the current quarter, which will end later this month. The maker of memory for computers said it’s benefiting from higher prices for its products.

AMC Entertainment jumped 7.5% to shave its loss for the year so far, which came into the day at 26.4% after it reported better results for the spring than analysts expected. The movie-theater chain said each customer paid more for their tickets than ever before, while also spending more on food and drinks.

On the losing side of Wall Street was C3ai after the artificial-intelligence application software company warned it may report an operating loss as large as $124.9 million for its first quarter. CEO Thomas Siebel called the first-quarter sales results “completely unacceptable,” and its stock tumbled 31%.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed amid mostly modest movements across Europe and Asia.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury remained at 4.27%, where it was late Friday.

AP Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Transcripts of the secret grand jury testimony that led to the sex trafficking indictment of Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell won’t be released, a judge decided Monday.

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Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in a written ruling that the government had suggested that the materials could be released publicly “casually or promiscuously,” which would risk “unraveling the foundations of secrecy upon which the grand jury is premised” and eroding confidence by persons called to testify before future grand juries,

“And it is no answer to argue that releasing the grand jury materials, because they are redundant of the evidence at Maxwell’s trial, would be innocuous. The same could be said for almost any grand jury testimony, by summary witnesses or others, given in support of charges that later proceeded to trial,” he added.

Federal prosecutors had asked to unseal the documents, in an effort to calm a whirlpool of suspicions about what the government knows about Epstein, a well-connected financier who died behind bars while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Maxwell, his socialite ex-girlfriend, was later convicted of helping him prey on underage girls.

It’s unclear how much the transcripts would have revealed since the Justice Department has acknowledged that they contained no testimony from witnesses who were not members of law enforcement.

Maxwell recently was interviewed by the Justice Department and was moved from a prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas. Her attorney says she testified truthfully.

Prosecutors have said much of what was discussed behind the grand jury’s closed doors ultimately became public at Maxwell’s 2021 trial in 2021, in victims’ civil lawsuits or in public statements from victims and witnesses. The only grand jury witnesses were law enforcement officers.

The decision about the grand jury transcripts doesn’t affect thousands of other pages that the government possesses but has declined to release. The Justice Department has said much of the material was court-sealed to protect victims and little of it would have come out if Epstein had gone to trial.

Another federal judge still is weighing whether to release the transcripts from the grand jury testimony that led to Epstein’s indictment.

A federal judge in Florida declined to release grand jury documents from an investigation there in 2005 and 2007.

Some Epstein victims supported releasing the grand jury transcripts with some redactions. Other accusers said the debate over the material was causing them anguish.

Maxwell, who’s appealing her conviction, opposed unsealing the documents. Her lawyers said she hasn’t seen them but believed they were full of questionable statements that her defense had no opportunity to challenge.

The Epstein saga has again become a national flashpoint six years after authorities said the financier killed himself. The 66-year-old was facing federal sex trafficking charges involving dozens of teenage girls and young women, some as young as 14.

Epstein already had served jail time and registered as a sex offender after pleading guilty to Florida prostitution offenses in a 2008 deal that let him avoid federal charges at the time.

President Donald Trump later raised questions about Epstein’s death, and Trump allies stoked conspiracy theories that dark secrets were covered up to protect powerful people. Some of those allies got powerful positions in Trump’s Justice Department and promised to pull back the curtain on the Epstein investigation — but then announced this summer that nothing more would be released and that a long-rumored Epstein “client list” doesn’t exist.

The about-face only amplified the clamor for transparency. After trying unsuccessfully to change the subject and denigrating his own supporters for not moving on, the president told Attorney General Pam Bondi to ask courts to unseal the grand jury transcripts.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed the Justice Department for files in the case. The committee also issued subpoenas to conduct sworn questioning of former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and eight former top law enforcement officials.

Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was one of Epstein’s many famous former friends. So was Trump, a Republican. Both men have said they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes until he was charged, and Epstein’s accusers have not alleged any wrongdoing by Trump or Clinton.