A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal…. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter. The move … Read more

From moisturizers made with beef tallow to salmon sperm facials, consumers have become more interested in animal-based skin care products in recent years. Promoted as natural alternatives to synthetics, they’re gaining popularity across social media and high-end spas as well as at farmers’ markets and in home kitchens. Some experts connect the products’ rise to an increased focus on … Read more

Decreasing the unintended pregnancy rate was a bipartisan wish. In 1969, President Richard Nixon recognized that “unwanted or untimely childbearing is one of several forces which are driving many families into poverty.” A year later, Congress passed Title X: the first federal program entirely dedicated to family planning and reproductive health care. It would go on to … Read more

Misinformation can affect and even derail polio vaccination campaigns, threatening the lives of children in underprotected communities. At a glance One day in 2023, mother-of-one Memory Mukusha was attending to her toddler when a curious message popped up on her mobile. She stopped what she was doing to read the incoming message, flagged eye-catchingly as … Read more

o solve big problems and navigate a chaotic world, we first need a clear, shared understanding of the facts. Today, though, technologies such as social media, online chat and artificial intelligence (AI) are allowing opportunistic actors to target people with intentionally manipulative and confusing narratives, often designed to rouse strong emotional responses, like fear, anxiety … Read more

nce again, raw milk is everywhere: in Instagram reels, wellness podcasts, farmer-to-consumer marketplaces, and even policy debates. It’s being framed as ancestral, clean, immune-boosting, and somehow more “real” than the milk most of us grew up drinking. With about 4.4% of U.S. adults, or about 11 million people, have reported drinking raw milk at least once … Read more

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t like our criticism of the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of Replimune’s life-saving drug for metastatic melanoma. But the Health and Human Services Secretary’s statements at a House hearing [on April 16, 2026] were as bewildering as the FDA rejection. “[T]he career scientists who looked at that drug said it was not … Read more

Are America’s top scientists being kidnapped or disappeared by a foreign adversary? Right-wing media are abuzz with speculation that 11 different individuals working on issues related to secret technology or the investigation of extraterrestrial life have been picked off one by one: murdered, kidnapped, disappeared. The stuff of The X-Files, in short: “The truth is … Read more

One of the truly remarkable—and depressing—things that I’ve observed since the longtime antivax activist who is now our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first coined the slogan “make America healthy again” whose abbreviation MAHA now stands for everything from antivax activism to promoting lots of supplements and even cancer quackery, with a dollop of science-based considerations of the effect of … Read more

arc Ernstoff, a physician who has pioneered immunotherapy research and treatments for cancer patients, said his work as a federal scientist proved untenable under the Trump administration. Philip Stewart, a Rocky Mountain Laboratories researcher focused on tick-borne diseases, said he retired two years earlier than planned because of hurdles that made it too challenging to … Read more