Health & Medicine
As teen suicides pile up, AI companies squirm to avert accountability
It was Amaurie’s younger sister who discovered the body. She was also the one who was looking through her brother’s ...
How to “vaccinate” against mis- and disinformation
As part of BBC Media Action’s broader effort to understand what works in tackling information disorder, we’re testing proactive responses to ...
Viewpoint: The Trump-RFK, Jr. anti-vaccine circus has yet another act, and it’s getting worse
Three weeks ago in a CIDRAP Op-Ed, I argued that the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was preparing to ...
Viewpoint: ‘Structural racism’ isn’t a myth and it can kill you
Across countries and decades, evidence links discriminatory housing, education, and health systems to higher mortality, greater disease burden, and poorer ...
Viewpoint: Climate change propaganda and disinformation are now the official position of the U.S. government
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists recently won a court case against the administration which forced it to ...
Viewpoint: There are dangerous consequences to firing credible scientists and gutting U.S. health agencies
In the past year, more than half of the leaders of the Institutes and Centers (IC) at the National Institutes ...
The most developed countries have declining birth rates, endangering their economies—or maybe not
Low fertility rates—the average number of children born to a woman—may not spell economic trouble after all, scientists say. In ...
40% of American adults have confidence in RFK Jr.’s leadership on health, and the numbers are sinking
Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s public health agencies, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center ...
Viewpoint: How ‘fake news’ shapes our behavior?
In recent years, the spread of fake news—particularly in the health domain—has become a significant concern. Misinformation about medical treatments, vaccines, ...
The Trump administration pledged to speed approval of rare disease drugs. The reality is the opposite
Rare disease breaks the traditional math of drug development. Companies can’t run a 10,000-patient trial when only a few thousand ...
Congress created a mechanism to address rare vaccine injuries. RFK, Jr. is poised to tear it apart
For nearly four decades, Americans who believe they have been harmed by a vaccine have had access to a little-known ...
As vaccine disinformation sweeps the country, pediatricians struggle to respond
Across the country, clinicians like Dr. [Alissa] Parker, who also holds a doctorate in nursing practice, are contending with a ...
Viewpoint: In defense of plastics (and a rebuttal of ideology-infused misinterpretations of risk science)
Close observers will note that journalists in the legacy press have a perplexing habit of engaging in outright activism for ...
Viewpoint: Social media influencers are promoting RFK, Jr.’s dangerous protein-heavy diet
The rise of social media influencers promoting the carnivore diet with its emphasis on eating as much beef, butter and ...
Supreme Court likely to have final say on RFK, Jr.’s currently-blocked vaccine policy
Although a federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s changes to the US childhood immunization schedule, the ...
Grassroots MAHA pushes back against White House plan to back away from anti-vaccine rhetoric
White House officials are steering the Trump administration away from vaccine reform, fearing the political consequences of emphasizing a relatively ...
Send women to jail for decades for having an abortion? Extremist Republicans get pushback, even from some in their own party
When a trio of Republican state lawmakers introduced a bill last year that would subject women who obtain abortions to ...
Challenging the fasting myth: No, it will not help you lose weight
There are several ways to fast. Some people fast for several days in a row. Others follow the so-called 5:2 ...
RFK, Jr. and the Trump administration’s political purge of scientists echoes the darkest days of the McCarthy period
Something sinister and yet vaguely familiar has been happening in American public health policy. This week’s federal court decision reversing ...
RFK, Jr.’s choice for U.S. Covid vaccine czar accused of unethical and misleading research
The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to ...
RFK, Jr. vaccine rebuke: Judge reverses Trump administration childhood and Covid vaccine policies
In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts [on March 16, 2026] blocked the ...
U.S. defunding International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), UN-affiliated group that issued cancer warnings for glyphosate, steak, and getting a haircut
The United States’s withdrawal this year from the World Health Organization (WHO) is having knock-on effects on an influential global ...
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr.’s unethical plan to run a Tuskegee-like syphilis experiment in West Africa to ‘prove’ hepatitis B vaccines cause neurological damage
Every generation needs to learn about what is commonly known as the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to ...
Viewpoint—After the vaccine policy wrecking ball: Taking stock one year after RFK, Jr. abandoned science
This past month, my kids’ small-town school has been in crisis mode. Budget shortfalls, emergency meetings, parents scrambling to understand ...
White House clamps down on RFK, Jr.’s vaccine rejectionism but he reportedly retains Trump’s support
The White House is more tightly controlling the messaging and policies—including around vaccines—coming from the Department of Health and Human ...
The intersection of vaccinations and faith: Should the ultra-religious get exemptions from mandatory vaccines shots?
From the perspective of mainstream scientific medicine, the choice between vaccination and potentially fatal diseases seem obvious. So are religious ...
Viewpoint: Check on scare “science”—Claims about the human health dangers of microplastics are collapsing
Since the rise of MAHA in US policy, journalists have been starting to question the findings of activist scientists, and ...