• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine; • US health officials are reevaluating a $590 million contract for bird flu shots that the Biden administration awarded to Moderna; • A meeting of a committee that advises the FDA on vaccine policy has […]
“As the measles outbreak in Texas keeps spreading, parents who previously chose not to vaccinate their children are now lining up to get their kids the shots needed to protect them from the serious illness. “People are more and more nervous” as they watch the highly contagious virus spread in their communities, mostly among children, […]
“Congress is considering proposals that could change Medicaid financing and eligibility. “Some of these proposed changes could cause millions of people to lose access to care under Medicaid. People without coverage often skip necessary care, leading to worse health outcomes. For people in poor health, the results can be dangerous. “Cuts will put a greater […]
This certainly isn’t pro-life: “The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” […]
The weight of evidence—scientific and epidemiological—points to a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 with the epicenter at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, China. Although the virus is endemic in bats, there’s little evidence for a direct jump of the virus from bats to humans in Wuhan. The most parsimonious hypothesis is that some other mammal […]
“In the facilities—the artificial ecosystems—that now house much of Earth’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are “a response to the selection pressures that exist in a […]
We eat a lot of different products that are packaged in plastic packaging. Plastic content leaches into the water we drink from product packaging and throwaway garbage. Unless you are filtering it out in some fashion such as reverse osmosis or another membrane type of filter, microplastic content can buildup in humans. ~~~~~~~ Scientists observe […]
It is very easy to disrupt a complex system and very hard to get it going again. Trump, Musk, and the Muskateers decided to limit overhead on NIH grants to 15% fearing that some of the overhead might get money to DEI deans. They also limited communication of government health agencies with the public. The […]
So-called “pro-life” extremists want to define the beginning of life as the moment of conception. Setting aside the fact that both the sperm and egg are also alive so life doesn’t begin at conception, one might ponder why those who want to criminalize abortion as murder don’t similarly criminalize miscarriages as murder or assault when […]
Incidence of bird flu in humans, though still low, is rising. “Regular” seasonal flu is now being classified as the worst in 15 years with more US hospitalizations for flu than for COVID. So far this year 68 kids have died of seasonal flu, and the US is on track to exceed last year’s children’s […]