“numerous studies going back to the year 2000 all indicate there is no particular reason to fear cell phones as a cause of cancer, and a new paper by Li Zhang and Joshua Muscat of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Pennsylvania State University examines the most up-to-date data from the United States to examine this question as if for the first time.
Most studies on this question so far have been case-control studies. This type of study is subject to biases (information bias and selection bias) because it selects subjects who already have the disease of interest (in this case, brain cancer). Although prospective studies avoid the biases inherent in case-control studies, they are expensive and difficult to carry out, especially for rare diseases such as brain cancer.
But now researchers can take advantage of the exponential increase in exposure to cell phones since their introduction in the mid-1980s. In the space of several decades, humans have gone from having no exposure—zero percent of the population exposed—to nearly universal exposure. This means that we can take advantage of what is referred to as a “natural experiment,” the approach that Li and Muscat take in their illuminating new study.
An earlier analysis of this type was carried out by the National Cancer Institute. That study showed no evidence of an association between cell phone use and cancer, but the data only went up to 2012. Possibly cell phones had not been in use long enough for an effect to show up. Li and Muscat extend the period of observation by nine years.
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The authors conclude that “these findings suggest that mobile phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of brain cancer, either malignant or benign.””
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“in the face of this evidence, RFK Jr. insists on propagating this debunked claim, and he is sponsoring a study by a discredited researcher that he hopes will provide the answer he favors. This is an unforgivable waste of money that could be spent on addressing an important health issue. But it is also more than that.
From observing RFK Jr., and those he appeals to, we see that the belief in different bogus claims tends to be correlated. A belief that cell phones are causing cancer or that vaccines cause autism can serve as a sentinel indicator of the susceptibility to other false beliefs, such as those targeting pesticides and genetically engineered crops. It’s noteworthy that the prominent anti-biotech advocacy organization U.S. Right-to-Know is anti-vaccine in addition to being fiercely against glyphosate and other pesticides and genetically modified crops.
These, and many others, are zombie risks that never die. It doesn’t matter what the specific risk is. The credulity, the failure to take any commonsense evidence or distillations of the scientific evidence into account, the refusal to value the judgment of experts who have spent untold hours examining the issue, or the conclusions reached by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, or the American Cancer Society, into account are the same.
RFK Jr. appears to have an implacable drive to do away with vaccines by undermining public confidence, disrupting insurance coverage, and making it too costly for pharmaceutical companies to produce them, as happened in the 1980s. Exposing his lies is literally a matter of protecting the lives of children and adults from the all-too-real infectious diseases that RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in.”
“The study included 2,653 drug seizures and 1,833 opioid-related deaths from 2020 to 2023. “Within the surrounding 100, 250, and 500 meters,” RTI International researcher Alex H. Kral and his two co-authors reported in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, “drug seizures were associated with a statistically significant increase in the relative risk for fatal opioid overdoses.””
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“Prohibition makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition magnifies that problem, as dramatically demonstrated by the deadly impact of restricting access to pain medication at the same time that illicit fentanyl was proliferating as a heroin booster and substitute.”
“A February 2025 review study of ivermectin randomized controlled trials in Annals of Medicine & Surgery concluded that ivermectin showed no significant impact on critical outcomes such as mortality, mechanical ventilation, viral clearance rates, ICU admissions, or hospitalization rates compared to controls. Similarly, a February 2025 review article of randomized controlled trials by a team of Indian pharmaceutical researchers observed that “we consider Ivermectin ineffective in the management of COVID-19 disease, both as treatment and prophylaxis.””
“A June 2024 meta-analysis in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews synthesized evidence from more than 100 studies and reviews. It found that masks, “if correctly and consistently worn,” are “effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases and show a dose-response effect.” It also found that, N95 and KN95 masks were more effective than surgical or cloth masks. Using data from jurisdictions with mask mandates, the researchers concluded that “mask mandates are, overall, effective in reducing community transmission of respiratory pathogens.” The efficacy of masks alone does not settle the question of mask mandates, which is far more complex.
In their comprehensive 2024 report, Effectiveness of masks and respirators against respiratory infections, researchers associated with the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health reviewed 153 research articles on the effectiveness of mask use against infective agents or airborne droplets and particles. They reported that 128 of the articles they analyzed found masks to be effective. They noted that “systematic reviews of on randomized controlled trial studies in clinical or community settings demonstrated effectiveness in 10 out of 16 studies, and 20 out of 23 studies found mask mandates to be effective.”
“COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.”
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“A September 2024 review in the journal NPJ Vaccines reports that the risk of myocarditis is about six times greater for those who are infected with COVID-19 than for those who are vaccinated. A February 2025 article in the European Heart Journal compared patients who experienced post-vaccine myocarditis to those who experienced post-COVID-19 and conventional myocarditis. The researchers found that post-vaccine myocarditis patients were less likely to be hospitalized and experienced fewer cardiovascular events.”
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“The most comprehensive analysis of the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is the cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals published in April 2024 in Vaccine. The researchers confirmed that the incidences of previously identified rare safety signals following COVID-19 vaccination were quite low.”
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“By March 2022, Fauci and his colleagues acknowledged “the concept of classical herd immunity may not apply to COVID-19” in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Living with COVID-19 is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives,” they concluded. Population protection, among other things, now involves inoculations updated much like seasonal flu vaccines to boost waning antibodies and to counter emerging variants of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Ultimately, Biden’s 2021 “summer of freedom” turns out to have been a fond but illusory hope of a permanent respite from COVID-19. Given this reality, current COVID-19 vaccines are now primarily designed to prevent severe disease and death rather than infection.”
“Since 1975, politicians have built huge portions of the American safety net — like the child tax credit (CTC) — around the idea that excluding the poorest Americans from government assistance will motivate them to climb out of deep poverty on their own and get a job.
This long-standing bipartisan consensus is manifest in the twin ideas of work and income requirements. Work requirements are simple: You either have a job or you don’t, and that binary is what determines whether you’re eligible for a handful of welfare programs.
Income requirements are a little wonkier. They stipulate that anyone without any income will receive no benefits. Only after earned income surpasses a specified level do benefits begin kicking in — which is where we get another dry name: “phase-ins.””
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“The consensus excluding the poorest Americans from some forms of government assistance through phase-ins held until President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Its anti-poverty centerpiece was to cut phase-ins from the existing CTC and crank up the payment, creating what’s known as the expanded CTC.
The results were historic. Over the course of 2021, child poverty was cut nearly in half, and the long-running fear at the heart of the American welfare system — that unconditional aid would discourage work — never came to pass.
Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education). Come 2022, phase-ins returned to the CTC, approximately 3.7 million children were immediately thrust back into poverty in January, and the rest of the year saw the sharpest rise in the history of recorded child poverty rates.”
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“Now that we have real-world evidence from a nationwide, year-long experiment, the expanded CTC’s success should ignite efforts to roll back phase-ins across the board. That also means cutting them from the CTC’s sister program, the earned income tax credit (EITC), which phases in as a supplement to wages for low-income Americans and helps about 31 million Americans.
The expanded CTC is estimated to have reduced child poverty rates anywhere from 29 percent to 43 percent, with the vast majority of that drop attributable to removing phase-ins. Extending that success to include the EITC would cut child poverty by an estimated 64 percent.”
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“Winship was unsurprised that his fears of parents choosing to work less didn’t show up during the expanded CTC. It only lasted for one year and was recognized all the while as a temporary program. “These kinds of behavioral effects take time to set in,” he writes. In the long-term, after a decade or a generation of the program being in place, that’s when he would expect to see, as Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think-tank American Compass, put it, “communities in which labor-force dropout is widespread and widely accepted.””
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“Long-term speculation, however, can go both ways. The generational impacts of unconditional transfers could just as well lead to long-term investments in education and skills training, support entrepreneurship, and actually raise productivity and economic activity in the long run, all of which would boost, instead of wipe out, poverty reduction.
In 2018, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis estimated that childhood poverty costs the US $1.03 trillion per year, or 5.4 percent of the GDP. They found that every dollar spent on reducing child poverty would save the public 7 dollars from the economic costs of poverty.
Results from basic income pilots across the US also stand in contrast to Winship’s concern. “Our moms get the guaranteed income and not only do they continue to work, they level up their work,” Nyandoro, who runs the nation’s longest-running guaranteed income program, told me. “They’re able to move from jobs to careers. They’re able to go back to school. They’re able to get out of debt.”
The most recent evidence in favor of phase-ins Winship cites is a 2021 paper by a group of economists from the University of Chicago, led by Kevin Corinth and Bruce Meyer. It predicted that making the CTC expansion permanent would spark a 1.5-million-person exodus from the labor force. As analysts were quick to point out, however, the paper is based on a model that already assumes unconditional cash reduces work. Predicting work disincentives using a model that already assumes them tells us nothing about whether the assumption itself is tethered to reality.
Corinth and Meyer have since responded to criticism of their work disincentive assumptions, arguing that they fall well within the range used in other studies. These academic debates will continue, but in the meantime, where should the burden of proof lie?
Eliminating phase-ins from the CTC was a massive anti-poverty success and had no short-term negative employment effects. Recipients spent the extra few hundred bucks on necessities, from food and clothing to shelter and utilities. Even small businesses voiced their support on the grounds that it would boost spending and entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, a minority of skeptics retain speculative concerns that a few generations down the line, newfound consequences might overshadow these benefits.”
““It’s really a product that’s good for some people and bad for other people, which doesn’t feel like too complex of a statement, but actually feels like something that is difficult for many to grapple with,” said Hartmann-Boyce, who is an associate professor of evidence-based policy and practice at the University of Oxford.
She led a 2022 Cochrane review — considered the best type of analysis of the available evidence — which looked at studies of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. It found the strongest evidence yet that vaping works better than traditional nicotine replacement tools such as patches or gum to help people stop smoking. For those advocating that vaping is an effective harm-reduction mechanism, it was a significant win.
But it’s also more complicated than that.
Hartmann-Boyce said that since Cochrane first started looking at the evidence nearly 10 years ago, things have changed dramatically. The devices themselves are different now and are much better at delivering nicotine. That’s good for people trying to give up smoking but creates a problem with non-smokers like kids who are trying these for the first time.
But not everyone is even convinced it’s good for most smokers in the long term.
Jørgen Vestbo, a clinician and emeritus professor of respiratory medicine at the University Hospital of South Manchester, who recently returned to his native Denmark, agrees that the randomized controlled trials show e-cigarettes can help people quit.
But he also points to data from clinical trials that show people given e-cigarettes were more likely to use them for longer than those using aids such as nicotine gum. Vestbo said population-level evidence shows that as long as you are addicted to nicotine you are more likely to start smoking again.”
“the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic.” Another WHO committee, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), independently assessed the ingredient, too, but maintained its existing recommendation — suggesting not that people cut the substance entirely out of their diets but that they limit their daily aspartame consumption to about 40 mg per kilogram (or about 2.2 pounds) of body weight. Diet soda contains about 200 mg of aspartame per 12-ounce can. By that measure, an adult weighing 60 kg, or roughly 132 pounds, would need to drink about 12 cans of diet soda a day to exceed the JECFA’s recommendation, assuming they had nothing else containing aspartame.
Making matters more confounding, the Food and Drug Administration had yet another take. It told Vox in an email that it had reviewed the information used in WHO’s assessment and “identified significant shortcomings” in the studies the agency relied on. “Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives in the human food supply,” the agency added.”
“They found that banning investors from buying and converting housing to rentals worked in one sense: The share of investor-owned rental properties in affected neighborhoods fell, and the number of properties bought by first-time homebuyers increased.
On the other hand, however, these new homeowners tended to be richer than the renters they were replacing, and the costs of rental housing increased overall.
“The ban has successfully increased middle-income households’ access to homeownership, at the expense of buy-to-let investors. However, the policy also drove up rents in affected neighborhoods, thereby damaging housing affordability for individuals reliant on private rental housing, undermining some of the intentions of the law,” write researchers in the study published on SSRN.”