“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.”
“The Trump administration is canceling funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the entity that produces the federal government’s signature climate change study, according to three federal officials familiar with the move.
The move, which had been widely expected, is a potentially fatal blow to the National Climate Assessment, the study that Congress mandated under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 be issued every four years to ensure the government understands the threats that rising temperatures pose and what is driving climate changes. The report is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive look at climate change and serves as a crucial guide to state and community efforts to prepare for the effects.”
“Five months later, federal health officials, industry executives and the public health community say they’re more worried than ever.
Kennedy in his first seven weeks atop the Department and Health and Human Services has dramatically reshaped the U.S. health apparatus, eliminating entire agency divisions, abruptly shifting policy priorities and leaving the sprawling department in what six current and former employees described as an unprecedented state of upheaval.
The health secretary and his team forced out top scientists in charge of developing new vaccines and evaluating the safety of medicines, stripping away centuries of collective expertise and institutional knowledge. Government offices that manage key functions like ensuring safe drinking water and alerting Americans to contaminated drugs have been decimated.
In the meantime, Kennedy appointees have sought greater control over scientific decision-making in agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration — going against longstanding norms and roiling a health sector that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy.
“It’s a mess,” said one former senior HHS official granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. “What was once a very robust place to work, that was trying to lead on innovation, is gone. It’s just gone.”
The rapid overhaul, punctuated by last week’s mass firing of 10,000 employees, has left the HHS workforce traumatized and the broader health community in deep distress, according to interviews with nine current and former health officials, as well as five other public health experts and industry officials, most of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.”
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““They got rid of all the people who made the place work,” said one health official. “It doesn’t seem to be achieving their aims. Unless their aim was just to cause chaos and torpedo morale.””
““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.
“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”
Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.
“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”
Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.
As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.
“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””
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“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”
Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so any atmosphere someone tries to terraform will just be blown away by solar winds.
It may make sense to focus on Earth and technological development for now. Better technology will make moving civilization to Mars more possible in the future.
Companies pay researchers to produce biased science. Then, they tell people to look into it themselves, knowing people will find the slanted research the industry paid for.
“”The DEA’s attempt to classify DOI, a compound of great significance to both psychedelic and fundamental serotonin research, as a Schedule I substance exemplifies an administrative agency overstepping its bounds,” Rush says. “The government admits DOI is not being diverted for use outside of scientific research yet insists on placing this substance in such a restricted class that it will disrupt virtually all current research.”
SSDP describes the two compounds as “essential research chemicals in pre-clinical psychiatry and neurobiology,” noting that their unscheduled status has made them accessible as tools for studying serotonin receptors. It says DOI, in particular, has been “a cornerstone in neuroscience research” due to its selectivity for the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, crucial for understanding the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. Scientists have used DOI to “map the localization of an important serotonin receptor in the brain critical in learning, memory, and psychiatric disease,” SSDP notes, and DOI studies “have shown encouraging results in managing pain and reducing opioid cravings.””