““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.”
“The state eventually dropped the charges against Miller. His two years in jail, however, took a toll, according to his criminal defense attorney, who said Miller’s cancer was in remission but recurred after the state locked him up, as he could not access his medication.
Following his release, Miller sued Craycraft. The district court concluded Craycraft was entitled to absolute immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit subsequently noted that Craycraft’s alleged chicanery was “difficult to justify and seemingly unbecoming of an official entrusted with enforcing the criminal law.” But that court went ahead and ratified the grant of absolute immunity anyway—a testament to the malfeasance the doctrine permits.
Core to the decision, and to similar rulings, is Imbler v. Pachtman (1976), the precedent in which the Supreme Court created the doctrine of absolute prosecutorial immunity. The Court ruled that a man who had spent years in prison for murder could not sue a prosecutor who allegedly withheld evidence that eventually exonerated him.
Plaintiffs’ only way around this doctrine is proving that a prosecutor committed misconduct outside the scope of his prosecutorial duties. It’s a difficult task. Louisiana woman Priscilla Lefebure sued local prosecutor Samuel C. D’Aquilla after he sabotaged her rape case against his colleague Barrett Boeker, then an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.”
““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.”
“Extreme weather events of the past few years — including the 2022 heat wave that sent temperature records tumbling across much of Europe, and the floods that devastated Pakistan last year — have surprised some of the world’s top climate scientists with just how far they sat outside the normal range.
Experts still know relatively little about when and where these types of extreme climate events will happen. Or what happens when two events, like a drought and a heat wave, hit one place simultaneously. That’s because scientists have tended to look at broader averages across regions, rather than the most intense extremes in specific locations.
“We haven’t asked the models [to] come up with an outrageously high temperature number, like 50 degrees in Canada” — a mark reached during a heat wave in 2021 — “and work out how likely that is or if that’s possible,” said Friederike Otto, an author of the IPCC report and senior lecturer at Imperial College London. “And I think that’s why these are surprises.””
“The Dickey Amendment, first attached to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, for example, famously prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding gun violence studies for decades. A new interpretation of that amendment in 2018 changed that, but Dickey wasn’t the only thing making it hard to study gun violence.
Instead, the researchers told me, the biggest impediment to demonstrating whether gun control policies work is the way politicians have intentionally blocked access to the data that would be necessary to do that research.”