health – Page 3

Trump health official ousted after allegedly giving himself a fake title

anthrax, COVID-19, hatfill, health, kennedy, mRNA vaccines, Trump / Paul Patrick / October 29, 2025

Steven Hatfill, a senior advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services was fired over the weekend, with health officials telling reporters that he was terminated for giving himself a fake, inflated title and for not cooperating with leadership.

For his part, Hatfill told The New York Times that his ouster was part of “a coup to overthrow M. Kennedy,” referring to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Further, Hatfill said the coup was being orchestrated by Matt Buckham, Kennedy’s chief of staff, though Hatfill didn’t provide any explanation of how his ouster was evidence of that. An HHS spokesperson responded to the allegation, telling the Times that “firing a staff member for cause does not add up to a coup.”

Bloomberg was first to report Hatfill’s termination.

Background

While Hatfill was not a particularly prominent member of the Trump administration, his role—and now ouster—is notable for several reasons. Most recently, he was seen as a driving force in Kennedy’s decision to cancel $500 million in federal grants for developing mRNA vaccines against future pandemic threats. The medical and scientific communities sharply criticized the cancellations, saying they leave the country ill-prepared for the next pandemic and create a void for China or other countries to lead in scientific advances. Still, Hatfill is especially hostile to mRNA vaccine technology. In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s show in August, Hatfill falsely claimed that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause “biochemical havoc” on cells.

Rather than support life-saving vaccines, Hatfill embraces ineffective treatments for COVID-19, including the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin. He touted those ineffective treatments during the height of the pandemic, when he was a White House advisor during Trump’s first term.

But Hatfill might best be known for being wrongly accused of carrying out the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened 17. The attacks involved a strain of anthrax that was used at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), where Hatfill had a fellowship from 1997 to 1999—though he worked on viruses while there, not bacterial diseases like anthrax. The FBI publicly announced Hatfill as a person of interest in the case in 2002. Hatfill filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice over privacy violations, which the department settled in 2008, paying Hatfill $5.8 million. The FBI went on to accuse Bruce Ivins, another USAMRIID scientist, of carrying out the attacks. But, Ivins died by suicide in 2008 before being charged and doubts remain about the case against him.

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Man accidentally gets leech up his nose. It took 20 days to figure it out.

bleeding, bloodletting, case report, health, leeches, parasites, poison / Rejus Almole / October 29, 2025

Leeches have a long medical history. Here’s what happens if one gets in your nose.

Since the dawn of civilization, leeches have been firmly attached to medicine. Therapeutic bloodsuckers are seen in murals decorating the tombs of 18^th dynasty Egyptian pharaohs. They got their earliest written recommendation in the 2^nd century BC by Greek poet and physician Nicander of Colophon. He introduced the “blood-loving leech, long flaccid and yearning for gore,” as a useful tool for sucking out poison after a bite from a poisonous animal. “Let leeches feed on [the] wounds and drink their fill,” he wrote. Ancient Chinese writing touted their medicinal potential, too, as did references in Sanskrit.

Galen, the physician for Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, supported using leeches to balance the four humors (i.e. blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile) and therefore treat ailments—as initially outlined by Hippocrates. Leeches, doctors found, provided a method for less painful, localized, and limited bloodletting. We now understand that leeches can release an anesthetic to prevent pain and a powerful anticoagulant, hirudin, to prevent clotting and keep blood flowing.

In the centuries since the Roman era, leeches’ popularity only grew. They were used to treat everything from gout to liver disease, epilepsy, and melancholy. The very word “leech” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “laece,” which translates to “physician.”

It wasn’t until the early 1900s, amid advances in medical knowledge, that leeches fell out of favor—as did bloodletting generally. That was for the best since the practice was rooted in pseudoscience, largely ineffective, and often dangerous when large quantities of blood were lost. Still, the bloodsuckers have kept a place in modern medicine, aiding in wound care, the draining of excess blood after reconstructive surgery, and circulation restoration. Leech saliva also contains anti-inflammatory compounds that can reduce swelling.

What leeches do in the shadows

But there’s also a darker side to leeches in medicine. Even Nicander realized that leeches could act as a kind of poison themselves if accidentally ingested, such as in contaminated water. He described the slimy parasites clinging to the mouth, throat, and opening of the stomach, where they might cause pain. For this poisoning, he recommended having the patient ingest vinegar, snow or ice, salt flakes, warmed salt water, or a potion made from brackish soil.

Nicander was right. While external leeches are potentially helpful—or at least not particularly harmful with controlled blood feasting—internal leeches are more problematic. They are happy to slither into orifices of all kinds, where they’re hard to detect and diagnose and difficult to extract, potentially leading to excessive blood loss. Luckily, with advances in sanitation, accidental leech intake doesn’t happen that often, but there are still the occasional cases—and they often involve the nose.

Such is the case of a 38-year-old man in China who showed up at an ear, nose, and throat clinic telling doctors his right nostril had been dripping blood for 10 days at a rate of a few drops per hour. He was not in pain but noted that when he coughed or spat, he had blood-tinged mucus. His case was published in the week’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Doctors took a look inside his nose and saw signs of blood. When they broke out the nasal endoscope, they saw the source of the problem: There was a leech in there. And it was frantically trying to wriggle away from the light as they got a glimpse of it.

As it turns out, the man had been mountain climbing a full 20 days prior. While out in nature, he washed his face with spring water, which likely splashed the sucker up his schnoz.

Lengthy feast

While 20 days seems like a long time to have a leech up your nose without noticing it, a smattering of other nasal leech cases report people going several weeks or even months before figuring it out. One 2021 case in a 73-year-old man in China was only discovered after three months—and he had picked out a chunk of the leech himself by that point. A 2011 case in a 7-year-old girl in Nepal took four weeks to discover, and the girl needed a blood transfusion at that point.

In 2014, BBC Radio Scotland interviewed a 24-year-old woman from Edinburgh who had picked up a nasal leech on a trip to Southeast Asia. She had nosebleeds for weeks before realizing the problem—even after the leech began peeking out of her nose during hot showers.

“Obviously my nasal passages would open up because of the steam and the heat and the water, and it would come out quite far, about as far as my lip,” she said. Still, she thought it was a blood clot after a motorbike accident she had been in recently, not a blood-sucking worm.

“Your initial reaction isn’t to start thinking, oh God, there’s obviously a leech in my face,” she said.

Of course, if the leech gets into a place where it causes more obvious problems, the discovery is quicker. Just last month, doctors reported a case in a 20-year-old woman in Ethiopia who had a leech stuck in her throat, which caused her to start vomiting and spitting blood. It took just a few days of that before doctors figured it out. But nasal leeches don’t tend to produce such dramatic symptoms, so they’re harder to detect. And a lot of other things can cause mild, occasional nosebleeds.

Exorcising the sinuses

Once a nostril Nosferatu is finally identified, there’s the tricky task of removing it. There’s not exactly a textbook method for extraction, and the options can be highly dependent on the location in which the leech has lodged itself. Various methods used over the years—many echoing Nicander’s original recommendations—include salt, saline, vinegar, and heat, as well as turpentine and alcohol. Saltwater in particular has been reported to be effective at getting the leech to relax and release, though such attempts to coax the leech out can be time-consuming. A variety of local and topical anesthetics have also been used to try to paralyze the leech, including the startling choice of cocaine, which acts as a local anesthetic, among other things.

The removal must be done with care. If the leech is pulled, it could regurgitate its blood meal, risking infection and more bleeding. There’s also the risk that pulling too hard could result in the worm’s jaws and teeth getting left behind, which could lead to continued bleeding.

In the mountain climber’s case, doctors were able to use the topical anesthetic tetracaine to subdue the shy leech, and they then gently extracted it with a suction catheter. It came out in one piece. The man had no problems from the removal, and a week later, his symptoms had entirely resolved.

Fortunately, reports of nasal leeches are rare and tend to have happy endings. But the cases will likely continue to splatter through the medical literature, keeping Nicander’s lore of leeches as both antidote and poison undying.

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

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If things in America weren’t stupid enough, Texas is suing Tylenol maker

autism, health, paxton, Policy, robert f kennedy jr, texas, Trump, tylenol / Kris Guyer / October 28, 2025

While the underlying cause or causes of autism spectrum disorder remain elusive and appear likely to be a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, President Trump and his anti-vaccine health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—neither of whom have any scientific or medical background whatsoever—have decided to pin the blame on Tylenol, a common pain reliever and fever reducer that has no proven link to autism.

And now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the maker of Tylenol, Kenvue and Johnson & Johnson, who previously sold Tylenol, claiming that they have been “deceptively marketing Tylenol” knowing that it “leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.”

To back that claim, Paxton relies on the “considerable body of evidence… recently highlighted by the Trump Administration.”

Of course, there is no “considerable” evidence for this claim, only tenuous associations and conflicting studies. Trump and Kennedy’s justification for blaming Tylenol was revealed in a rambling, incoherent press conference last month, in which Trump spoke of a “rumor” about Tylenol and his “opinion” on the matter. Still, he firmly warned against its use, saying well over a dozen times: “don’t take Tylenol.”

“Don’t take Tylenol. There’s no downside. Don’t take it. You’ll be uncomfortable. It won’t be as easy maybe, but don’t take it if you’re pregnant. Don’t take Tylenol and don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born,” he said.

“Scientifically unfounded”

As Ars has reported previously, there are some studies that have found an association between use of Tylenol (aka acetaminophen or paracetamol) and a higher risk of autism. But, many of the studies finding such an association have significant flaws. Other studies have found no link. That includes a highly regarded Swedish study that compared autism risk among siblings with different acetaminophen exposures during pregnancy, but otherwise similar genetic and environmental risks. Acetaminophen didn’t make a difference, suggesting other genetic and/or environmental factors might explain any associations. Further, even if there is a real association (aka a correlation) between acetaminophen use and autism risk, that does not mean the pain reliever is the cause of autism.

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Man takes herbal pain quackery, nearly dies, spends months in hospital

case report, cortisol, health, herbal supplements, hormones, supplements / Kris Guyer / October 24, 2025

Deadly doses

The supplements were: Artri King, Nhan Sam Tuyet Lien, and Linsen Double Caulis Plus. All are known to contain unlisted glucocorticoids, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And testing of two of the man’s supplements by the hospital confirmed the presence of the steroids.

Doctors determined that the man had essentially overdosed on the glucocorticoids—he had taken doses that exceeded the normal levels of glucocorticoids in the body. The steroids likely suppressed immune responses, leading to his infections and GI ulcers. But, more significantly, the excess steroid levels also caused his HPA axis to essentially shut down. While it’s possible to get the HPA axis back up and running after withdrawal from excessive steroid use, the amount of time that takes can vary. Further, if a person stops taking large doses of glucocorticoids abruptly, rather than gradually—as in the man’s case—and particularly after chronic use—also as in the man’s case—it can lead to an adrenal crisis. In retrospect, the man had all the signs of a crisis.

The doctors started treating him with hydrocortisone (medication cortisol) to get him out of danger. But it took six weeks before his HPA axis showed signs of recovery on tests. By that time, he had developed recurrent bacterial infections in his blood and had persistent delirium. It was only after several months in the hospital that he was able to be discharged back home.

In the end, the doctors describe the man’s case as a cautionary tale. Many Americans use supplements, but their efficacy is largely unproven, and they are not rigorously regulated for safety. And even though, in this case, the FDA had issued warnings specifically about the three supplements the man took, his case highlights that public awareness of such dangers remains low.

“Clinicians must remain vigilant in assessing supplement use and educate patients on potential risks, particularly regarding hidden glucocorticoids, to prevent serious health complications such as adrenal insufficiency,” the doctors conclude.

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An NIH director joins MAHA, gets replaced by JD Vance’s close friend

cancer, cellphones, fluoride, health, NIEHS, NIH, NTP, robert f kennedy jr, Science, trump administration / Paul Patrick / October 23, 2025

The director of a federal health institute that has arguably produced two of the most controversial government studies in recent years has accepted a new federal role to advance the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Meanwhile, the person replacing him as director is a close friend of Vice President JD Vance and was installed in a process that experts describe as completely outside standard hiring practices.

The series of events—revealed in an email to staff last week from the National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—is only exacerbating the spiraling fears that science is being deeply corrupted by politics under the Trump administration.

Richard Woychik, a molecular geneticist, is the outgoing director of the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which is located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He has been director since 2020 and was recently appointed to a second five-year term, according to Science magazine. Woychik was hired at the institute in 2010, when he joined as deputy director, and was appointed acting director in 2019.

As the director of NIEHS, Woychik was also the director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP). This is an interagency program that has produced two highly controversial scientific reports during Woychik’s time in NIEHS’s upper leadership. One, initially released in 2016, claimed that cellphone radiation causes cancer based on findings from rats, though only male rats. The final reports were published in 2018. Another controversial study, finalized this year, suggested that high levels of fluoride lower the IQ of children. Both the cellphone radiation and fluoride studies have been roundly criticized for flaws in their methodology and analysis, and the scientific community has largely dismissed them.

However, the studies align with—and bolster—the conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by the MAHA movement, which is led by ardent anti-vaccine activist and current US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As health secretary, Kennedy has pledged to remove fluoride from municipal water, which, over decades, has proven safe and highly effective at preventing tooth decay in children. He has also, at various times, suggested 5G cell phone radiation causes cancer, a variety of other health conditions, changes to DNA, and is used as mass surveillance.

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Health plan enrollment period is set to be horrifying for everyone this year

ACA, health, health insurance, KFF, Marketplace, premiums / Paul Patrick / October 22, 2025

Employer plans

While ACA sticker shock spreads, a new KFF report out today suggests that people on employer-based health insurance plans are also in for some heftier prices—though the increases aren’t quite as dramatic as the Marketplace hikes.

An analysis of current employer plans finds that the average cost to insure an American family hit nearly $27,000 this year, with average employee contributions to that bill being $7,000 a year. Family premiums are up 6 percent, or $1,408, from last year, while inflation only rose 2.7 percent and wage growth only rose 4 percent.

KFF suggested that various factors are contributing to the increasing costs, with GLP-1 weight-loss drugs being a prominent one. Overall, employers told the organization that they’re bracing for higher costs for 2026 plans, with insurers already seeking double-digit increases in small-group plans.

“There is a quiet alarm bell going off. With GLP-1s, increases in hospital prices, tariffs, and other factors, we expect employer premiums to rise more sharply next year,” KFF President and CEO Drew Altman said in a statement. “Employers have nothing new in their arsenal that can address most of the drivers of their cost increases, and that could well result in an increase in deductibles and other forms of employee cost sharing again, a strategy that neither employers nor employees like but companies resort to in a pinch to hold down premium increases.”

For deductibles—the amount people pay before their plan’s coverage kicks in—costs for single coverage increased 17 percent since 2020. At that time, the average deductible was $1,617 for a covered person, while the average this year is $1,886. But deductibles can be much higher for those who work for a small employer. Among those workers, 36 percent had deductibles of $3,000 or higher this year.

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When sycophancy and bias meet medicine

AI, health, medicine / Tim Belzer / October 22, 2025

Biased, eager-to-please models threaten health research replicability and trust.

Once upon a time, two villagers visited the fabled Mullah Nasreddin. They hoped that the Sufi philosopher, famed for his acerbic wisdom, could mediate a dispute that had driven a wedge between them. Nasreddin listened patiently to the first villager’s version of the story and, upon its conclusion, exclaimed, “You are absolutely right!” The second villager then presented his case. After hearing him out, Nasreddin again responded, “You are absolutely right!” An observant bystander, confused by Nasreddin’s proclamations, interjected, “But Mullah, they can’t both be right.” Nasreddin paused, regarding the bystander for a moment before replying, “You are absolutely right, too!”

In late May, the White House’s first “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) report was criticized for citing multiple research studies that did not exist. Fabricated citations like these are common in the outputs of generative artificial intelligence based on large language models, or LLMs. LLMs have presented plausible-sounding sources, catchy titles, or even false data to craft their conclusions. Here, the White House pushed back on the journalists who first broke the story before admitting to “minor citation errors.”

It is ironic that fake citations were used to support a principal recommendation of the MAHA report: addressing the health research sector’s “replication crisis,” wherein scientists’ findings often cannot be reproduced by other independent teams.

Yet the MAHA report’s use of phantom evidence is far from unique. Last year, The Washington Post reported on dozens of instances in which AI-generated falsehoods found their way into courtroom proceedings. Once uncovered, lawyers had to explain to judges how fictitious cases, citations, and decisions found their way into trials.

Despite these widely recognized problems, the MAHA roadmap released last month directs the Department of Health and Human Services to prioritize AI research to “…assist in earlier diagnosis, personalized treatment plans, real-time monitoring, and predictive interventions…” This breathless rush to embed AI in so many aspects of medicine could be forgiven if we believe that the technology’s “hallucinations” will be easy to fix through version updates. But as the industry itself acknowledges, these ghosts in the machine may be impossible to eliminate.

Consider the implications of accelerating AI use in health research for clinical decision making. Beyond the problems we’re seeing here, using AI in research without disclosure could create a feedback loop, supercharging the very biases that helped motivate its use. Once published, “research” based on false results and citations could become part of the datasets used to build future AI systems. Worse still, a recently published study highlights an industry of scientific fraudsters who could deploy AI to make their claims seem more legitimate.

In other words, a blind adoption of AI risks a downward spiral, where today’s flawed AI outputs become tomorrow’s training data, exponentially eroding research quality.

Three prongs of AI misuse

The challenge AI poses is threefold: hallucination, sycophancy, and the black box conundrum. Understanding these phenomena is critical for research scientists, policymakers, educators, and everyday citizens. Unaware, we risk vulnerability to deception as AI systems are increasingly deployed to shape diagnoses, insurance claims, health literacy, research, and public policy.

Here’s how hallucination works: When a user inputs a query into an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini, the model evaluates the input and generates a string of words that is statistically likely to make sense based on its training data. Current AI models will complete this task even if their training data is incomplete or biased, filling in the blanks regardless of their ability to answer. These hallucinations can take the form of nonexistent research studies, misinformation, or even clinical interactions that never happened. LLMs’ emphasis on producing authoritative-sounding language shrouds their false outputs in a facsimile of truth.

And as human model trainers fine-tune generative AI responses, they tend to optimize and reward the AI system responses that favor their prior beliefs, leading to sycophancy. Human bias, it appears, begets AI bias, and human users of AI then perpetuate the cycle. A consequence is that AIs skew toward favoring pleasing answers over truthful ones, often seeking to reinforce the bias of the query.

A recent illustration of this occurred in April, when OpenAI canceled a ChatGPT update for being too sycophantic after users demonstrated that it agreed too quickly and enthusiastically with the assumptions embedded in users’ queries. Sycophancy and hallucination often interact with each other; systems that aim to please will be more apt to fabricate data to reach user-preferred conclusions.

Correcting hallucinations, sycophancy, and other LLM mishaps is cumbersome because human observers can’t always determine how an AI platform arrived at its conclusions. This is the “black box” problem. Behind the probabilistic mathematics, is it even testing hypotheses? What methods did it use to derive an answer? Unlike traditional computer code or the rubric of scientific methodology, AI models operate through billions of computations. Looking at some well-structured outputs, it is easy to forget that the underlying processes are impenetrable to scrutiny and vastly different from a human’s approach to problem-solving.

This opacity can become dangerous when people can’t identify where computations went wrong, making it impossible to correct systematic errors or biases in the decision-making process. In health care, this black box raises questions about accountability, liability, and trust when neither physicians nor patients can explain the sequence of reasoning that leads to a medical intervention.

AI and health research

These AI challenges can exacerbate the existing sources of error and bias that creep into traditional health research publications. Several sources originate from the natural human motivation to find and publish meaningful, positive results. Journalists want to report on connections, e.g., that St. John’s Wort improves mood (it might). Nobody would want to publish an article with the results: “the supplement has no significant effect.”

The problem compounds when researchers use a study design to test not just a single hypothesis but many. One quirk of statistics-backed research is that testing more hypotheses in a single study raises the likelihood of uncovering a spurious coincidence.

AI has the potential to supercharge these coincidences through its relentless ability to test hypotheses across massive datasets. In the past, a research assistant could use an existing dataset to test 10 to 20 of the most likely hypotheses; now, that assistant can set an AI loose to test millions of likely or unlikely hypotheses without human supervision. That all but guarantees some of the results will meet the criteria for statistical significance, regardless of whether the data includes any real biological effects.

AI’s tireless capacity to investigate data, combined with its growing ability to develop authoritative-sounding narratives, expands the potential to elevate fabricated or bias-confirming errors into the collective public consciousness.

What’s next?

If you read the missives of AI luminaries, it would appear that society is on the cusp of superintelligence, which will transform every vexing societal conundrum into a trivial puzzle. While that’s highly unlikely, AI has certainly demonstrated promise in some health applications, despite its limitations. Unfortunately, it’s now being rapidly deployed sector-wide, even in areas where it has no prior track record.

This speed may leave us little time to reflect on the accountability needed for safe deployment. Sycophancy, hallucination, and the black box of AI are non-trivial challenges when conjoined with existing biases in health research. If people can’t easily understand the inner workings of current AI tools (often comprising up to 1.8 trillion parameters), they will not be able to understand the process of future, more complex versions (using over 5 trillion parameters).

History shows that most technological leaps forward are double-edged swords. Electronic health records increased the ability of clinicians to improve care coordination and aggregate data on population health, but they have eroded doctor-patient interactions and have become a source of physician burnout. The recent proliferation of telemedicine has expanded access to care, but it has also promoted lower-quality interactions with no physical examination.

The use of AI in health policy and research is no different. Wisely deployed, it could transform the health sector, leading to healthier populations and unfathomable breakthroughs (for example, by accelerating drug discovery). But without embedding it in new professional norms and practices, it has the potential to generate countless flawed leads and falsehoods.

Here are some potential solutions we see to the AI and health replicability crisis:

Clinical-specific models capable of admitting uncertainty in their outputs
Greater transparency, requiring disclosure of AI model use in research
Training for researchers, clinicians, and journalists on how to evaluate and stress-test AI-derived conclusions
Pre-registered hypotheses and analysis plans before using AI tools
AI audit trails
Specific AI global prompts that limit sycophantic tendencies across user queries

Regardless of the solutions deployed, we need to solve the failure points described here to fully realize the potential of AI for use in health research. The public, AI companies, and health researchers must be active participants in this journey. After all, in science, not everyone can be right.

Amit Chandra is an emergency physician and global health policy specialist based in Washington, DC. He is an adjunct professor of global health at Georgetown University’s School of Health, where he has explored AI solutions for global health challenges since 2021.

Luke Shors is an entrepreneur who focuses on energy, climate, and global health. He is the co-founder of the sustainability company Capture6 and previously worked on topics including computer vision and blockchain.

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FDA slows down on drug reviews, approvals amid Trump admin chaos

drug approvals, fda, health, Reviews / Mike M. / October 21, 2025

Amid the chaos of the Trump administration’s haphazard job cuts and a mass exodus of leadership, the Food and Drug Administration is experiencing a slowdown of drug reviews and approvals, according to an analysis reported by Stat News.

An assessment of metrics by RBC Capital Markets analysts found that FDA drug approvals dropped 14 percentage points in the third quarter compared to the average of the six previous quarters—falling from an average of 87 percent to 73 percent this past quarter. In line with that finding, analysts noted that the delay rate in meeting deadlines for drug application reviews rose from an average of 4 percent to 11 percent.

The FDA also rejected more applications than normal, going from a historical average of 10 percent to 15 percent in the third quarter. A growing number of rejections relate to problems at manufacturing plants, which in turn could suggest problems with the FDA’s inspection and auditing processes.

With the government now in a shutdown—with no end in sight—things could get worse for the FDA. While the regulatory agency is still working on existing drug applications, it will not be able to accept new submissions.

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Anti-vaccine activists want to go nationwide after Idaho law passes

anti-vaccine activists, anti-vaxxer, health, public health, syndication, vaccine mandates / Mike M. / October 20, 2025

This is so stupid… and dangerous

The Idaho Medical Freedom Act makes it illegal to require anyone to take a vaccine.

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Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.

The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools, and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.”

Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements.

But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the US through vaccination are making a resurgence.

The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.)

The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.

The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived.

A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month.

That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho.

Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that—contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the US—vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent.

It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines.

Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.”

An analysis published last year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the US over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year.

Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.”

The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic.

It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions—government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies, and others—on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control.

Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another.

Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard.

Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs.

That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated.

In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and daycare centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations.

The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form—one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated.

(There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.)

An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution.

Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho.

The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job, or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and daycares couldn’t require people on their property to follow public health guidance.

The state had just passed “the Coronavirus Stop Act” in 2023, which banned nearly all COVID-19 vaccine requirements. If lawmakers did that for COVID-19, Manookian reasoned, they could do the same for all communicable diseases and all medical decisions.

Her theory was right, ultimately.

The bill she penned in the summer of 2024 made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate in early 2025.

Manookian took to social media to rally support for the legislation as it sat on the desk of Gov. Brad Little.

But the governor vetoed it. In a letter, he explained that he saw the bill as government intrusion on “parents’ freedom to ensure their children stay healthy.” During an outbreak, he said, schools wouldn’t be able to send home students “with highly contagious conditions” like measles.

Manookian tried again days after the veto. In the next version of the bill, protections during a disease outbreak applied only to “healthy” people.

This time, Little signed it.

Weeks after the signing, Manookian joined like-minded advocates on a stage in Washington, DC, for a launch event for the MAHA Institute, a group with strong ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again.) The new Health and Human Services secretary had denounced vaccines for years before President Donald Trump appointed him.

At the gathering, Manookian announced her next mission: to make it “a societal norm and to codify it in law” that nobody can dictate any other person’s medical choices.

“We’re going to roll that out to other states, and we’re going to make America free again,” Manookian told the audience in May.

Manookian’s commitment to bring along the rest of the country has continued ever since.

Her nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund, is now distributing model legislation and a how-to guide, with talking points to persuade legislators. Manookian said in podcast interviews that she is working with the nonprofit Stand For Health Freedom to mobilize activists in every state.

In an interview with ProPublica, Manookian said her objective is for people to “understand and appreciate that the most basic and fundamental of human rights is the right to direct our own medical treatment—and to codify that in law in every state. Breaking that barrier in Idaho proves that it can be done, that Americans understand the importance of this, and the humanity of it, and that it should be done in other states.”

Her efforts were rewarded over the summer with a visit from none other than Kennedy, who visited Boise and toured a farm with Manookian and state lawmakers in tow.

“This state, more than any other state in the country” aligns with the MAHA campaign, Kennedy told reporters at a news conference where no one was allowed to ask questions. Kennedy called Idaho “the home of medical freedom.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment from Kennedy or his staff on Idaho’s law and his visit to the state.

Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy built into one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines, took interest in the Idaho bill early on.

The group promoted the bill as it sat on the governor’s desk, as he vetoed it, then as Manookian worked successfully to get a revived bill through the statehouse and signed into law.

The organization’s online video programming featured Manookian five times in late March and early April. One show’s host told viewers they could follow Idaho in its “very smart strategy” of taking a law against COVID-related mandates, “crossing out ‘COVID,’ making a few other tweaks, and you have an incredible health freedom bill after that.”

Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said she’s known Manookian for more than 15 years and pushed the national organization to publicize Manookian’s work. Holland introduced her at the Washington, DC, event.

Whereas most states put the onus on unvaccinated people to show why they should opt out of a mandate, Idaho’s legislation made unvaccinated people the norm—shifting the burden of accommodation onto those who support vaccination.

Now, parents of infants too young for a measles vaccine can’t choose a daycare that requires immunization. Parents of immune-compromised students must decide whether to keep their children home from school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing unvaccinated children won’t be quarantined.

Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association”—not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines—just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements imposed by states like California and New York.

“I think you could certainly do that in Idaho,” Holland said. “It wouldn’t be a public school. It might be the Church of Vaccinia school.”

The day Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act was signed, a legislator in Louisiana brought forward the Louisiana Medical Freedom Act. In a hearing later, she pointed to Idaho as a model.

Louisiana followed Idaho once before in 2024, when it passed a law that requires schools to describe the exemptions available to parents whenever they communicate about immunizations. Idaho had passed an almost identical law three years earlier.

Herricks, the Louisiana pro-vaccine advocate, said she watched the Idaho Medical Freedom Act’s progress with “a lot of concern, seeing how much progress it was making.” Now it’s set a precedent, Herricks said.

Holland, the Children’s Health Defense CEO, said she looks forward to Idaho’s approach spreading.

She pointed to a September announcement by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo that he intends to rid his state of all vaccine mandates. Holland said she expects other Republican-controlled states to take a serious look at the Idaho law. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s a big change,” Holland said. “It’s not just related to vaccines. It’s a blow against the notion that there can be compulsory medicine.”

Some people support the more-than-century-old notion that compelling people to be vaccinated or masked will provide such enormous collective benefits that it outweighs any inconvenience or small incursion on personal liberty.

Others, like Holland and Manookian, do not.

At the heart of laws like Idaho’s is a sense of, “‘I’m going to do what I want to do for myself, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do,’ which is in direct contrast to public health,” said Paul Offit, pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit, who co-invented a vaccine against rotavirus, is a critic of Kennedy and was removed from a federal vaccine panel in September.

A more fundamental conflict is that some people believe vaccines and other tools to prevent the spread of illness, like masks, are harmful. That belief is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of scientists and health experts, including Kennedy’s own Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC.

Both tensions are at play in Idaho.

As is the case nationally, Idaho’s “health freedom” movement has long pushed back against being labeled “anti-vaccine.” Idaho lawmakers and advocates have stressed that their goals are bodily autonomy and informed choice.

They do not take a stance on the bodily autonomy principle when it comes to abortion, however. Almost all state legislators who voted for the Idaho Medical Freedom Act also voted to ban abortion, if they were in office at both times.

“Every action has to be evaluated on its individual morality,” not on whether it does the most good for the most people, Manookian said.

But Manookian’s rejection of vaccine mandates goes beyond a libertarian philosophy.

Manookian has said publicly that she thinks vaccines are “poison for profit,” that continuing to let daycares require vaccination would “put our children on the chopping block,” that measles is “positive for the body,” that the virus protects against cancer, and that it can send people “into total remission”—an assertion she made on an Idaho wellness center’s podcast in April.

Manookian told ProPublica she believes infectious diseases have been made “the bogeyman.”

Against those claims, research has shown that having the measles suppresses immunity to other diseases, a phenomenon dubbed “immune amnesia” that can make children who have recovered from measles more susceptible to pneumonia and other bacterial and viral infections. About 20 percent of unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who are infected will die from complications of the disease, according to the CDC.

And while researchers have studied using engineered measles viruses in a cancer treatment, those same researchers have written that they were “dismayed to learn” their research has been misconstrued by some who oppose vaccination. They said they “very strongly advise” giving children the measles vaccine, that there “is no evidence that measles infection can protect against cancer,” and that measles is “a dangerous pathogen, not suitable for use as a cancer therapy.”

(Manookian said she believes she has evidence for her cancer remission claim but couldn’t readily produce it, adding that she may have been mistaken.)

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, meanwhile, is safe and highly effective, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. The CDC says the most common negative reactions are a sore arm, fever, or mild rash. Two doses of the vaccine provide near total protection, according to the CDC.

Manookian said she doesn’t believe the research on vaccines has been adequate.

She will have another chance to spread her views from a prominent platform in November, when she’s scheduled to speak at the Children’s Health Defense 2025 conference in Austin, Texas.

She’ll share the stage with celebrities in the anti-vaccine movement: Del Bigtree, communications director for Kennedy’s past presidential campaign; actor Russell Brand; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson; and Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who made headlines for his push to end vaccine mandates in Florida, months after Idaho wrote that concept into law.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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RFK Jr.’s MAHA wants to make chemtrail conspiracy theories great again

health / Tim Belzer / October 18, 2025

A prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again movement is pushing for health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make the topic of chemtrail conspiracy theories a federal priority, according to a report by KFF News.

KFF obtained a memo, written by MAHA influencer Gray Delany in July, presenting the topic to Calley Means, a White House health advisor. The memo lays out a series of unsubstantiated and far-fetched claims that academic researchers and federal agencies are secretively spreading toxic substances from airplanes, poisoning Americans, and spurring large-scale weather events, such as the devastating flooding in Texas last summer.

“It is unconscionable that anyone should be allowed to spray known neurotoxins and environmental toxins over our nation’s citizens, their land, food and water supplies,” Delany writes in the memo.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told KFF that the memo presents claims that are false and, in some cases, physically impossible. “That is a pretty shocking memo,” he said. “It doesn’t get more tinfoil hat. They really believe toxins are being sprayed.”

Delany ends the memo with recommendations for federal agencies: form a joint task force to address this alleged geoengineering, host a roundtable on the topic, include the topic in the MAHA commission report, and publicly address the health and environmental harms.

It remains unclear if Kennedy, Means, or federal agencies are following up on Delany’s suggestions. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard told KFF that “HHS does not comment on future or potential policy decisions and task forces.”

However, one opportunity has already been missed: The MAHA Commission released its “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report on September 9, along with a strategy document. Neither document mentions any of the topics raised in Delany’s memo.

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Vaginal condition treatment update: Men should get treated, too

ACOG, bacterial vaginosis, dysbiosis, health, microbiota, partners / Tim Belzer / October 17, 2025

For some cases of bacterial vaginosis, treatment should include a package deal, doctors now say.

The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) updated its clinical guidance Friday to fit with recent data indicating that treatment for recurring bacterial vaginosis (BV) in women is significantly more effective if their male partners are also treated at the same time—with both an oral antibiotic and an antibiotic cream directly onto the potentially offending member.

“Partner therapy offers us another avenue for hopefully preventing recurrence and helping people feel better faster,” Christopher Zahn, chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality at ACOG, said in a statement.

BV is a common condition affecting nearly 30 percent of women worldwide. Still, it’s potentially stigmatizing and embarrassing, with symptoms including itching, burning, a concerning fishy smell, and vaginal discharge that can be green or gray. With symptoms like this, BV is often described as an infection—but it’s actually not. BV is an imbalance in the normal bacterial communities that inhabit the vagina—a situation called dysbiosis.

This imbalance can be especially difficult to correct; of the women who suffer with BV, up to 66 percent will end up having the condition recur after treatment.

BV symptoms are “incredibly uncomfortable and disrupt people’s daily lives,” Zahn said, and that discomfort “becomes compounded by frustration when this condition comes back repeatedly.”

Firm recommendation

Studies in recent years have started to expose the reasons behind recurrence. Though again, BV is an imbalance, it has the profile of a sexually transmitted infection, with links to new sexual partners and similar incubation periods. Going further, microbial communities of penises can silently harbor the bacterial species linked to BV, and penile microbial communities can be predictive of BV risk in partners.

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CDC tormented: HR workers summoned from furlough to lay off themselves, others

CDC, health, Trump / Rejus Almole / October 15, 2025

Traumatized CDC has lost 33% of its workforce this year, union says.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 9: Bullet holes are seen in windows at the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) Global Headquarters following a shooting that left two dead, on August 9, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 8, a gunman opened fire near the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, killing a DeKalb County Police Department officer before being found dead by gunfire. Credit: Getty | Elijah Nouvelage

The dust is still settling at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a mass layoff on Friday, which former employees at the beleaguered agency are describing as a massacre.

In separate press briefings on Tuesday, a network of terminated CDC staff that goes by the name the National Public Health Coalition, and the union representing employees at the agency discussed what the wide-scale cuts mean for the American people, as well as the trauma, despair, and damage they have wreaked on the workers of the once-premier public health agency.

In a normal federal layoff—called a reduction in force, or RIF—the agency would be given a full outline of the roles and branches or divisions affected, as well as some explanation for the cuts, such as alleged fraud, abuse, or redundancy. However, the Trump administration has provided no such information or explanation, leaving current and former employees to essentially crowdsource what has been lost and only guess at the possible reasons.

The numbers

The union representing CDC workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2883, has been assessing the cuts since termination emails began arriving in employee inboxes late Friday. The union estimates that the Trump administration sent termination notices to 1,300 CDC employees on Friday, in what they called an illegal “politically-motivated stunt.” Of those 1,300 terminations, around 700 were rescinded, beginning on Saturday.

The Trump administration said the 700 rescinded terminations were sent due to a “coding error.” But CDC workers didn’t buy that explanation, saying all the terminations were intentional, and some were only reversed after backlash erupted when people realized what the administration was trying to cut—for example, terminating the experts responding to domestic measles outbreaks and those responding to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who received RIF notices that were later rescinded. Still, with the rescissions, some 600 terminations appear to remain.

In all, the union estimated that the CDC has lost 33 percent of its workforce since the start of the Trump administration. In January, there were roughly 13,000 CDC workers total. Since then, about 3,000 have been fully separated from the agency, including 600 laid off in a RIF on April 1, and 2,400 who were either fired or forced out amid pressure campaigns. An additional 1,300 have been laid off but are not yet fully separated from the agency; they remain on paid administrative leave but are unable to do their work.

In the RIF Friday, laid-off employees said they were given notices that list their termination effective date as December 8, leaving a 60-day period in which they would be on administrative leave.

The RIF was carried out amid an ongoing government shutdown over a health care funding dispute, and the Trump administration has claimed that the RIF is a consequence of the shutdown. But the union, along with federal employment lawyers and even some senior government officials, say a RIF during a shutdown is illegal; a temporary lapse in government funding is not a legitimate reason for a RIF under federal regulations, and it runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits the government from incurring new costs during a shutdown, such as by promising severance packages.

Brutal cuts

In practice, a RIF amid a shutdown added more trauma to the demoralized staff. In opening remarks, Local AFGE 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs noted that the CDC Human Resources staff had been furloughed during the shutdown but were temporarily brought back into work just so they could process termination letters—including their own. A terminated CDC employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said that more than 90 percent of the HR staff is now gone.

Among the terminations were also mental health workers who were helping CDC staff recover from an August attack, in which a gunman fired over 500 rounds at CDC buildings full of agency employees and killed a local police officer.

Another terminated CDC worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity discussed the personal toll of the RIF. She had worked at the agency for over two decades and learned of her termination Friday night as she was doing dishes after making homemade pizza with her family—money worries kept them from ordering out. Her phone “started going crazy” as coworkers were checking in after receiving their RIF notices. She dug out her work laptop, which had been set aside since she was furloughed, to find her own RIF notice at the top of her inbox.

As text messages continued to come in through the night, she said it was “heartbreaking and devastating” when she realized the Trump administration was “actually dismantling us.”

“These are just hardworking Americans who just want to do their job, who just want to help people, who want to make sure the correct information is out there [and] that we are preventing things from happening,” she said.

Since the RIF has sunk in, she has started to worry more for her family and their finances. During the furlough, paychecks are uncertain. And her effective termination date in December will land between holidays, when hiring is slow. She worried about affording Christmas presents for her family.

She also said that staff have asked about getting other jobs while on administrative leave but were told that in order to do that, they would need to get approval from the CDC’s ethics office to ensure there were no conflicts of interest. But staff can’t actually do that because everyone at the ethics office also got RIF notices.

Losses

Throughout the briefings yesterday, staff highlighted that the RIF did not just trim here and there, as one might expect with cuts designed to make the organization leaner. Instead, it lopped off entire teams and branches, completely shutting down whole lines of work.

One former CDC employee spoke broadly of big hits to experts in chronic disease, global health, and the National Center for Health Statistics, which runs critical data collection that states and local health departments rely on. The CDC’s library staff are all gone. Suicide prevention experts have been cut, as well as communications and policy staff, who develop briefings and provide information to Congress members.

Abigail Tighe, a former CDC employee with National Public Health Coalition, tried to put the cuts in context, saying: “We are losing the people with all the knowledge to prevent childhood drownings, child abuse, and suicide. We’re losing the experts who help us track and understand the health and safety needs of our communities [and] the brave and brilliant professionals who, on a moment’s notice, respond to new and unknown outbreaks across the world. And that’s just a few examples.”

A terminated scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that her entire office was eliminated in the RIF. “My heart breaks for my colleagues and friends who have been tormented, traumatized, shot at, threatened daily. These are kind, hardworking, thoughtful people whose lives are being overturned,” she said.

But, “ultimately,” she said, “I am terrified for the public safety of our country.”

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