The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable because in 1970 he forecast that within the coming decade “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people”. Furthermore, by 1980 the life expectancy of the average American would have fallen 42 years as a result of cancer caused by pesticides.

Yet he not only lived more than 50 years longer than 42; he lived to be one of more than 8 billion people in a world where global life expectancy has increased at the average rate of seven hours per day since he forecast it would collapse. Meanwhile, famine has all but gone extinct, with death rates from mass starvation down to a tiny fraction of what they were in the 1960s. Here are the astounding numbers: in the 1960s, 29.7 million people out of a population of 3 billion died in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each. In the 2010s, 1.1 million out of a population of more than 8 billion died in such episodes: a decline of 99% in the death rate.

In short, Ehrlich was wrong. Not, as the New York Times said in its obituary this week, “premature”, but radically, completely, spectacularly wrong. He was wrong as soon as he put pen to paper and went on being wrong for decades afterwards. He shot to fame with a best-selling book in 1968, The Population Bomb, whose prologue dismissed all hope for humankind: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Yet something did prevent that. Even as he wrote these words, the world’s population growth rate was falling. New strains of wheat and rice developed by agronomists like Norman Borlaug were starting to transform the productivity of agriculture and India was on the way to banishing famine and becoming a food exporter within a few short years. The amount of food available has increased faster than population on every continent over the last 60 years even as the land area devoted to farming has begun to fall. As so often with environmental pessimism, Ehrlich’s warning was already out of date when it was made.

For the rest of his life Ehrlich remained adamant that he was not so much wrong as…right. In 2008 he was still predicting “an unhappy increase in the death rate”. In 2023 he tweeted plaintively: “If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones.” He was indeed laden with honors when he died: including a MacArthur “genius” award in 1990 and honorary membership of London’s Royal Society in 2012 – despite forecasting in 1970 that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Getting things wrong is clearly very rewarding. But his words had consequences. For many people, the misanthropy and cruelty of his political recommendations were less forgivable than his failed forecasts. His book began with an evening in Delhi when he found the press of people overwhelming. “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating.” The answer to his culture shock, he argued, was coerced, compulsory population control. “The operation will demand many brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.”

Food aid to India should be made conditional on forcible sterilisation of all those who had three or more children: “coercion in a good cause”. Ehrlich was “astounded” that libertarians objected when the American government took up his suggestion. In 1975 Indira Gandhi was refused World Bank loans unless she began sterilising people. Her son Sanjay obliged, making permits, licences, rations and even housing applications conditional on sterilisation. Eight million people were sterilised. Yet one of the greatest causes of the falling birth rate in the world over the past half century has been kindness, not cruelty: the prevention of child mortality. When mothers can be confident of their children surviving, they plan smaller families.

For Americans, too, Ehrlich recommended coercion and control. In an interview in 1970 he said that television programs should be ordered by the federal government to show large families always in a “negative light”. Commercials should relentlessly shame such people. If that did not work, the government should give women a “bonus for not having babies” or “change the tax structure” to punish the fertile, and if necessary, “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many” children.

Immensely influential, Ehrlich set the dirigiste tone for the nascent environmental movement, which saw people as the problem, economic growth as a crime and coercion as necessary. As Ehrlich’s attention switched to the running out of resources in the late 1970s, the economist Julian Simon called his bluff. In 1980 he offered Ehrlich a bet: that the price of a $1,000 basket of five metals (to be chosen by Ehrlich) would fall in real terms by 1990 because human ingenuity meant the world was getting better at finding such resources. The loser was to pay the difference in the price of the basket.

Ehrlich rushed to accept Simon’s “astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in” though he later dissembled that he had been “goaded” into the bet. He chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, with $200 invested in each. But when 1990 came round it was Ehrlich who owed Simon $576.07, all five having fallen in price. Ehrlich would have lost even without taking inflation into account. Grudgingly he made his wife write out the check, before delivering a speech in which he said of Simon, “the one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles”.

On my bookshelf stands the Julian Simon award, which I won in 2012 and which is made of the five metals. Simon, who was just three months older than Ehrlich, died at the age of 66 in 1998, far too young. He was never a celebrity.

Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan. He has been a journalist and a businessman and served for nine years in the House of Lords. Find Matt on X @mattwridley

A version of this article was originally posted at The Free Press and the Rational Optimist Society and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find the Rational Optimist Society on Substack

Across the country, clinicians like Dr. [Alissa] Parker, who also holds a doctorate in nursing practice, are contending with a sharp rise in vaccine hesitancy. They are trying to do what is best for children’s health while staying sensitive and supportive, even as they bear the brunt of parents’ mistrust and confusion.

Skepticism about vaccines was once a fringe view, held by a small group of Americans. But the Covid-19 pandemic, with its mandates and rapid rollout of vaccines, breathed new vigor into the anti-vaccine movement and bred hostility toward the medical establishment.

And despite the fact that pediatrics is the lowest paid medical specialty — as pediatricians are quick to point out — Mr. Kennedy and others have portrayed its practitioners as greedily promoting vaccines in order to earn fat profits.

…

For some practitioners, it has proved to be too much: They are contemplating leaving the profession.

“It’s just a really sad and stressful time for pediatricians,” said Dr. Megan Schultz, a pediatric emergency physician at Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “I really worry about us as a field, honestly.”

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

The rise of social media influencers promoting the carnivore diet with its emphasis on eating as much beef, butter and bacon as you want is a dangerous example of dietary misinformation, according to a medical doctor in Cork University Hospital.

“It’s all part of the manosphere political movement and Make America Healthy Again that sees red meat as masculine,” said Dr Gary McGowan. McGowan, who has 55,000 followers on Instagram, actively counters such claims.

“This carnivore diet can dramatically increase LDL cholesterol to three to five times the normal range for a healthy adult. It goes against over 50 years of research on the links between saturated fat and heart disease,” said McGowan, who has a master’s degree in preventative cardiology.

…

He said it’s very easy for the public to be misled by social media influencers on nutritional advice. “The untrained eye doesn’t know how to interpret nutritional evidence …,” he said.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

Yet those quotes come directly from the recently released book Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic, by former Wall Street Journal business reporter Saabira Chaudhuri. The book was marketed as a history of the consumer goods industry, a journalistic exposé on the growth of plastic use in daily life. But as its melodramatic title confirms, Consumed is really a chemophobic tome lamenting that innovative companies developed novel solutions to better serve their customers. 

In Chaudhuri’s view of the world, consumers aren’t rational adults who choose to use plastic products that make our lives better—like disposable diapers that save time and money and minimize infections and painful rashes. Rather, we’re victims addicted to harmful plastics because big brands “poured billions of dollars” into convincing us we need them. The object of this nefarious campaign? To feed “our love affair with bottled water and our seemingly insatiable appetite for snacks and coffee on the go.”  

“We were never clamoring for any of this,” she says on everyone’s behalf. “But this shift towards disposability has fundamentally transformed our daily habits.” Others might call this shift “convenience.” 

Chaudhuri’s thesis is fatally flawed because it casually dismisses the indispensable, diverse roles plastics play in modern life, which is why everyone uses them. By understating their utility, she frames plastics as a scourge to eliminate with sweeping changes that would disrupt life for billions of people. Central to Chaudhuri’s view is the alarm over plastics’ health risks, but these claims are unsupported by sound evidence. She warns that “many plastics are made using a bewildering array of additives that can leach into food and drinks.” Tiny plastic particles, she notes, have been found “in everything from fetuses to the human brain,” without mentioning that none of these studies provides evidence of harm; the doses of plastic they detect are so low they are highly unlikely to impact human health.  

In fact, the microplastics scare story was dealt a crippling blow last October when the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the EU’s counterpart to our FDA, issued a 53-page report blasting the research used to allege that microplastics are harmful. The agency concluded: 

“Many publications are affected by methodological shortcomings in test conditions, in sample preparation, and by deficiencies in the reliability of analytical data, with the consequence of frequent misidentification and miscounting … In view of all this, there is no sufficient basis at this stage to estimate [micro- and nanoplastic] exposure from [food containers] during their uses.” 

As I noted in a recent article, this is diplomatic science-speak for “microplastics research is hot garbage.” Chaudhuri’s argument is built on a foundation of studies so lousy, even Europe’s caution-addicted regulators reject them. 

Chaudhuri cites a number of examples of companies phasing out certain chemicals due to public pressure, like McDonald’s removing fluorinated compounds from its wrappers, implying that there was a real risk to their customers. But she then registers worry that the ingredients used to replace those compounds could be “similarly harmful.” This highlights the incoherent nature of her proposals: existing chemicals, including those used in food contact applications, are extensively tested and regulated for safety, yet replacement substances are often not nearly as well understood. As so often happens, the activist’s zeal to “do something” replaces a good product with an inferior one.  

Indeed, the harms Chaudhuri describes are based on limited and otherwise questionable research from academics who blur the line between activism and science, some of whom are even paid to malign safe products. This is, needless to say, not the consensus of a dispassionate search for facts based on robust data. Her narrative also flatly ignores the fact that regulatory bodies like the EPA continually assess the public’s chemical exposure, which has fallen substantially with industrial emissions declining by more than 50 percent since 1998. 

Against Chaudhuri’s portrait of the plastics industry as bogeymen, the industry’s defenders are often quick to point out the ways plastics actually safeguard public health and the environment. And they’re right to do so: Medical devices, such as syringes, IV bags, and ventilators rely on sterile, durable plastics to prevent infections and enable life-saving procedures—benefits forgotten in the book’s critique of single-use products.  

Plastics also extend food shelf life, cutting waste substantially—contrary to Chaudhuri’s somewhat bizarre and unsupported claim that “often supply chains are only as lengthy and convoluted as they are because plastic packaging has enabled them to be this way.” Without plastics, food spoilage would spike, increasing the risk of food-borne illness and harming the environment through boosted greenhouse emissions. Indeed, recent research shows that plastics actually have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than most of the alternative materials Chaudhuri and her allies insist we use instead. “In 15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives,” this study concluded. 

Bottled water, a ubiquitous American staple, comes under heavy fire in Consumed, but is also usually the first product one sees delivered by the pallet-load to communities facing war, fire, famine and a whole range of other disasters. 

But there’s a cynical reason why bottled water in particular is so often maligned by activists like Chaudhuri: it is a ubiquitous product, familiar to every consumer. The overarching complaint is right in her title — consumption itself — but the trick is to staple the anti-capitalism logic onto a product everyone knows and convince them it isn’t benign but somehow poisonous.  

Though Consumed is well over 300 pages, Chaudhuri dedicates just a single sentence to these critical details. “Using plastic can save on carbon emissions compared to other materials,” she concedes, “and plastic offers clear functional benefits, including helping to keep perishable products fresh for longer, reducing food waste.” But if this is so, why write an entire book demonizing the material? Perhaps Consumed should have been called Preserved: How Plastics Protect Us and Our Planet. 

Simply put, Consumed is more manifesto than journalism. Chaudhuri’s dramatic claims—from the “corrupting” nature of plastics to their role in various impending health crises—demand skepticism without any validation by rigorous, peer-reviewed science. But a look at Chaudhuri’s reporting on the subject going back to 2018 reveals that for her, evidence always follows from her conclusions rather than informing them. 

Balanced reporting measures both sides of the story, supplying readers with the facts they need to reach a conclusion. Readers of Consumed will find that the only thing they’re being fed is ideology.  

David Zaruk is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. He also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. Find David on X @Zaruk

A version of this article was originally posted at Real Clear Science and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Real Clear Science on X @RCScience

The House Agriculture Committee advanced a proposed farm bill … —a set of legislative proposals that have traditionally balanced the social safety net around food with the needs of farmers and other food producers. Although a farm bill is typically passed every five years, Congress has failed to pass a new package since the last farm bill expired, in 2023.

Last year, some of the largest programs that are usually included in the farm bill were instead rolled into the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). The House’s new farm bill largely includes provisions from a 2024 draft that were left out of the OBBB—and that have bipartisan support.

In general, though, the bill does not directly provide new investments to farm programs and maintains much of the status quo, [said] Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition ….

This does not match the need among farmers, especially given 2025’s instability, stemming from contract cancellations, funding freezes, shifts in trade policy, and more, Lavender said.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

Although a federal judge in Boston has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s changes to the US childhood immunization schedule, the US Supreme Court could have two chances over the next year to weigh in on the decision, legal experts say.

US District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy said the sweeping overhaul of federal vaccine recommendations by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely violated a law that governs how public policy changes are made, as did Kennedy’s firing of all 17 members of an influential immunization advisory panel. The ruling means that, at least for now, the federal government must restore vaccination recommendations in place when Kennedy took office, and that the advisory panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP)—cannot take any legal action.

Murphy’s decision was made in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other leading medical groups, which claimed that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that forbids public officials from making policy changes that are “arbitrary and capricious.” 

The Trump administration has vowed to appeal the court’s decision.

“We look forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon posted on X.

If a federal appeals court rejects the Trump administration’s appeal, the administration “is likely to try to take it up to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket,” said attorney Richard Hughes IV, JD, MPH, who represented the medical groups.

The Supreme Court would have until June or July, when its term ends, to keep the Trump administration’s vaccine policies on hold or to reinstate them, Hughes said at a webinar for journalists today.  The Supreme Court could also decide to consider the merits of the case during its next term, which begins in October, and issue a final verdict on how much power Kennedy has to reshape health policy.

ACIP meeting canceled

The AAP  filed suit against HHS in July 2025 over Kennedy’s unilateral changes to COVID vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women. The suit was amended in January after HHS took a hatchet to the US pediatric immunization schedule, slashing the number of recommended vaccines from 17 to 11. 

Murphy agreed with the medical groups that Kennedy bypassed the scientific process and didn’t follow proper administrative procedures. Thirteen of Kennedy’s handpicked ACIP appointees “appear distinctly unqualified,” Murphy wrote. In response to the ruling, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) canceled the ACIP meetings scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday.

In series of posts on X, ACIP Vice Chair Robert Malone, MD claimed that Murphy defamed him and described Murphy as a “rogue judge”  who should be impeached. He posted that he was disappointed that the ACIP was canceled because, “This week was to be an incredibly important ACIP meeting on vaccine injury, the first of its kind—ever.”

Although Murphy’s ruling doesn’t bar Kennedy from seating additional members on the committee, Hughes said the medical groups are likely to challenge any appointment that doesn’t follow established procedure. “If we see additional appointments to ACIP, you can rest assured that we will act,” Hughes said.

Requesting CDC records

Hughes said he has asked to see public records leading up to Kennedy’s restrictions of vaccine access, including his decision to stop universally recommending COVID vaccines and the announcement that the United States would follow Denmark’s vaccine schedule. The records made public so far present an incomplete picture, Hughes said.

“We’re probably going to file a motion to complete the record if the record is incomplete,” Hughes said. If needed, “we’re probably going to ask for extra record discovery that may go as far as asking for some depositions.”

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD, an epidemiologist and member of the advocacy group Defend Public Health, said in a statement that while yesterday’s ruling is important, “this battle against Kennedy’s public health malpractice is far from over.” 

“We’re going to keep a close eye on whatever ACIP does next and stand ready to continue to support the plaintiffs any way we can and to call out RFK Jr’s anti-science nonsense,” Jacobs added. 

A version of this article was originally posted at the University of Minnesota and is reposted here. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find CIDRAP on X @CIDRAP

The US military might use generative AI systems to rank lists of targets and make recommendations—which would be vetted by humans—about which to strike first, according to a Defense Department official with knowledge of the matter. The disclosure about how the military may use AI chatbots comes as the Pentagon faces scrutiny over a strike on an Iranian school, which it is still investigating.

A list of possible targets might be fed into a generative AI system that the Pentagon is fielding for classified settings. Then, [said an official] … humans might ask the system to analyze the information and prioritize the targets while accounting for factors like where aircraft are currently located. … OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok could, in theory, be the models used for this type of scenario in the future, as both companies recently reached agreements for their models to be used by the Pentagon in classified settings.

The official described this as an example of how things might work but would not confirm or deny whether it represents how AI systems are currently being used.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

White House officials are steering the Trump administration away from vaccine reform, fearing the political consequences of emphasizing a relatively unpopular issue in a key election year.

…

“We’re just kind of done with the vaccine issue,” said [one official]. “We’ve done what we want to do on the vaccine front.”

But parts of the MAHA movement are now pushing back against the strategy, insisting its cause, including some vaccine issues, has broad popularity. The work, they say, is far from over.

“We’re nowhere near done on the vaccine issue,” said Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer of the Children’s Health Defense, the highly vaccine-skeptical group that Kennedy founded.

…

The Trump administration’s shift away from vaccine policy comes after it landed another blow to the MAHA movement in encouraging the production of the herbicide glyphosate, which could further strain the odd-bedfellows alliance between Trump and Kennedy supporters. The outcomes of the MAGA-MAHA debate have political implications in the midterms and could also have far-reaching impact on the nation’s public health.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here 

At the Capitol Hill roundtable …, hosted by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), farmers, union leaders, lawyers, academics, and hunger advocates railed against policies they say have allowed corporations to get too big. They say the policies hurt consumers by making them pay more at the register, and also hurt farmers, who earn less for what they produce.

…

While some lawmakers and witnesses at the roundtable decried Republican cuts to food aid, the central issue was corporate consolidation. Corporate control of farming and supply chains is not only driving up prices, they argued, it is also pushing farmers out of business. A central message to voters will be that Trump’s industry-friendly policies are making the situation worse.

Food prices, in reality, are influenced by a complex set of factors.

As the midterms get closer, Republicans are just as focused on convincing voters they will bring food prices down, but their plans to do so look very different.

Trump’s main focus has been on importing foods that are facing supply constraints, including eggs and beef.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here 

The fallacy is clear to anyone paying attention. A claim is true if it corresponds to reality, not because of the person making the claim. As the economist Ludwig von Mises observed many years ago, “Arguments from authority are invalid; the proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship.”

Isaac Newton had patrons; today’s researchers secure grants from governments, universities, foundations or corporations. All carry potential biases, and singling out private industry reveals inconsistency: taxpayer-funded studies often align with regulatory agendas, while billionaire-funded NGOs bankroll research advancing predetermined conclusions on a wide variety of political issues. Why is industry money uniquely disqualifying but Greenpeace or NIH grants virtuous?

Beyond the hypocrisy, the shill gambit’s real-world consequences can be dire. Dismissing industry experts impoverishes debate. Pharmaceutical breakthroughs—from antibiotics to HIV therapies—emerged from company labs. Tech giants fund AI and computing advances we all benefit from. The solution isn’t blanket disqualification but scrutiny of methods and replication of research.

Bottom line? The shill gambit stifles innovation and empowers charlatans who claim “independence” while peddling dogma—often with opulent support from competing industries or billionaire donors. In our polarized public square, rejecting this fallacy fosters genuine scientific progress by prioritizing facts over personal insults.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they break down the “shill gambit.”

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Now, though, it seems unlikely to become state law. In November, a vote to advance the bill beyond a legislative subcommittee failed. Four out of six Republicans on the Senate Medical Affairs Committee subpanel refused to vote on the measure.

Republican state Sen. Jeff Zell said during a November subcommittee hearing that he wanted to help “move this pro-life football down the field and to save as many babies as we can.” Still, he could not support the bill as written.

“What I am interested in is speaking on behalf of the South Carolinian,” he said, “and they’re not interested in this bill right now or this issue right now.”

While that bill stalled, it signals that abortion will continue to loom large during 2026 legislative sessions. More than three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, measures related to abortion have already been prefiled in several states, including Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and Virginia.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina bill also exposed a rift among Republicans. Some GOP lawmakers are eager to appeal to their most conservative supporters by pursuing more restrictive abortion laws, despite the lack of support for such measures among most voters.

Until recently, the idea of charging women who obtain abortions with a crime was considered “politically toxic,” said Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University.

Yet at least 15 states introduced “abortion as homicide” bills during 2024-2025 legislative sessions, many of which included the death penalty as a potential sentence, according to Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, an organization that tracks the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes.

Even though none of those bills was signed into law, Sussman called this “a hugely alarming trend.”

“My fear is that one of these will end up passing,” she said.

Less than a month after the bill stalled in South Carolina, another bill — which would create criminal penalties for “coercion to obtain an abortion” — was prefiled ahead of the Jan. 13 start of the state’s legislative session.

“The issue is not going away. It’s a moral issue,” said state Sen. Richard Cash, who introduced the abortion bill that stalled in the subcommittee. “How far we can go, and what successes we can have, remain to be seen.”

‘Wrongful Death’

Florida law already bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. But a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill in October proposing civil liability for the “wrongful death” of a fetus. If enacted, the measure will allow parents to sue for the death of an unborn child, making them eligible for compensation, including damages for mental pain and suffering.

The bill says neither the mother nor a medical provider giving “lawful” care could be sued. But anyone else deemed to have acted with “negligence,” including someone who helps procure abortion-inducing pills or a doctor who performs an abortion after six weeks, could be sued by one of the parents.

In Missouri, a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion passed in 2024 with 51.6% of the vote. In 2026, state lawmakers are asking voters to repeal the amendment they just passed. A new proposed amendment would effectively reinstate the state’s ban on most abortions, with new exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and medical emergencies.

“I think that’s a middle-of-the-road, common sense proposal that most Missourians will agree with,” said Ed Lewis, a Republican state representative who sponsored the legislation to put the measure on the ballot.

Lewis said the 2024 amendment went too far in allowing a legal basis to challenge all of Missouri’s abortion restrictions, sometimes called “targeted regulation of abortion providers,” or TRAP, laws. Even before Missouri’s outright ban, the number of abortions recorded in the state had dropped from 5,772 in 2011 to 150 in 2021.

Meanwhile, Lewis backed another proposed constitutional amendment that will appear on the 2026 ballot. That measure would make it harder for Missourians to amend the state constitution, by requiring any amendment to receive a majority of votes in each congressional district.

One analysis suggested as few as 5% of voters could defeat any ballot measure under the proposal. Lewis dismissed the analysis as a “Democratic talking point.”

‘Gerrymandered’ Districts

Republican lawmakers aren’t necessarily aiming to pass abortion laws that appeal to the broadest swath of voters in their states.

Polling conducted ahead of Missouri’s vote in 2024 showed 52% of the state’s likely voters supported the constitutional amendment to protect access to abortion, a narrow majority that was consistent with the final vote.

In Texas, state law offers no exceptions for abortion in cases of rape or incest, even though a 2025 survey found 83% of Texans believe the procedure should be legal under those conditions.

In South Carolina, a 2024 poll found only 31% of respondents supported the state’s existing six-week abortion ban, which prohibits the procedure in most cases after fetal cardiac activity can be detected.

But Republicans hold supermajorities in the South Carolina General Assembly, and some continue to push for a near-total abortion ban even though such a law would probably be broadly unpopular. That’s because district lines have been drawn in such a way that politicians are more likely to be ousted by a more conservative member of their own party in a primary than defeated by a Democrat in a general election, said Scott Huffmon, director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University.

The South Carolina legislature is “so gerrymandered that more than half of the seats in both chambers were uncontested in the last general election. Whoever wins the primary wins the seat,” Huffmon said. “The best way to win the primary — or, better yet, prevent a primary challenge at all — is to run to the far right and embrace the policies of the most conservative people in the district.”

That’s what some proposals, including the “abortion as homicide” bills, reflect, said Greene, the North Carolina State professor. Lawmakers could vote for such a measure and suffer “very minimal, if any,” political backlash, he said.

“Most of the politicians passing these laws are more concerned with making the base happy than with actually dramatically reducing the number of abortions that take place within their jurisdiction,” Greene said.

Yet the number of abortions performed in South Carolina has dropped dramatically — by 63% from 2023 to 2024, when the state enacted the existing ban, according to data published by the state’s Department of Public Health.

Kimya Forouzan, a policy adviser with the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion legislation throughout the country and advocates for reproductive rights, said South Carolina’s attempt to pass “the most extreme bill that we have seen” is “part of a pattern.”

“I think the push for anti-abortion legislation exists throughout the country,” she said. “There are a lot of battles that are brewing.”

Bram Sable-Smith is a founding reporter of Side Effects Public Media and taught radio journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Find Bram on X @besables

Lauren Sausser, South Carolina correspondent, covers health care across the South. She is based in Charleston, where she spent nine years covering health care at The Post and Courier. Find Lauren on X @laurenmsausser

A version of this article was originally posted at Kaiser Family Foundation Health News and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find Kaiser Health News on X @KFFHealthNews

There are several ways to fast. Some people fast for several days in a row. Others follow the so-called 5:2 diet, eating normally five days a week and consuming very few calories on the remaining two. Another approach is time-restricted fasting, known as the 16:8 method, where all meals are eaten within an eight-hour window and fasting continues for the rest of the day. 

Researchers at the Cochrane Institute have now investigated whether fasting helps with weight loss. 

…

The researchers reviewed studies involving people who were overweight or obese and who followed intermittent fasting, diets based on standard dietary advice, or no diet at all.

They found 22 international studies with a total of 2,000 participants. 

The findings were discouraging for anyone who believes fasting is a miracle cure. 

Participants lost just as much weight on diets based on standard dietary advice as they did with fasting.

There was also no difference in weight loss between those who fasted and those who followed no diet at all.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

We have reached a point where the mere mention of glyphosate reflexively triggers public reactions of fear, regardless of whether even a slight actual cause for concern has been raised.

While the application of the chemical for the production of wheat is much rarer than for most other major crops, wheat has become a lightning rod for glyphosate critics. Glyphosate is used on roughly a third of wheat acres, compared with more than 90% for corn, soybeans, cotton and sugar beets.

The latest controversy stems from a state-level initiative Healthy Florida First, which seeks to “identify and evaluate chemical contaminants that may be present in products commonly consumed by the general population.” State officials voiced concern after glyphosate was detected at levels up to 191.04 parts per billion in bread. “Florida Testing Shows High Levels of Weed Killer in Popular Bread Brands,” warned one headline.

In fact, the measurements were quite low based on tolerances established by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which allows for residue of up to 30 parts per million for flour. The EPA tolerances, 157 times greater than the residues detected in the bread in Florida, are set at levels providing immense margins of error out of an abundance of caution, to keep consumers safe.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” but the EPA is hardly the only global regulatory body that considers the chemical safe to use. More than 100 countries have greenlighted glyphosate’s use, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Australia.

It is difficult to overstate the stakes if the principle of accepted thresholds for chemical risk assessment is not upheld. Food manufacturers will be unable to make rational decisions when it comes to product formulation. Consumers will have no basis for making informed choices about what they eat. Avoiding nutritious foods because of ungrounded fears compromises rather than enhances health.

Rigorous science also serves as a safeguard ensuring commercial interests do not come at the expense of consumer health. A 2017 Purdue University study estimated that farm income would fall by $6.7 billion annually if glyphosate were banned with half of the loss occurring in the United States. A robust, transparent, science-based regulatory process is the only practical and effective mechanism to successfully balance the interests of growers and commercial entities with those of consumers and workers.

Recognizing the economic stakes of preserving glyphosate, US President Donald Trump on Feb. 18 issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act granting immunity to makers of the herbicide. The order, which drew howls of protest from many so-called MAHA moms, gives greater certainty to commercial stakeholders, including producers of glyphosate, growers, processors and food companies.

Still, it would be far better if it were the embrace of science based on sound risk-reward analysis rather than government fiat that provided this certainty. In the absence of publicly accepted scientific standards, unscrupulous politicians from the left and the right, social media influencers and other opportunists do not hesitate to step in, sowing fear and confusion.

Glyphosate application for wheat is limited to a range of specialty uses that in some cases are growing in importance. One example is to help enable no-till practices for regenerative agriculture. Glyphosate applications before planting help control weeds and preserve soil moisture. Another approved and valued use of glyphosate application is before harvest after the wheat kernel development is complete and the plant has shut down. It is estimated glyphosate is applied for this purpose on less than 3% of wheat acres, according to the National Association of Wheat Growers.

Key grain, milling and baking groups have issued a joint statement sharing basic facts about glyphosate in response to Healthy Florida First, seeking to reassure the public about the safety of wheat and wheat-based foods. Amid the hysterical and irrational din, the groups injected a much-needed calm, rational voice.

A version of this article was originally posted at World Grain and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find World Grain on LinkedIn

RFK, Jr. has not merely gutted globally accepted vaccine policy. He has severely damaged some of the world’s leading public-health institutions. The scientists who built and defended modern vaccine policy and devised new treatments for disease are being targeted as a dangerous elite — the public-health equivalent of fellow travelers. His campaign recalls the McCarthy period, when scientists and other professionals were driven from positions of trust not because their work had been discredited, but because they were judged politically suspect.

That disconcerting parallel was heightened in February when I came across an article by two scholars in the New England Journal of Medicine. It told the story of the Chicago cardiovascular epidemiologist, Jeremiah Stamler, and his research associate, Yolanda Hall, who in the 1960s stood up to an intimidation campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Many people believe that the abuses of the McCarthy period, a decade earlier, had ended an era of blacklisting and vulgar attacks on the patriotism and loyalty of American citizens. The article starkly showed that this was not the case, and that the story has special resonance today.

It opens with the words, “Today, science and medicine are under ideological attack in the United States, and their practitioners are feeling increasingly vulnerable and devalued, with some losing their funding.” I was immediately drawn in.

Reading the article opened up a dual perspective — of a now distant period in our history, when figures in the scientific community, the arts, and government were targeted and blacklisted as internal enemies and of our present, in which we are witnessing a different, but no less frightening, attack on the achievements of the post-World War Two era, with its remarkable progress in science, medicine, and technology.

Over eight years, beginning in 1965, Stamler and Hall mounted a brilliant riposte to HUAC’s attempt to brand them as anti-American for their involvement in a progressive movement that “included support of national health insurance and the elimination of racial discrimination in medicine.” I was stirred by the ingenuity and courage of Stamler and Hall’s counter-offensive, which allowed them to turn the tables on HUAC by bringing a suit against the committee in federal court. The grueling legal battle culminated in 1973 with the dismissal of HUAC’s case against them.

The parallels to today are both eerie and frightening: once again, scientists, artists, and public servants are targeted and blacklisted, in President Trump’s phrase, as “enemies from within.” At stake is more than a discrete set of policies, but a broader faith in expertise, evidence, and the institutions that helped drive America’s extraordinary advances in science, medicine, and technology. I can’t help but think that what is being challenged now is not simply a set of policies, but a wholesale assault on the Enlightenment values of liberalism, equity, and science that have underwritten 80 years of unprecedented progress in our country.

The NEJM article also resonated personally. It brought back powerful memories of my father’s experience of a similar attack on his loyalty to our country. It began in 1947 and lasted a decade, during a time when my father, Elvin A. Kabat, was an assistant professor of microbiology at Columbia University and was already well-known for his work on antibody specificity, blood group substances, and a test to diagnose multiple sclerosis in cerebrospinal fluid.

He had grown up in the 1920s in New York City in very straitened circumstances. After graduating from City College during the Depression, he obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology with Michael Heidelberger, known as the father of quantitative immunochemistry, at Columbia University in 1938, joining the faculty in 1941.  

In that year, he and a colleague had written a literature review on biological warfare, and, during the war, he had done work at Fort Detrick to anticipate the use of biological weapons by Germany. When the report was finally published in 1947, it created a minor sensation, including an article in Time magazine, and the FBI was assigned to investigate him and his co-author. This was to have far-reaching consequences for his career.

Beginning in 1947, my father had started working as a part-time consultant on a project at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital. In the postwar period, especially after the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb in 1949, there was increasing anxiety about the Soviet threat as well as a threat posed by left-wing politics. These currents culminated in the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R, WI.), who came to national prominence in 1950, claiming that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Soviet agents. Already by March 21, 1947, the fear of communist subversion was so widespread that President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835 mandating a loyalty oath and investigation regime for all Federal workers.

In the 1940s, my father was brought before the loyalty review board of the Bronx V.A. The government had two witnesses who testified that during his year in Uppsala, Sweden, as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in the laboratory of The Svedberg in 1937, he had voiced pro-Communist sentiments and had been a member of several organizations that promoted Soviet-American cooperation in the medical and scientific fields. My father made clear in his hearing that during his twenties, he had been influenced by enthusiasm for socialism and the Soviet experiment. However, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939, he quickly became disillusioned with communism.

He appealed to the Presidential Loyalty Review Board and conducted his own defense, and in July 1950, he was cleared and restored to his position. However, political interference in research was becoming stronger, and he decided to resign from the V.A., giving up his work on the histochemical localization of enzymes in tissues.

The FBI had informed the Passport Office at the Department of State of my father’s questionable loyalty. As a result, even though he was cleared by the loyalty review board, it was not until 1955 that his passport was restored, allowing him to attend international conferences and travel abroad. My father only learned in 1981, through the Freedom of Information Act, that the Criminal Investigation Division of the Department of Justice had placed him on its Security Index “list for the apprehension and detention of prominent individuals considered dangerous to the security of the United States.”

Following the loss of his V.A. consultancy in 1953, the U.S. Public Health Service (which at the time oversaw NIH) canceled my father’s grants, which supported his work on an animal model for multiple sclerosis as well as on blood group substances. He was told that the funds could be given to Columbia for his use if another investigator was substituted as the Principal Investigator. My father rejected this offer and boycotted the Public Health Service for a number of years. In addition, he vowed that no one accepting PHS funding could come to work in his lab. The loss of his grants could have destroyed his career. In fact, he had colleagues whose careers were disastrously affected by the cutoff of funding due to allegations of disloyalty.

Fortunately, he had very good relationships with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the National Science Foundation, whose program officers were eager to fund high-caliber research in immunology. In 1952, Congress appropriated $100,000 for research in immunochemistry in the budget of the Office of Naval Research. Soon after, two officers came to Columbia to meet with about a dozen researchers, who presented their ideas. My father tells how, as the meeting was ending, Robert Consolazio of the ONR, whom my father had never met before, said to him:

“‘You are staying here,’ and then he asked, ‘To whom would you give money on the basis of the suggestions?’ I outlined the programs I thought should be supported. He then said, ‘You have to take some money.’ I responded, ‘I don’t need any money, I’m loaded with money.’ He gave me a yellow pad, saying ‘You are not leaving here until you write out a proposal. You can hold on to the money and you can activate the contract any time within the next five years.’ I wrote out a title, ‘Immunochemical Criteria of Purity of Proteins and Polysaccharides,’ my name, the University’s name and the address, a short abstract, and a budget that provided for a postdoctoral fellow and supplies. … My stock at Columbia rose enormously. I only activated the contract a year later when the Public Health Service cancelled my grants at the height of the McCarthy period. It was like having money in the bank. ONR supported me for 17 years.”

My father was fortunate to have colleagues and institutions that supported his standing as a scientist and a loyal American citizen. At Columbia, the chair of the department of microbiology and immunology; the chairman of the department of neurology; and the dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons all gave him unwavering support. Michael Heidelberger, with whom my father continued to have a close relationship, was active in the Ethical Culture Society and was an outspoken critic of political interference in the conduct of scientific research. He was also the two-time president of the American Association of Immunologists, which, as early as 1948, had taken a strong stand against loyalty oaths and the blacklisting of scientists, including the physicist Edward U. Condon, Linus Pauling, Elvin Kabat, and John Peters.

My father went on to have a fulfilling life and a productive career. In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, an honor that he regarded as recognition of his treatment during the McCarthy period. It is striking that both Stamler and Hall and Elvin Kabat showed, each in their own way, a remarkable adaptability in rising to the defense of their work and their principles, making use of academic and professional institutions and the law. In their battles against political interference in the exercise of the right of free speech and in the conduct of government-sponsored research, they brought to bear their considerable intellectual powers. Above all, they stood up to defend the First Amendment and the principle that scientific investigation should be free from tests of political loyalty.

As the NEJM article emphasizes, these stories, from what now seems like the distant past, are crucial reminders of how scientists have stood up and actively fought against the impingement of politics on science and managed to continue to advance their fields under the most adverse conditions. What feels so unsettling today is the recognition that ideological litmus tests in science policy are not an artifact of history. They return in a new language, through new institutions, and with new targets.

Geoffrey C. Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist and the author of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. Find him on his website geoffreykabat.com

QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In just the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. Many lamented the performance of GPT-5.2, the latest model. Others shared memes parodying the chatbot’s sycophancy. … Still, others are protesting against what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.

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Dozens of left-leaning teens and twentysomethings scattered across the US came together to organize QuitGPT in late January. They range from pro-democracy activists and climate organizers to techies and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians ….

The information that ICE uses a résumé screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4 came from an AI inventory published by the Department of Homeland Security in January.

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“We make a big enough stink for OpenAI that all of the companies in the whole AI industry have to think about whether they’re going to get away enabling Trump and ICE and authoritarianism,” says an organizer of QuitGPT….

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

The MIT professor who has been appointed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to review the safety of Covid-19 vaccines has failed to meet basic scientific standards in his own research on the topic, according to more than a dozen scientists and public health experts.

Retsef Levi, an operations management professor, is a member of the US health department’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) ….

Levi, who holds Israeli and American citizenship, has claimed that Covid-19 vaccines are the “most failing medical product in the history of medical products”, despite a body of research that has shown they are safe and effective. 

A Guardian review of Levi’s record found that more than a dozen experts have criticized research papers he has authored on the topic for being misleading. Some experts also said they believed Levi, who is not a physician or vaccine expert and now heads ACIP’s special immunizations work group on the Covid-19 vaccines, approaches the topic with a pre-determined agenda, instead of a spirit of true scientific inquiry.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here 

In a severe blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a federal judge in Massachusetts [on March 16, 2026] blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The ruling also reversed, at least for the time being, all decisions made by the panelists that Mr. Kennedy appointed to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices [ACIP] ….

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The judge’s ruling brought an abrupt halt to the major changes that Mr. Kennedy, who has long been skeptical of vaccines, had set in motion …. Those included cutting down the number of diseases covered by routine immunization, and restricting access to Covid vaccines ….

In his decision, Judge Brian Murphy … noted that the vaccine committee has historically made decisions through careful review of scientific evidence, “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements.” But, he added “unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”

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In his decision, Judge Murphy wrote that only six of the 15 panelists “appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines — the very focus of A.C.I.P.”

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

The United States’s withdrawal this year from the World Health Organization (WHO) is having knock-on effects on an influential global organization for cancer research …. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is cutting ties with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), WHO’s 60-year-old cancer research arm.

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The move, which has not been announced publicly, also appears likely to end long-running collaborations between IARC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and other federal agencies. 

IARC may be best known for its monographs, reviews of the carcinogenicity of chemicals and other types of exposure, from very hot drinks to the herbicide glyphosate. The reports assess whether a substance has the potential to cause cancer, not whether people are exposed enough to develop disease, and critics have argued they create confusion.

But that’s because scientists and the public sometimes misunderstand their purpose, says toxicologist Dave Dorman of North Carolina State University, who has served on several monograph working groups. “They’re probably the authoritative global reference evaluating carcinogenic hazards” and give countries a starting point for risk assessments, Dorman says.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here 

A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.

The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online.

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The content has become a potent informational weapon for Tehran as it seeks to shake the public’s tolerance for war by depicting scenes of devastation and destruction across the region. The majority of A.I. videos about the war push pro-Iranian views, often to falsely demonstrate its military superiority and sophistication ….

In one of the most circulated fake videos found online, a shaky handheld scene seemingly shot from an apartment balcony in Tel Aviv shows the skyline pounded with missiles as an Israeli flag sits in the foreground. The video was viewed millions of times ….

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The A.I. footage has essentially created an alternate reality more suited to social media, experts said, where the exaggerated footage is more likely to find an audience.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here