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      Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

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      The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.” More

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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      RFK Jr does not just reject vaccines. He rejects science and must step down | Bernie Sanders

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      Since taking office, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the health and human services department (HHS), has undermined vaccines at every turn. He has dismissed the entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory panel, narrowed access to life-saving Covid-19 vaccines, filled scientific advisory boards with conspiracy theorists and fired the newly appointed CDC director for refusing to rubber-stamp his actions.But his rejection of vaccines is only part of the problem. Secretary Kennedy is unfit to be our nation’s leading public health official because he rejects the fundamental principles of modern science.For generations, doctors have agreed that germs – like bacteria or viruses – cause infectious diseases.In the 1850s, John Snow, known as the father of epidemiology, traced a cholera outbreak in London to water contaminated with human waste – not the “bad air”, or so-called miasma, that many at that time believed to be the cause.In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, in a controlled experiment, injected one group of sheep with an anthrax vaccine while another group went without it. Then he injected all of the sheep with anthrax bacteria. The vaccinated sheep survived, the unvaccinated did not.The germ theory led to a revolution in public health and medicine which, over the years, has saved tens of millions of lives.Just a few examples.At a time when many women were dying during childbirth at hospitals, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis found that handwashing by doctors saved lives.Joseph Lister showed that sterilizing medical equipment before surgery prevented needless deaths.Florence Nightingale, considered the mother of modern nursing, substantially improved hygiene at hospitals and made healthcare much safer for patients.Pasteur made the food we eat and the milk we drink safer through a process of heating called pasteurization.And these are just a few examples.Yet, incredibly, in the year 2025, we now have a secretary of HHS who has cast doubt and aspersions on the very concept of the germ theory – the very foundation of modern medicine for over a century.In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy absurdly claims that the central tenet behind the germ theory “is simply untrue”. Vaccines are not, Kennedy falsely asserts, responsible for the massive decline in deaths from infectious diseases. Instead, Kennedy falsely proclaims that “science actually gives the honor of having vanquished disease mortalities to sanitation and nutrition”.Yes. No one disputes that proper sanitation, a nutritious diet and exercise can lead to healthier lives. But no credible scientist or doctor believes that alone makes a person immune from polio, measles, mumps, Covid, HIV/Aids and other infectious diseases. Otherwise healthy people can become sick, hospitalized or even die from these and other terrible diseases.Sadly, Kennedy’s dangerous rejection of well-established science is behind his wild conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns.It’s what led to Kennedy’s false assertion that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective” despite peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives and reduced infant deaths by 40% in the past 50 years.It’s behind Kennedy’s bogus claim that the polio vaccine “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did”, even though the scientific data has shown that the polio vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented about 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.It undergirds his history of promoting the ridiculous idea that HIV does not cause Aids, despite rigorous studies finding the exact opposite. This type of outrageous HIV/Aids denialism is widely believed to have caused the deaths of at least 330,000 people in South Africa who did not receive the life-saving medicine they needed.It’s what led him to say that the Covid vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made”, that vaccines cause autism, and that the hepatitis B vaccine doesn’t work and should only be used for “prostitutes” and “promiscuous gay men” – lies that have been thoroughly debunked by scientific data and the medical community.Frighteningly, it’s what caused Kennedy to say: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it.”As a private citizen, Kennedy is entitled to his views, no matter how misguided they may be.If Kennedy would like to swim in water contaminated by raw sewage and fecal matter, as he has done recently in Washington DC’s Rock Creek Park, he is free to do that.But as our nation’s top health official, Secretary Kennedy’s rejection of science and the actions he has taken as a result of his bizarre ideology is endangering the lives of millions of children in the United States and throughout the world.Today, Kennedy is making it harder for people to get vaccines. Tomorrow, what will it be? Will he tell doctors they don’t need to wash their hands before surgery? Will he tell hospitals that they don’t need to sterilize their scalpels and other medical equipment?The American people need a secretary of HHS who will listen to scientists and doctors, and not conspiracy theorists.We need a secretary of HHS who will listen to medical experts who may disagree with him, not fire them summarily.Bottom line: we need an HHS secretary who will not engage in a war on science and the truth itself.Secretary Kennedy must step down.

      Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and ranking member of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

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      Rinse and repeat: US vaccine hearing on unpublished study debates same myths

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      A congressional hearing on Tuesday titled “How the Corruption of Science Has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines” largely consisted of a debate over an unpublished study comparing chronic illnesses in children who received vaccines with those who didn’t.The study was lead-authored by Marcus Zervos of Henry Ford Health, completed in 2020, and never submitted for publication, according to testimony during the hearing. Senator Ron Johnson, the chair of the subcommittee for the hearing, and the witness Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has represented RFK Jr and the anti-vaccination non-profit Informed Consent Action Network, both claimed the study was not submitted because the authors would lose their jobs were it to be published.Zervos and the other authors of the study were not present at the hearing. The study, which has never been peer-reviewed, is not currently available to the public as a pre-print or in any other form.Henry Ford Health’s communication office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.The only information that is currently publicly available about the study comes from the hearing itself, including witness testimony and a brief trailer for a documentary from the Informed Consent Action Network. The trailer says the study found that “amongst the unvaccinated group, there was zero brain dysfunction, zero diabetes, zero behavioral problems, zero learning disabilities, zero intellectual disabilities, zero tics and zero other psychological disabilities”.The trailer also includes a clip of Donald Trump saying: “A few decades ago, one in 10,000 children had autism. Today, it’s one in 31.”Witnesses on both sides of the debate during the hearing agreed that the study in question found no link between vaccines and autism.Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford – and the only physician who served as a witness during the hearing – had a different explanation as to why the study was not published.In his testimony, Scott said that the study is “fundamentally flawed”, adding that its core problem was that “vaccinated children had twice the follow up time and substantially more healthcare visits than unvaccinated children”. More healthcare visits mean more opportunities to be diagnosed with conditions like ADHD.Scott went on to explain that “the study reports zero ADHD cases among 1,000s of unvaccinated children. How is that possible with a national prevalence at 11%? That’s highly unlikely, unless conditions went undiagnosed.” Scott noted that the study also claimed a six to eightfold increase in ear infections among vaccinated children, but there is no plausible scientific explanation as to why vaccines would increase ear infections.This finding is consistent with past research showing that parents who do not vaccinate their children are also less likely to have their children treated for health conditions in the medical system. Conditions that were not diagnosed or treated would not have shown up in the study, which relied on medical records, according to hearing testimony.Siri claimed the authors of the study ran sensitivity analyses to account for the differences in medical care. These are not available to the public.As a point of comparison, Scott referenced a Danish study published this July in Annals of Internal Medicine which investigated whether childhood vaccines were linked to 50 different conditions, including many of the same conditions from the unpublished study, like ADHD, autism, asthma, food allergies and eczema. The Danish study looked at outcomes in over a million vaccinated children and 15,000 unvaccinated children, while the unpublished study looked at 18,500 vaccinated children and 2,000 unvaccinated children, according to hearing testimony.The Danish study found no statistically significant increase in risk for any of the conditions investigated, and that vaccinated children experienced lower rates of certain conditions, like ulcerative colitis.Johnson and Siri expressed skepticism over the Danish study, noting that the authors have not released the de-identified raw data they used for their conclusions. No data is available about the unpublished study.Later in the hearing, the conversation turned towards skepticism about vaccines in general and the Covid-19 vaccine specifically.Some graphics that Johnson shared left out critical information. For example, a line chart he introduced accurately showed that measles death rates had already begun to decline significantly before vaccines were introduced in the 1960s, due to other factors like improved sanitation, healthcare access and nutrition, but the chart stops in 1960. After vaccines were introduced and widely adopted, both measles cases and death rates declined to nearly zero.Measles was effectively eliminated in the US in 2000, but cases reemerged when vaccine adoption decreased. There have been 35 measles outbreaks in 2025, according to the CDC. At least two US children and one adult have died of measles this year.Scott, the Stanford witness, had trouble answering some questions based on spurious facts. He was silent for a moment when Johnson asked him “Did you believe when Fauci told us that the [Covid] mRNA shot would stay in the arm?” There is no credible evidence that Fauci ever said this.Toby Rogers, a fellow at the Brownstone institute whose study linking vaccines and autism was retracted said: “I believe we are in the midst of one of the greatest crimes in human history,” referring to vaccines. In now-deleted tweets, Rogers has called for hearings similar to the Nuremberg trials for public health officials who promote vaccines.When Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the hearing subcommittee, asked if Rogers believes the Covid-19 vaccine is comparable to the Holocaust, several audience members applauded. More

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      Trump’s former surgeon general urges president to fire RFK Jr

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      The surgeon general from the first Trump administration on Saturday said that the US president should “absolutely” fire health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “dangerous” policies on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Jerome Adams, who has become a pointed critic of the public health decisions being swiftly rolled out in the second Trump administration, made his most fierce attack yet on what has been unfolding.“He’s putting us at risk,” Adams said of RFK Jr, adding that Kennedy is “endangering America at large” with moves to limit access to vaccines, such as shots to protect against the deadly Covid-19 virus.In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, anchor Victor Blackwell asked Adams, who served as Donald Trump’s surgeon general from 2017 to 2021, including through the height of the coronavirus pandemic, whether Kennedy should resign.“Well, he’s not going to resign,” Adams said.Asked whether, therefore, Trump should fire his health secretary, Adams said: “I absolutely believe that he should, for the sake of the nation.”Kennedy was praised by the president after a stormy committee hearing in the US Senate on Thursday where Democrats called for his resignation or firing and accused him of ignorance and “reckless disregard for science and the truth”.Although more muted, a select few Republicans were critical, including Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who had been a crucial vote to confirm Kennedy to his post, who said the secretary was “effectively denying people the vaccine” with his policy positions. Kennedy snapped back: “You’re wrong.”Adams said he was “flabbergasted” by new restrictions from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month on who is eligible to receive the latest version of the Covid-19 vaccination and hoped that Trump “will begin to see the danger … to America” of Kennedy’s leanings and will not be “in thrall” of his health secretary.On Friday, Adams was a co-author of a bipartisan opinion piece published in USA Today from three former surgeons general that said that Kennedy’s actions to shake up the CDC were actions that “jeopardize not only the institution’s integrity but also the health and well-being of millions of Americans”.The other authors were Jocelyn Elders, surgeon general in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration, and Richard Carmona, surgeon general under Republican George W Bush’s presidency.The CDC erupted in chaos in late August when the Trump administration fired the center’s director Susan Monarez, who had been in the post for mere weeks, in an apparent divide over vaccine policy – although she is refusing to leave. Several senior CDC leaders quit in protest at Kennedy’s move to oust her. This followed his June firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) and his replacing them with some who publicly hold anti-vaccine views.The three former surgeons general wrote that they were “gravely concerned” for the CDC as a “cornerstone of public health in America and across the world” that had saved countless lives through its science-driven approach, earning public trust.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The recent turbulence at the CDC threatens to undermine this legacy, and we feel this is not just a bureaucratic or political issue. It’s truly a matter of life and death,” the article said.Adams said in the CNN interview that organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have lost trust in the CDC under Kennedy’s leadership.He warned that Kennedy could effectively destroy the CDC and was “putting lives at risk by doing so”.Adams at times clashed with Trump when he was his surgeon general, including over policies over public masking during the pandemic.On Saturday, he warned that Kennedy’s policies threatened public health in general but that Covid vaccine restrictions were “specifically endangering Black, Hispanic and Native American communities, who experienced death rates during the pandemic that were twice as high as white Americans”.The day after the Senate hearing, former Massachusetts Democratic representative Joe Kennedy III, RFK Jr’s nephew, posted a statement on X calling the health secretary “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” and urging him to resign.Echoing that call to resign was one of the secretary’s siblings, Kerry Kennedy, who also posted on X and decried what she called “the decimation of critical institutions, like the [National Institutes of Health] and the CDC”. More

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      RFK Jr accused of ‘reckless disregard for science and the truth’ in Senate hearing

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      The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, faced the Senate finance committee in a tense and combative hearing on Thursday, during which lawmakers questioned his remarks expressing vaccine skepticism, claims that the scientific community is deeply politicized and the ongoing turmoil plaguing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).In a hearing lasting more than three hours and ostensibly about the Trump administration’s healthcare agenda, Kennedy defended his leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), claiming that his time at the agency will be focused on “unbiased, politics-free, transparent, evidence-based science in the public interest”.Senate Democrats on the committee began the hearing calling for Kennedy’s resignation. “Robert Kennedy’s primary interest is taking vaccines away from Americans,” ranking member Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, said in his opening remarks. “People are hurt by his reckless disregard for science and the truth in this effort. I hope the very least, Robert Kennedy has the decency to tell the truth this morning.”Raphael Warnock, also a Democrat, called Kennedy a “hazard to the health of the American people”, repeating calls for him to step down or for Donald Trump to fire him.Last week, Kennedy fired the CDC director, Susan Monarez, less than a month after she was confirmed to her position. She is now mounting a legal case challenging her removal.Shortly after Monarez’s termination, several leading public health officials at the CDC resigned from their positions, citing frustration with Kennedy’s approach to vaccines and his management style.Kennedy said Monarez was “lying” about her claims that she was fired for refusing to sign off on the secretary’s new vaccine policies. Instead, Kennedy said that she was removed after admitting to being untrustworthy.The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, was unconvinced – citing Kennedy’s prior characterization of the former CDC director as “unimpeachable”.“You had full confidence in her and you had full confidence in her scientific credentials, and in a month she became a liar?” she asked. Thom Tillis, the outgoing Republican senator of North Carolina, asked about the same contradiction in his questioning.Monarez’s lawyers responded in a statement to Kennedy’s comments, calling them “false” and “at times, patently ridiculous”. They added that Monarez would repeat her published claims “under oath”.Kennedy also justified wider firings at the CDC , calling them “absolutely necessary”.“We are the sickest country in the world,” he said. “That’s why we need to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy.”In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee – a move that defied a promise he made during his confirmation hearing to Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee. Many of Kennedy’s replacements for the advisory panel have a history of vaccine skepticism.When asked about the changes to the advisory committee, and how that will change vaccine recommendations and scheduling, Kennedy said he didn’t anticipate changes to the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine.In an exchange with Kennedy, Cassidy noted the possible conflict of interest with some of the panel’s new members who are involved in ongoing litigation with vaccine manufacturers.Cassidy cast a critical vote to confirm Kennedy earlier this year. He had previously expressed a number of concerns about the health secretary’s historic comments that undermined vaccine efficacy. The senator has since been critical of a number of Kennedy’s policies, including his decision to cut half a billion dollars worth of mRNA vaccine funding – calling the move “unfortunate”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the new batch of Covid-19 vaccines, but placed restrictions on who would be able to access them. The agency has authorized shots for people 65 and older, who are known to be more at risk from serious illnesses from Covid infections. Younger people will only be eligible if they have an underlying medical condition that makes them vulnerable. Infectious disease experts say that this policy could prove extremely dangerous, particularly for young children.On Tuesday, Kennedy defended HHS’s handling of the measles outbreak that affected several states in an opinion piece. While the secretary branded his agency’s response as effective, public health experts said Kennedy’s own messaging around vaccines was muddied and confusing.Cassidy concluded his remarks at the hearing by telling Kennedy that his policies were “effectively denying people the vaccine”, sharing an email from a doctor friend who expressed confusion about Covid inoculation eligibility given the FDA’s new recommendation policies.Kennedy snapped back: “You’re wrong.”The Republican senator John Barrasso, of Wyoming, also a doctor, expressed similar concerns about Kennedy’s policies. “In your confirmation hearing you promised to uphold the highest standard for vaccines,” Barrasso said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”During a back and forth with the Virginia senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, Kennedy falsely claimed that there are “no cuts to Medicaid” under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – Trump’s hallmark domestic policy legislation that was signed into law in July.The congressional budget office estimates that around 7.8 million people stand to lose their health insurance over a decade, due to Medicaid changes under the law.Multiple Democrats on the committee had heated exchanges with the health secretary. Many of them pointed out the inconsistency between Kennedy’s recent support for the president’s “Operation Warp Speed” and his disparagement of the Covid-19 shot. He has previously called it the “deadliest” vaccine ever manufactured.At the hearing, Kennedy refused to acknowledge the wealth of data that shows that the Covid-19 vaccine has saved lives.“Trump has said the vaccine works, and has saved millions of lives. Your own process, on the other hand, has not been transparent,” said the Democratic senator Maggie Hassan, of New Hampshire. “You repeatedly choose to ignore data because it doesn’t match your preconceived notions and lies.” More

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      Texas bill allowing residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers reaches governor

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      A measure that would allow Texas residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers advanced to the desk of the governor, Greg Abbott, on Wednesday, setting up the state to be the first to try to crack down on the most common abortion method.Supporters say it’s a key tool to enforce the state’s abortion ban, protecting women and fetuses.Opponents see it not only as another way to rein in abortion but as an effort to intimidate abortion providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states – and to encourage a form of vigilantism.If the measure becomes law, it’s nearly certain to spark legal challenges from abortion rights supporters.Under the measure, Texas residents could sue those who manufacture, transport or provide abortion-inducing drugs to anyone in Texas for up to $100,000. Women who receive the pills for their own use would not be liable.Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sued could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.Lawmakers also added language to address worries that women would be turned in for seeking to end pregnancies by men who raped them or abusive partners. For instance, a man who impregnated a woman through sexual assault would not be eligible.The measure has provisions that bar making public the identity or medical details about a woman who receives the pills.It wasn’t until those provisions were added, along with the limit of a $10,000 payment for people who aren’t themselves injured by the abortion, that several major Texas anti-abortion groups backed the bill.The idea of using citizens rather than government officials to enforce abortion bans is not new in Texas. It was at the heart of a 2021 law that curtailed abortion there months before the US supreme court cleared the way for other state bans to take effect.In the earlier law, citizens could collect $10,000 for bringing a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. But that measure didn’t explicitly seek to go after out-of-state providers.Pills are a tricky topic for abortion opponents. They were the most common abortion method in the US even before the 2022 supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.They’ve become even more widely used since then. Their availability is a key reason that the number of abortions has risen nationally, even though Texas and 11 other states are enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.The pills have continued to flow partly because at least eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws that seek to protect medical providers from legal consequences when they use telehealth to prescribe the pills to women who are in states where abortion is illegal.Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, said the measure is intended to threaten those out-of-state providers and women in Texas.“This is about the chilling effect,” she said. “This is yet another abortion ban that is allowing the state to control people’s health care lives and reproductive decisions.”Earlier this year, a Texas judge ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for providing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.The same provider, Dr Maggie Carpenter, faces criminal charges from a Louisiana prosecutor for similar allegations.New York officials are invoking their state’s shield laws to block extradition of Carpenter and to refuse to file the civil judgment.If higher courts side with Louisiana or Texas officials, it could damage the shield laws.Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Texas and Florida are seeking to join Idaho, Kansas and Missouri in an effort to get courts to roll back US Food and Drug Administration approvals for mifepristone, one of the drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions, contending that there are safety concerns. They say it needs tighter controls because of those concerns.If the states are successful, it’s possible the drug could be distributed only in person and not by telehealth.Major medical organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the drug is safe. More

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      Why Trump’s undermining of US statistics is so dangerous | Daniel Malinsky

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      In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts – in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine – and so Stalin’s government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR’s achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.A few weeks ago, following the release of “disappointing” jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Donald Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr Erika McEntarfer, and claimed the numbers were “rigged”. He also announced his intention to commission an unprecedented off-schedule census of the US population (these happen every 10 years and the next one should be in 2030) with an emphasis that this census “will not count illegal immigrants”. The real goal is presumably to deliver a set of population estimates that could be used to reapportion congressional seats and districts ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections and ensure conditions favorable to Republican control of Congress – though it is not clear there is sufficient time or support from Congress to make this happen. The administration is also reportedly “updating” the National Climate Assessments and various important sources of data on topics related to climate and public health have disappeared. In addition to all this, Trump’s justice department launched an investigation into the crime statistics of the DC Metropolitan police, alleging that the widely reported decline in 2024 DC violent crime rates – the lowest total number of recorded violent crimes city-wide in 30 years – are a distortion, fueled by falsified or manipulated statistics. One might say that the charge of “fake data” is just a close cousin of the “fake news” and all of this is par for the course for an administration that insists an alternate reality is the truth. But this pattern may also beget a specifically troubling (and quintessentially Soviet) state of affairs: the public belief that all “political” data are fake, that one generally cannot trust statistics. We must resist this paradigm shift, because it mainly serves to entrench authoritarianism.It was eventually a common sentiment in the Soviet Union that one could never trust “the official numbers” because they were largely manipulated to serve political interests. (At least, this is the sentiment reported by my parents, who grew up in the Soviet Baltic states during the 1960s and 1970s – I was an infant when we left in the late 80s so I cannot report much first-hand.) One upshot of this kind of collective belief, if it were to take hold, is that it can make one’s informational world quite small: if you can only trust what you can verify directly, namely what you experience yourself or hear from trusted friends and family, it is difficult to broaden your view to include experiences of people in circumstances very different from yours. This kind of parochial world with few shared reference points is bad for democracy and building solidarity across groups. It also makes it easier for an oppressive state to plant false and divisive “facts” to serve its goals; we’ll have a fake crime wave here and a booming economy there, and though maybe most people disbelieve this they do not quite believe the opposite either. No one can credibly claim or contest any socially relevant trends because all numbers are fake, so the activities of claiming and contesting things become pointless – just do what you can get away with.A political culture with no trust in data or statistics is also one that will rely more heavily on opaque decisions made by elites behind closed doors. In his influential historical study of the rise of quantitative bureaucracy, the historian Thomas Porter points out that basing policy decisions on calculated numerical costs and benefits reduces the role of “local” discretion and can have a homogenizing effect, which can strengthen centralized state control. The flip side of this coin is that it also divests people in power from part of their authority by enabling a degree of public transparency and scrutability: if a huge government project must be justified by reference to some cost-benefit calculations, these calculations can be cross-checked and challenged by various parties. If a government agency requires documentation of progress on initiatives, proof that public funds are being spent appropriately, and evidence on who benefits and by how much, there is substantially less room for plain corruption and mismanagement provided that independent parties have access to the relevant information. Without credible data that reflects the facts on the ground, how can the public push back against an invented “crisis” narrative, concocted to justify the invocation of emergency powers?Anyone who spends any time working with data is acutely aware that there are lots of choices to be made in the collection or processing of data – there are numerous “decision points” about what to include, how to precisely define or measure things, and so on. Indeed, insofar as data is used to tell stories about complex things such as the state of the economy or the health of a population, different data collection or analysis choices can to some extent lend support to different narratives, including predetermined narratives if an unscrupulous analyst is set on it. But it does not follow from this that “anything goes” or that statistics are meaningless. There are better and worse ways to collect and analyze data, both reasonable and preposterous ways to answer empirical questions such as “are crime rates in DC going up or going down?” Most importantly, when government statistics are managed by qualified and non-partisan officials and the relevant numbers can be challenged, debated and contested, then we have a democratic basis for guiding our institutions to better policy decisions. Data of public importance must be publicly accessible, not hidden from view.Trump’s assault on the integrity of data is not the worst of his ongoing abuses – the public should be more immediately outraged by the masked agents disappearing people on the streets and the national guard occupying city centers – but this pattern of actions vis-a-vis official statistics should be extremely alarming. It is a slow boil: if we reach the point where nobody trusts numbers because it’s all “fake data”, it will be too late to resist and too difficult to undo the damage. The opposition must block appointments of unqualified and clearly biased nominees to lead the BLS and other agencies responsible for data stewardship. We must resist undue interference in data gathering, whether that is at the level of the US census or at the level of city government. On the contrary, we should be investing in initiatives that strengthen public trust in and understanding of the social, economic and environmental data that can be used to guide decisions that affect our communities’ wellbeing.

      Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More