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    Trump Administration Has Begun a War on Science, Researchers Say

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    Nearly 2,000 scientists urged that Congress restore funding to federal agencies decimated by recent cuts.Some 1,900 leading researchers accused the Trump administration in an open letter on Monday of conducting a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” that could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans.The letter’s signatories, all of them elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, warned of the damage being done by layoffs at health and science agencies and cuts and delays to funding that has historically supported research inside the government and across American universities.“For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world,” the letter said. “Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”Read the LetterResearchers at academic institutions nationwide say that U.S. science is being dismantled.Read Document 75 pagesThe letter said that many universities and research institutions had so far “kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.” But, it said, “the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”The signatories called on Americans to appeal to Congress to protect scientific funding.With Elon Musk’s efforts to cut spending and President Trump’s crackdown on institutions he sees as ideological enemies, the administration has sought to dismantle parts of the federal government’s scientific funding apparatus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the Right Still Embraces Ivermectin

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      Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses.He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped.“Yum,” Mr. Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.”Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent Covid-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers.Mr. Grinsteiner, 54, is a Trump supporter and country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Grinsteiner said that he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being.There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Mr. Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Ivermectin Can (and Can’t) Do

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      Social media posts have promoted the anti-parasitic drug for cancer and Covid. That has doctors alarmed.At least once a week, someone asks Dr. Skyler Johnson if ivermectin can treat their cancer.Patients have asked about the anti-parasitic drug for years, especially during the pandemic. But in recent months, Dr. Johnson, a radiation oncologist at the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute, has fielded more and more questions about the medication.Exaggerated and inaccurate comments about ivermectin have intensified online lately. Google searches for “ivermectin” hit their highest point in January since a Covid wave in 2022. That month, the actor Mel Gibson appeared on the hit podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” and said that three friends with Stage 4 cancer recovered after taking ivermectin, among other drugs. Researchers said the podcast, which received 10 million views on YouTube alone, fed into a flood of inaccurate claims and misinformation about the drug’s purported health benefits.At the same time, politicians in several states are promoting legislation that would make it easier for people to obtain ivermectin. The governor of Arkansas signed a bill last week that would enable people to buy it without a prescription. Lawmakers in Georgia, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and Kentucky have filed, or said they plan to file, similar legislation. A wealth of research has shown the drug does not treat Covid. And there is not evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer.“I understand that people, a lot of times, want to take health into their own hands — they want to figure things out on their own,” said Krissy Lunz Trujillo, an assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina who researches health misinformation. “But that might have really serious consequences.”Dr. Johnson worries that people will forgo traditional cancer treatments for a drug that hasn’t been proven to work. He tells patients that there is no rigorous research showing the anti-parasitic drug cures cancer in humans. Still, he has seen some people with early, treatable tumors turn to the drug, and return months later with cancers that have spread to their lymph nodes, bones and brain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Top FDA Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies’

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      The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

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      Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire.On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump’s Justice Dept. Speech on Crime, Immigration and His Cases

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      President Trump repeated a number of well-trodden falsehoods on Friday in a grievance-fueled speech at the Justice Department, veering from prepared remarks to single out lawyers and prosecutors and assail the criminal investigations into him.His remarks, billed as a policy address, were wide-ranging, touching on immigration, crime and the price of eggs.Here’s a fact-check.Mr. Trump’s misleading claims touched on:His legal troublesThe 2020 electionBiden and classified documentsThe Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the CapitolParents, anti-abortion activists and CatholicsImmigration and crimeEgg pricesHis legal troublesWhat Was Said“They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”“They spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.”This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump’s claims refer to a wide array of investigations and criminal cases that occurred before, during and after his first term as president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Covid Changed the Lives of These 29 Americans

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      Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by grief, fear and isolation, many of us wondered: When will things go back to normal? Could they ever? Today, for many, the coronavirus pandemic seems far away and foggy, while for others it’s as visceral […] More

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      Zelensky Urges ‘More Truth’ After Trump Suggests Ukraine Started the War

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appealed to the Trump administration on Wednesday to respect the truth and avoid disinformation in discussing the war that began with a Russian invasion of his country, in his first response to President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine had started the war.“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv during a broader discussion about the administration, which this week opened peace talks with Russia that excluded Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” and in a “circle of disinformation.”The remarks, delivered from his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags to avoid blasts from Russian missiles, were some of the most pointed yet about Mr. Trump and his views on the war.The 38th Separate Marine Brigade firing a Grad self-propelled 122-milimeter multiple rocket launcher at a Russian target from the Pokrovsk front line of eastern Ukraine on Monday.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesMr. Zelensky had until this week walked a fine line of staking out Ukrainian positions while avoiding any suggestion of an open breach with the United States, Ukraine’s most important ally in the now nearly three-year-old war. After the initial cease-fire talks between Russia and the United States, Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday had starkly laid out his refusal to accept terms negotiated without Ukrainian participation.Later Tuesday, Mr. Trump said of Ukraine’s leadership and the war, “You should have never started it,” and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections before some stages of talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating was 4 percent. Mr. Zelensky said that was not true, citing polls showing far higher support.At the news conference, Mr. Zelensky was focused and spoke with intensity. He said he was not personally ruffled by the negotiations with the Trump administration. “This is not my first dialogue or fight,” he said. “I take it calmly.”Russia, he said, is clearly pleased with the turn of diplomatic developments. “I think Putin and the Russians are very happy, because questions are discussed with them,” Mr. Zelensky said.“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government sparked the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years. “That is something new.” More

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      Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

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      Speaking in Paris at an artificial intelligence summit, the vice president gave an America First vision of the technology — with the U.S. dominating the chips, the software and the rules.Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More