FAIR Health aggregates pricing and cost information for private insurers of healthcare. Its annual report, on what we might consider primary care, shows the changes wrought by COVID-19 and how we seek care. [1]

Vice News endorses all the currently fashionable opinions—including activist bromides about modern agriculture. The magazine recently took exception to children's books meant to teach elementary-school students about pesticides. I take exception to Vice's sorry excuse for science reporting.

Hear about the German guy who got arrested for getting selling forged vaccine cards to anti-vaxxers? That should be funny enough, right? Nope. ACSH goes the extra kilometer, as usual.

Monopolies in pharmaceutical (think pharmacy benefit management), a different view of Twitter (still negative though), and Microsoft reports we have three peak areas of work every day; the last is at 10 PM – what up with that?

To obtain a permit for a handgun in New York City, the applicant must provide written consent from those living with them that the presence of a gun is OK. Is that a good or bad requirement? A new study looks at homicide deaths among “cohabitants of handgun owners,” what could go wrong?

Antibiotic R&D is hard. Getting to approval is harder. Surviving the commercialization step today is almost impossible. Government-based funding to fix the broken antibiotic market is essential to stop this march of the lemmings. Private investment will follow a government incentive and amplify its effect.

President Eisenhower worried that we were creating a scientific/technologic elite that controls the narrative and stifles heterodoxy. But the digital age and the democratization of knowledge threaten the scientific "priesthood" – much in the way the printing press threatened the controlling interest of an earlier time. The priesthood must learn to adapt to a world where it no longer has a monopoly on specialized knowledge.

North Carolina State University recently cancelled a science-outreach event because the invited speakers have the wrong skin color. It's another example of academic institutions prizing a radical social agenda over education.

Access to health care and having health insurance are two easily recognizable “social determinants” of health. But is having access to the Internet another social determinant? A new study and the media suggest that the answer is yes. Let’s see what the paper actually said and what it might mean.

COVID-19 may remain in our communities for the foreseeable future, and we are told to live with as yet to be defined “new normal.” By and large, this pandemic has been fought on an individual level, one case, mask, and vaccination at a time. Alternatively, environmental risk analysis involves three levels of specificity: community, local, and individual, comprising a “3-legged stool”. Understanding the first two legs is required to benefit the third.