The Veteran Administration's "Opioid Safety Initiative" – as fine an example of doublespeak as you'll see – succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions by 64% in less than a decade. That's just fine if you're prepared to accept the accompanying 75% increase in rural veteran suicides. Drs. Jeffrey Singer and Josh Bloom are not. Here's their opinion piece in The Virginian-Pilot.

Had she lived, Henrietta Lacks would have been 101 in August. Instead, she died at 31, a victim of aggressive cervical cancer. Monday marks the 70th anniversary of her death on October 4, 1951.  But her cells live on, immortalized by George Gey, a cellular biologist at Johns Hopkins.

It's time for another installment of "The Health Ranger Chronicles," where we examine Mike Adams' claims about the supposed dangers of COVID vaccination. Adams and other Natural News writers have alleged that the shots are mind-control tools or bioweapons, and that planning for the pandemic began in 2015. This time, COVID-19 is apparently a real threat, but the vaccines are still more dangerous.

Has the New York Times, which has been squarely in the 'No GMO' column for many years, moved into this century? Drs. Kathleen Hefferon and Henry Miller argue yes, but not nearly enough so to make up for past misrepresentations about genetic modification.

It takes up a third of our life; why do we sleep? Jimming the lock of the lock and key model of biology. How to escape a volcano, like the one on La Palma. The Work Ethic revisited.

Many tobacco control advocates have attacked vaping by emphasizing the risk it poses to teenagers. While children should never use any nicotine product, there's a strong case to be made that the campaign against teen vaping has distracted us from tackling a critical public health threat: adult smoking.

Wanna hear something crazy? Fentanyl test strips are FDA-approved to quickly test for the presence of the dangerous drug in the urine in overdose cases. They can also be used to check for fentanyl in street drugs and counterfeit pills. But in more than 40 states, this is illegal (!). Why? Because they are considered to be drug paraphernalia. Seriously. Good luck finding any policy or law dumber than this.

The year was 1947 – the last smallpox invasion in America. Ground zero:  New York City. The carrier: an ex-pat named Eugene LeBar, who had arrived from Mexico on March 1. By the time his diagnosis was confirmed, more than a month later, he had likely exposed thousands of New Yorkers. Even before arriving in New York, LeBar had traveled through seven major American population centers, exposing probably hundreds more.

As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).

Antiviral drug development for COVID-19 took a back seat to vaccines during the brief time – when we thought that ending the pandemic was simply a matter of getting enough needles in enough arms. But the virus had other ideas: variants. Now it's looking like we may need a drug to complement the vaccines. Three are in development. Here's a look at Pfizer's PF-07321332. It should work, but don't hold me to that.