The uptake of the current COVID vaccine is running at about 7% of the U.S. population. Pfizer is taking a significant write-off. After the pandemic, our trust in vaccinations has reached a nadir. It's a far cry from our behavior concerning smallpox in 1947 when, over eight days, over 4 million New Yorkers were vaccinated. Or compared to 1961, when 90% of the at-risk population got vaccinated against polio.

Politicians are attacking a safe and important class of pesticides – neonicotinoids – with unwarranted bans and restrictions. These policies will be devastating to farmers, costly to consumers, and damaging to the environment.

Last year, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, seeking to expand access to buprenorphine, a proven treatment for opioid use disorder. However, a recent proposal by the Drug Enforcement Administration threatens to undermine Congress' intention. Now, some members of Congress appear ready to push back.

While largely ineffective medications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease have gotten a great deal of press, an “orphan” disease – sickle cell disease – is in a similar situation. It is a devastating disease, and there seems to be a gene treatment on the horizon, one that comes with risks and benefits. How do patients calculate what to do?

Answer: It could be. Stress kills. Rarely, but not never. And then there is anxiety, which subsumes a host of related diagnoses. The terms are often co-mingled, with the latter tending to diffuse the dangers of the former. Let’s take a deeper look.

VUCA?
Race in science
Pass the ammo
Sushi and lateral transmission

The U.S. Government doesn't want to hear the message: The Centers for Disease Control and the Veterans Administration published practice guidelines on the prescription of opioid pain relievers in 2022 that they knew were unsupported by science and harmful to public health. The Department of Health and Human Services is stone-walling repeated demands for a senior staff review of these issues.

This could be big. All physicians or cancer researchers have been taught forever that a certain class of cancer drugs works by stopping mitosis, hence cancer cell division. However, a group at the University of Wisconsin discovered that everything we thought we knew about drugs like Taxol and vincristine - decades of textbooks - is wrong. The ramifications could reshape cancer drug research.

Curiosity is the insatiable hunger for knowledge and understanding that fuels our exploration of the world. Each of us has curiosity to varying degrees, often for one topic more than another. Curiosity, as with many of our biological drives, has a dynamic quality: waxing and waning. Some researchers were curious.

Either of two phenomena may be at work -- the "placebo effect" or the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy.