Friday, August 14, 2026 Evidence-led medical research news
The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts
MP

Mira Petrov

Investigations · Accountability

Cold, controlled, document-anchored. States what the records do not establish before what they do, and follows the money. Investigative and accountability reporting.

Investigations

RFK Jr. Promised Radical Transparency. His HHS Gutted the Staff Who Release FDA Inspection Reports and CDC Outbreak Data.

The FDA, CDC, and NIH fielded more than 15,000 records requests in 2024. In April 2025 HHS fired the staff who answer them, rehired some FDA workers a month later under legal pressure, and by August 2026 the federal records backlog had only grown.

Investigations

Built to Find Nothing: Merck Tested Gardasil's Safety Against Its Own Aluminum Adjuvant

In ten of eleven pivotal trials, Merck's Gardasil 'placebo' was 225 micrograms of the same aluminum adjuvant that is in the vaccine, and serious harms counted only inside a 14-day window.

Investigations

Two Scientists Nominated Fauci for Cash Prizes. Then His Agency Funded Them by the Hundreds of Millions.

The emails Rand Paul released July 24 show Fauci's taxpayer-funded staff drafting his award nominations, and two scientists who submitted them going on to draw large NIAID grants.

Investigations

Vitamin K Shot Refusals Nearly Doubled Since 2017. A Cancer Scare Refuted Twenty Years Ago Still Shadows It.

Refusal of the newborn vitamin K shot has nearly doubled since 2017. The injection all but erases a bleed that kills roughly one in five infants it reaches, and the cancer scare still shadowing it was refuted twenty years ago. The institutions losing these parents will not even count the damage.

Investigations

A Gene-Editing Trial Killed a Six-Year-Old. The Only Official Penalty Was a $3,500 Fine.

Xinhua Hospital paid about 24,000 yuan in September 2025. The death it was fined over stayed out of the medical literature for another ten months, and out of the Nature paper entirely.

Investigations

A Gene-Editing Trial Killed a 6-Year-Old. Nature Published the Science and Left Her Out of the Record.

Her parents paid $860,000 to base-edit their daughter's brain. She died of an immune reaction within a week, the trial's fatal outcome was never disclosed, and the Nature paper built on the same work never names her.

Investigations

NEJM Retracted the Study That Approved Amgen's Vasculitis Drug. It Had Never Done That in 200 Years.

The FDA says the drug's superiority result came from re-scoring nine patients after the trial was unblinded. It is still on U.S. shelves while Amgen fights the withdrawal.

Investigations

Kennedy Ended the COVID Emergency Authorizations. The Document That Blocks Injury Lawsuits Wasn't the One He Signed.

The emergency use authorizations wind down within a year. The liability shield that routes injured people to a program denying more than 98% of claims runs untouched through 2029.

Investigations

The Crisis Was Unexpected. The Org Chart Wasn't.

Internal NIH correspondence and the public record both point to a pandemic-response architecture, and the people to run it, assembled years before Covid arrived.

Investigations

A DC judge dismissed the Study 329 suit. The court did not say the paper is honest.

A DC court dismissed an attempt to force JAACAP and Elsevier to retract Study 329. The ruling did not find the paper sound. It found that no reader has standing to make a journal stop selling a fraudulent article.

Investigations

Becerra Got the Fauci Whistleblower File. The HHS Inspector General Did Not.

A whistleblower told the Director of National Intelligence in August 2021 that Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about gain-of-function funding. The file was routed to Xavier Becerra, Fauci's cabinet boss, instead of the independent HHS Inspector General. The paper trail is now public.

Investigations

Aaron Siri Wrote a Book Made of Court Filings

A new book by attorney Aaron Siri assembles a decade of FOIA wins, court filings, and depositions into one record of what the federal vaccine docket does and does not say.

Investigations

The founder of Kentucky's biggest rehab chain was indicted this week. The wire fraud charge is the smaller of his problems.

A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Kentucky indicted the founder of Addiction Recovery Care on June 4 for selling the same COVID-era tax credit twice. The bigger case, the FBI Medicaid investigation into the company he built, is still open.

Investigations

Six Negative Tests, Forty-Two Days: What Australia's Biosecurity Order Won't Say Out Loud

Australia extended facility detention of six hantavirus contacts to a full 42 days under the Biosecurity Act after they tested negative. WHO's own guidance reserves that option for the high-risk tier; most peer countries chose monitoring.

Investigations

Vietnam's New Integrity Rule Arrives 251 Retractions Late

Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology issued a research-integrity framework with permanent bans on May 25, 2026. The Retraction Watch database already lists 251 retractions carrying Vietnamese affiliations.