This week a sentence from a courtroom stuck to me and would not come off. A judge dismissed the effort to make a journal retract a paper that has been picked apart for years, and the reason was not that the paper holds up. The reason was that no ordinary reader has the standing to demand it be pulled. Read that twice. The honesty of the medical record is apparently nobody’s to insist on, least of all yours, the person whose body the record is supposed to serve. I have been turning that over all week.
It rhymes with a quieter thing I keep noticing: how often the news cycle hands us a “discovery” that was actually published months ago, the way a magician shows you the card you already saw. The work is real. The freshness is theater. And the gap between the two is where you get talked into something.
So that is the mood here. We are not against science. We are against being managed by it. When a finding earns the excitement, we will say so loudly. When the excitement is doing work the evidence cannot, we will say that too, and we will show you why.
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.
The AI Models Just Failed the Clinical Test We Use to Spot Executive Dysfunction
A new PNAS Nexus study put the same Stroop task neuropsychologists use to screen for executive dysfunction in front of GPT-5, Claude Opus, and Gemini. The accuracy collapse arrives months after the FDA quietly loosened oversight of AI clinical decision support.
Drugs & FDA
Moderna’s mRNA flu shot got a 9-0 vote. The comparator question that killed its first filing did not go away.
An FDA panel voted 9-0 to back Moderna’s first mRNA flu vaccine. Four months earlier, the same agency refused to even read the file over the comparator the trial used. The comparator did not change.
The $200K Pediatric Diabetes Shot Just Won a Bigger Label. The Number That Won Isn’t the One Families Will Ever See.
The FDA gave Tzield an accelerated nod for kids 8 to 17 newly diagnosed with Stage 3 type 1 diabetes. The C-peptide number won. The endpoints families would actually feel did not.
Cancer
Ivermectin and Cancer: The Review the Horse-Paste Crowd Wasn’t Supposed to Get
A 2025 systematic review finds coherent anticancer biology in ivermectin across ten tumor types. The human evidence to match it does not exist. The question of why is what the punchline was designed to bury.
The “Secret Reason” Cancer Drugs Stop Working Was Published in February
A Montreal team’s antibody against the SLAMF6 brake on T cells made the rounds this week as a fresh discovery. The paper went up in February, the work is in mice, and the antibody has not been given to a person.
Infectious Disease
It Grows Like a Cancer, Not a Parasite. And It’s in 37% of Seattle’s Coyotes.
A European strain of Echinococcus multilocularis has been found in 37 percent of Puget Sound coyotes, the first wild-host detection on the U.S. West Coast outside Alaska.
Decades of Failed Diarrhea Vaccines Kept Hitting the Wrong Coat. A WashU Team Just Found the Scissors Underneath.
A WashU-led team identified a structurally conserved patch on three mucus-cleaving enzymes that ETEC, Shigella, and other gut pathogens all use to breach the intestinal barrier, offering a single antibody target the field has chased for decades.
Metabolic & Weight
Your Kidneys Are Quietly Failing. The WHO’s Plan Skips What’s Actually Killing Them.
The Lancet is pushing fast implementation of the first WHO kidney resolution, which expands screening and treatment access while leaving the ultraprocessed food and sugar driving the global CKD doubling untouched.
Sleep apnea’s heart damage may run through the gut, not the airway
Researchers at UCSD report that knocking out a single bile-acid receptor abolishes the arterial plaque sleep-apnea conditions would otherwise drive in mice. The mechanism fits the CPAP era’s underwhelming trial record better than the airway story ever did.
Brain & Aging
A 14-Patient Hand-Exoskeleton Study Lands in Science Advances, With a Headline That Outruns the Data
A Vienna-led team published a 14-patient feasibility study of a wearable hand exoskeleton with closed-loop electrical stimulation. The mechanism is genuinely novel; the headline is doing work the data cannot.
The amyloid-versus-tau war in Alzheimer’s might be the wrong fight
A four-person UC Riverside chemistry group argues amyloid beta and tau compete for the same microtubule binding sites, a unifying mechanism that cuts under Alzheimer’s research’s three-decade amyloid-versus-tau fight.
Nutrition & Food
Brewed tea has the longevity receipts. The supplement aisle has a liver problem.
A 2025 review finds 1.5 to 2 cups of brewed tea daily correlate with about 10% lower all-cause and 14% lower cardiovascular mortality. The EGCG-extract supplements built on the same chemistry have been linked to over 100 liver-injury cases, while bubble tea can match a Coke for sugar.
Vitamin C just landed on an 8-preservative hypertension list. It was the only one also tied to heart disease.
A French cohort of 112,395 adults, followed eight years, flagged eight common preservatives for hypertension. Ascorbic acid was the only one that also independently associated with cardiovascular disease, and the lead author is calling on EFSA and FDA to reopen the file.