Investigations
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The Zombie Papers: Retracted Stem-Cell Studies Still Feeding the Unproven-Cure Marketplace
A stem-cell paper retracted in November 2021 kept collecting citations for years, 72 by mid-2026, 27 of them after the notice went up, 15 since 2023 that never mention it. Two researchers counted, and named who is supposed to be cleaning up.
InvestigationsA Journal Built to Critique Capitalism Sold for €360,000. Its Fifteen Editors Read the New Fees and Quit.
A €360,000 sale, a €1,350 charge to publish, and a 25 percent fee to withdraw your own paper: the board of a journal built to critique capitalism read the new terms and resigned en masse.
InvestigationsThe Startup Selling 'Optimized' Babies Just Paid to Gene-Edit Human Embryos
Columbia scientists rewrote cholesterol and sickle-cell genes in human embryos, reaching 100 percent in embryos edited before their first division. The funder sells parents 'optimized' babies, and a germline edit like this could be inherited by every generation that follows.
Investigations97,000 Sibling Sets Later: Standard Air-Pollution Birth Studies Overshot One Risk and Buried Another
Comparing brothers and sisters born to the same mother stripped out many of the family-level confounders, and the scary preterm-birth links shrank while the growth-restriction link the conventional models kept underselling got stronger.
InvestigationsAn AI Read 4.4 Million Mother-and-Baby Records and Says It Can Predict Illness. It Has Yet to Meet a Living Patient.
MoChiAgent forecasts maternal and infant disease from hospital records at a scale no clinician could read. A cautionary predecessor, Epic's sepsis tool, caught only a third of the cases it promised to catch.
InvestigationsThe Government Calls the AMA's Codes a 'Monopoly.' The Government Made Them Mandatory.
Royalties bring the American Medical Association more than half its revenue, $301.4 million in 2024, and the code set behind them is one federal rules make mandatory. This summer, CMS asked the public what that arrangement costs.
InvestigationsThe FDA Erased Its Ivermectin Posts and Admitted Nothing. The Doctors' Records Kept the Punishment.
The agency deleted its 'you are not a horse' posts to end a lawsuit, but by then Bowden had lost hospital privileges, Marik had resigned his university chair, and Apter had been referred to two state boards.
InvestigationsOn the Study's Cleanest Test, the Doctors' $12 Billion AI Only Tied Google's Free Search Box
In June a Nature Medicine paper crowned general chatbots over the specialized AI that 40 percent of U.S. doctors use. Its biggest margins came from a public exam and a benchmark OpenAI built. On the one test made for the comparison, the expensive tool only matched a free Google box.
InvestigationsPennsylvania Announced Two Measles Deaths Its County Coroner Never Recorded
Pennsylvania classified two Lancaster County fatalities as measles-associated, including a newborn the county coroner says he certified as dying from a ruptured spleen and blood loss. The CDC won't add either to the national count until the record shows measles caused or contributed to the deaths.
InvestigationsGSK Bankrolled the Study That Turned Its Shingles Vaccine Into a Dementia Headline
The academics who best isolated a shingles-vaccine effect on dementia used a natural experiment and no industry money. The study behind this month's headlines used a claims database and GlaxoSmithKline's checkbook.
InvestigationsA Third of England's COPD Patients Aren't Diagnosed Until a Hospital Admission
Across 1.7 million patients and thirteen conditions, being diagnosed only after an emergency tracked with far higher odds of dying within a year, up to sevenfold for coeliac disease, in a health service whose own records held the story for two decades.
InvestigationsKennedy Reopens the Federal Vaccine Rulebook, Starting With the Words That Decide Which Shots Your Child Gets
HHS is asking whether the three labels that decide which shots your child gets still work, and putting the COVID-era override of its own vaccine advisers on the record as the reason public trust cracked.
InvestigationsA Chinese Registry Marked the Trial 'Complete.' It Never Mentioned the Boy Who Died.
A boy died in a Chinese gene-therapy trial in August 2025. Months later the registry marked the study 'complete' and never mentioned him. He is one of three deaths now pulling Congress toward the trial data U.S. drugmakers ship home from China, while American inspectors almost never see the sites th
InvestigationsTwo Words Open Fauci's Pandemic Diary: 'GAME ON!!!'
Anthony Fauci's private diary greets the pandemic with 'GAME ON!!!' and, in the same January 2020 entry, records that the first infection traced to early December and that the Wuhan market was 'the amplifier,' not the source.
InvestigationsFauci's Top Adviser Admitted to Hiding COVID Emails and Taking Wine for a Natural-Origins Commentary
David Morens pleaded guilty to conspiring to run NIH business through Gmail to dodge FOIA, and to taking wine as an illegal gratuity tied to a commentary declaring COVID had natural origins. Fauci was not charged.
InvestigationsCanada Went Looking for the Forever Chemicals Nobody Tracks and Found a Dozen of Them in Women's Blood
Scientists went hunting for the replacement and precursor PFAS almost nobody measures. In Canadian women's blood they found a dozen of them, riding alongside the 'banned' legacy chemicals that still turn up in nearly everyone.
InvestigationsA JAMA Essay Says the Doctor Makes Your Care Worse. Three of Its Four Authors Sell the AI.
The Viewpoint predicts autonomous AI will run much of primary care by 2030, and that adding a human doctor can make the care worse. Its evidence is trained actors chatting over text, and three of its four authors sell or bankroll the AI.
InvestigationsEighteen Years and $250 Million Later, Human Limb Regrowth Is Still a Salamander Trick
A Northeastern lab showed exactly how an axolotl rebuilds an arm from the shoulder down, and humans carry the same genes. We can still regrow a lost fingertip as children. Everything past that we heal by scarring over, and $250 million of Pentagon money has not changed the math.
Investigations'No Falsification': JAMA Keeps a Purdue-Funded Opioid Paper Its Own Retraction Rule Says to Pull
Court records from a 2007 federal case show Purdue had flagged 8 possible-withdrawal cases a year before its 2000 study called withdrawal rare. The journal says that isn't falsification, so the paper stays in print.
InvestigationsThe Checklist Drove ICU Infections to Zero. The Federal Ethics Office Halted the Study.
A five-step checklist cut central-line infections 66 percent and was credited with 1,500 lives saved in Michigan ICUs. Then the federal office that guards research ethics ordered it halted, because the hospitals had never run it past an institutional review board.
InvestigationsKing's College London Turned Sheep's Wool Into a Bone Scaffold, and Called It a Milestone Before a Single Human Trial
The wool membrane grew more organized bone than collagen in a rat's skull. Collagen still grew more of it, the sample size never made the press release, and no one has put the material in a person.
InvestigationsRFK 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.
InvestigationsOne Irish Plant Releases Both of Sanofi's Pompe Enzymes. In June, the FDA Called Its Drugs 'Adulterated.'
One Irish plant runs the final release for both of Sanofi's lifelong Pompe enzymes. It just failed an FDA inspection on that exact step, and now the company says the fix could take months while patients confirm their next shipments.
InvestigationsMonths Before Officials Told Pregnant Women the COVID Shot Was Safe, Fauci Privately Flagged a Theoretical First-Trimester Miscarriage Risk
Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul pulled the first messages off Fauci's government iPhone: a January 2021 chain in which he privately flagged a theoretical first-trimester miscarriage risk, months before official guidance told pregnant women the shot carried no such concern.
InvestigationsFeed These Bacteria a Splash of Glycerol, and 95% of the Uranium Leaves the Water
Microbes in a flooded German uranium mine turned 95 percent of the dissolved metal into an iron compound that held together when oxygen returned, the exact failure that has always defeated standard cleanup.
InvestigationsArkansas Cut 18,000 Eligible People From Medicaid Over Paperwork, and the 2027 Fix Is AI Its Own Authors Say Will Reproduce the Bias
A federal work requirement hits ACA Medicaid on January 1, 2027. Health-policy academics propose using AI to verify, screen, and manage the rollout, and the paper's lead author admits the system will "100% reproduce" the biases baked into the data.
InvestigationsMIT Put an AI Skin Doctor in Front of 776 People. Its Friendliest Feature Fooled the Ones Who Needed Help Most.
623 lay people and 153 doctors used the same AI to read skin conditions. The doctors shrugged off its bad advice. Everyone else trusted it more the more fluently it explained itself.
InvestigationsVitamin 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.
InvestigationsTwo Vaccine Injury Programs, One Country: COVID Claims Landed in the One That Almost Never Pays
The federal fund for routine vaccine injuries has paid $5.2 billion to nearly 10,000 people. The program COVID shots were routed into has compensated 34 claims, and RFK Jr. wants to change the math.
InvestigationsTwo 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.
InvestigationsBuilt 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.
InvestigationsThe Phone-Radiation Study Everyone Called a Debunking Was Too Small to Find the Tumor
Japan and Korea spent two years 'validating' the NIH finding that cell-phone radiation gave rats heart tumors. They used one dose, one sex, and too few animals to detect it. Korea's rats grew the tumor anyway.
InvestigationsA 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.
InvestigationsPregnant Women's Blood Pressure Registers Every Smoke Day. A Federal Rule Lets States Erase Those Days From the Record.
On heavy smoke days, adults' systolic pressure ran nearly 4 mmHg higher; across eight southwestern states, gestational smoke exposure raised the odds of gestational hypertension 12 percent. Since 2016, regulators have won EPA approval to erase wildfire smoke from the Clean Air Act record in more tha
InvestigationsThe American Diabetes Association Had Police Remove the Editor of Its Own Journal. Then It Refused to Print His Reply.
Steven Kahn edits the ADA's own journal. In June its meeting had state police walk him out for handing out one of its editorials. In July it refused to print the response he and his colleagues wrote. He calls it what it is: pure censorship.
InvestigationsBPA Sits in 90% of Us. The Cancer Studies Sample It With a Method That Was Never Going to Find Anything.
Bisphenol A shows up in more than nine of ten Americans, yet California's reviewers just called the cancer evidence 'inadequate,' because the studies measure a chemical the body clears in hours from a single urine sample.
InvestigationsA 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.
InvestigationsA Pharma-Funded Nonprofit Is Lobbying the FDA to Kill Seven Peptides It Can't Sell You
The Partnership for Safe Medicines has deep ties to the drug lobby. Now it's urging the FDA to permanently block BPC-157, MOTS-c and five other off-patent peptides that compounding pharmacies sell cheap.
InvestigationsNearly Half of America's ER Substance-Use Visits Involve Someone the Justice System Already Booked
Forty-four percent of Americans who go to an emergency room for substance use have a booking in their past. A survey of 139,524 people measured how much the jail and the ER share a population.
InvestigationsNEJM 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.
InvestigationsAustralia Switched Off Social Media for a Generation of Kids. Nepal Already Ran That Experiment.
The ban is sold as youth mental-health protection, but its own university researchers call the harm evidence overblown, and the one nation that already banned a platform got ID checks and VPN workarounds, not healthier kids.
InvestigationsTwo Journals That Buried the Lab-Leak Question Now Warn of a 'Gilded Age' in American Science
The Lancet and Science marked America's 250th by casting the administration's research cuts as vandalism. Both journals spent the public trust they now invoke, and the editorials never mention how.
InvestigationsKennedy 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.
InvestigationsA Road Made From Recycled Fishing Nets Shed Less Microplastic Than the Tires Rolling Over It
Hawaii scientists laid ocean-net plastic into a real Oahu street, then measured what came off. The recycled plastic barely registered. Tire wear, the source almost nobody regulates, swamped it by orders of magnitude.
InvestigationsEurope Called Medical AI 'High Risk' and Still Gave Patients No Right to Refuse It
An algorithm once cut the extra care flagged for Black patients by more than half, and ran for years before anyone noticed. A commentary in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine says the rules now governing medical AI would not have caught it.
InvestigationsThe WHO Invented Osteopenia for Statisticians. Merck Turned It Into 34 Million Patients.
The man who chaired the 1992 WHO meeting says they never imagined osteopenia would be treated as a disease. Three years later Merck launched Fosamax and started putting bone scanners in doctors' offices.
InvestigationsHis Heart Was Pumping at 10 Percent. The Real Question Is Why It Took an Algorithm to Notice.
An AI tool flagged a 45-year-old's hidden heart failure and the story became 'AI beats your doctor.' The case actually documents a missed standard workup, and it dropped the same week as the FDA clearance.
InvestigationsThe Knee Procedure That Barely Beats a Convincing Fake
A university press release pitches a minimally invasive knee procedure as a way to delay joint replacement, but the only sham-controlled trials show the fake version works nearly as well.
InvestigationsThe 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.
InvestigationsFauci's Pardon Was Supposed to End This. It's the Reason He Can't Stay Quiet.
Rand Paul subpoenaed Anthony Fauci on June 22 after declassified documents reopened the COVID-origins question, and the preemptive pardon meant to shield him is why he cannot refuse to answer.
InvestigationsRetracted by Its Title: A Vaccine-SIDS Paper and a Standard That Isn't Science
A vaccine-safety paper sat in a peer-reviewed journal for five years, then was pulled in 2026 with a critic saying its title alone disqualified it. The science against the paper is strong; the retraction that followed wasn't science.
InvestigationsA Top Cancer Scientist, a Deleted Study, and the Question Washington Won't Fund
A June 2026 Senate subcommittee hearing centered on a Brown University cancer researcher's review of 333 post-vaccination cancer case reports, and on the retractions, censorship, and cyberattack that met it.
InvestigationsWe Fixed the Ozone Hole. The Replacement Is Now in Your Blood.
A new Lancaster modeling study finds CFC replacement refrigerants and anesthetic gases have rained 335,500 tonnes of the forever chemical TFA across the planet since 2000, and it is now the dominant PFAS in American blood.
InvestigationsThe 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.
InvestigationsA 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.
InvestigationsBecerra 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'A Reality, Not an Emergency': The Lancet Picks Another Political Side
The Lancet's new editorial recasts immigration enforcement as the public-health pathology. The receipts on the journal that published it run from the Daszak letter to the Surgisphere fraud.
InvestigationsAaron 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.
InvestigationsThe Hernia FAQ That Forgets to Mention the Implant
A polished hernia FAQ walks patients through recovery time, return-to-work, and lifestyle. It skips the question with 26,153 pending lawsuits behind it, and the no-mesh option the international guideline still keeps on the table.
InvestigationsThe $401 CBC and the $32 CBC Are the Same Test
A Reddit pitch for a Quest reseller put receipts on a markup the insurance-billed lab market has spent years obscuring. A Florida cost study confirms what the consumer market already figured out.
InvestigationsA Senate Subcommittee Just Put the COVID Shot Cancer Question on the Record
A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee took testimony on whether mRNA COVID shots can plausibly cause cancer, and on the parallel campaign to keep that question out of the journals. Dr. John Campbell walked his audience through it.
InvestigationsA 16-Foot Fire Tornado Burned an Oil Slick With 40% Less Soot. Cleanup Crews Have Been Breathing the Same Old Smoke Since the Exxon Valdez.
A federally funded field trial used a controlled fire whirl to burn up to 95% of a crude oil pool while cutting soot by 40%, raising the question of why the standard in-situ burn, with its measured worker-lung cost, has gone unchallenged for thirty-five years.
InvestigationsThe 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.
InvestigationsCops shoved a doctor at the ADA meeting. The editorial they tore up has its own credibility problem.
Police escorted ADA members out of New Orleans on Friday for passing out an editorial against Trump's NIH overhaul. The shove was bad. The editorial defending the status quo has a credibility problem the press is mostly missing.
InvestigationsA Senate hearing finally put the cancer question on the record. The journal notice had been up for months.
Sen. Ron Johnson's June 3 subcommittee hearing on plausible mechanisms linking mRNA injections to cancer, the South Korean cohort behind it, and the editorial notice Springer had posted on the paper months earlier.
InvestigationsThe Crunchy Mom and the MAHA Mom Were Fighting the Same War. The Pesticide Lobby Won Anyway.
For one strange year, the EWG hiking-boots crowd and the MAHA red-hat moms were fighting the same pesticide war. Then Trump invoked the Defense Production Act on behalf of Bayer, the final MAHA report quietly stopped mentioning glyphosate, and a coalition that was actually winning got stomped by a C
InvestigationsHalf a Billion in Detainee Health Care, and the Federal Watchdog Quietly Closed
A KFF and AP investigation pulled more than 300 sworn allegations of medical neglect from 33,000 ICE habeas petitions, even as the detention ombudsman office quietly closed and the federal detainee care bill passed half a billion dollars.
InvestigationsA Senior NIAID Scientist Got Caught Smuggling 113 Vials Through Detroit. He Says He Does It All the Time.
Two NIAID scientists are charged with bringing 113 undeclared vials into Detroit during an active Congo mpox outbreak. One allegedly told a federal officer he does it all the time.
InvestigationsSix 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.
InvestigationsVietnam'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.
InvestigationsDoctor Mike Plays 'Never Have I Ever' With a Firefighter. Watch What's Around the Bit.
Doctor Mike's lighthearted Never Have I Ever video sits at the top of a funnel that includes a $997 media academy, a UNICEF vaccine-ambassador title, and an ongoing pitch to pharmaceutical executives about social-media trust.