Investigations
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The Escape Hatch in Trump's Drug Deal: 26 Companies Signed Their Way Out of the Price Cuts
Twenty-six drugmakers have signed voluntary White House agreements that exempt them from the proposed mandatory Medicare price cuts, and an analysis finds the deals could erase as much as 80 percent of the projected savings.
InvestigationsThe 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.