Investigations
111 stories · Page 3 of 5
Pennsylvania 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.