Investigations
111 stories · Page 4 of 5
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.
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.