Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told members of Congress that Americans shouldn't listen to him when it comes to medical advice.
The secretary appeared before Congress for a hearing Wednesday to discuss President Donald Trump's budget. The line of questioning came from Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who returned to questioning Kennedy on vaccines.
“If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?” Pocan asked Kennedy.
“Probably for measles,” Kennedy said. Then he pivoted: “What I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.”
In April, Kennedy said during a news conference that the measles vaccine, in particular, is "leaky" because the effectiveness decreases over time.
"People get measles because they don't vaccinate. They get measles because the vaccine wanes. The vaccines wane about 4.8% per year ... So, you know, it's a leaky vaccine, and that problem is always going to be around," said Kennedy.
“That's kind of your jurisdiction because CDC does give advice,” Pocan said during the congressional hearing.
“What we're trying to do is to lay out the pros and cons, the risks and benefits accurately as we understand them, with replicable studies," Kennedy said.
He was asked about vaccines for polio and chickenpox, but again rebuffed, saying that he didn't want to give medical advice.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was criticized after taking his grandchildren swimming in an unsafe creek with a high bacteria count because of sewage runoff.
In a post to X on Sunday, Kennedy revealed that he spent Mother's Day swimming with his family in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek.
"Mother's Day hike in Dumbarton Oaks Park with Amaryllis, Bobby, Kick, and Jackson, and a swim with my grandchildren, Bobcat and Cassius in Rock Creek," the secretary wrote.
The Washingtonian noted that the waterway was dangerous because sewage flows directly into it.
"[O]n July 14, 2015, the D.C. Department of Energy and the Environment found bacteria levels over 2,420 times the most probable number of colonies in 100 milliliters (MPN)," environmental consultant Marchant Wentworth pointed out in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. "This is far in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency standard of 410 MPN."
The National Park Service officially forbids swimming and wading in the creek.
"Swimming and wading are not allowed due to high bacteria levels," the agency's website warned. "Stay out of the water to protect streambanks, plants and animals and keep you and your family (including pets!) safe from illness."
"Rock Creek has high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health. Please protect yourself and your pooches by staying on trails and out of the creek. All District waterways are subject to a swim ban - this means wading, too!"
Just what we want. The top public health official in the US government telling people it's okay to swim in a waterway with an extremely high bacteria count (due to sewage run-off) that has numerous warning signs declaring swimming and wading are unsafe and prohibited.
President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to cut federal spending has translated into eliminating in-human clinical trials for "a tiny device [which] silently pumps fluid through a series of tubes and vessels that mimic the human heart."
Trump has been cutting federal funding to medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health, but even the Department of Defense is funding medical research at Cornell University for a life-saving heart pump for babies.
The Cornell Chronicle revealed this week that the Department of Defense accepted a proposal to conduct the clinical trials, but a week later, researchers were told the four-year funding was cut.
“Interruption of that funding has really brought us to a screeching halt,” said Professor James Antaki, at the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. “If the interruption lasts very long, it would be irreversible. We’ll have to start laying off people, and I don’t think we’d be able to recover.”
PediaFlow was crafted over 20 years ago with the aim of making a device, the report says, that is the size of an AA battery.
The project has been a 30-year "labor of love," Antaki said.
There are approximately 40,000 children born annually with some form of heart condition. That number isn't large enough for medical device companies in the private sector to fund their own research and development, so the federal government has been the investor.
“For that reason,” Antaki said, “our only option is federal funding, and it also explains why devices like this are not being developed in other countries because they don’t have the benefit of federal funding. We’ve been very fortunate to make it as far as we have because of federal funding.”
The report noted that a previous federal grant that began in 2019, under the first Trump administration, is wrapping up.
“The PediaFlow is intended for children with congenital and acquired heart disease,” Antaki said. “That means babies that are born with a hole in the heart or with a missing ventricle that need serious surgery to survive. Sometimes the child can’t survive to surgery and they need some kind of crutch to get them over that difficult period.”
There's also the matter of heart transplants. Babies born with such heart defects could get a new heart, but without a machine to keep their heart pumping, they may not make it until a heart becomes available, the report explained.
“Babies aren’t small adults,” Antaki said. “They have a different anatomy, different physiology. Their blood is more delicate. Their tissues are more delicate.”
Today “the project is on life support,” Antaki said.
ABC News reported this week that the U.S. experienced a multi-state tornado outbreak, impacting millions of people. However, behind the scenes of the world of weather forecasters, things are far worse than previously known.
CNN reported Friday that the drastic budget and staff cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) have left a skeleton crew to handle the nation's forecasting agency.
The report pointed out that there are concerns this year "could be a destructive hurricane season."
Meteorologists told CNN that they're concerned "forecasts and life-saving warnings" won't be put out in a timely way.
"Responsible for protecting life and property from severe weather impacts, the National Weather Service is headed into hurricane season with 30 of its 122 weather forecast offices lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge," the report explained.
There are major offices in New York City, Cleveland, Houston and Tampa that navigate hurricane-specific forecasting. The report details 30 National Weather Service offices that no longer have a chief meteorologist working in them.
After the cuts, "there is not a single manager in place at the hurricane-prone Houston-Galveston forecast office, according to a NOAA staff member who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal."
The Houston office in particular was the main source of forecasting during Hurricane Harvey, which killed at least 68 people in the Houston metro area in 2017, the report recalled.
Other offices do daily weather balloon launches, but after the cuts, many have stopped and "more are likely to follow suit following a wave of early retirements taking place this week," one NOAA employee told CNN. The balloons help with creating computer models for forecasters to predict whether the weather will be severe or not.
As Raw Story reported in February, there are often more staff working for NOAA and NWS because they watch the weather 24/7 to ensure that if there are storms overnight, those warnings are issued and alerts can still go out.
In Goodland, Kansas, the NWS forecast office will no longer have a 24/7 shift, the report said. There were about a dozen other forecast offices that will also stop doing 24/7 monitoring. Many of those offices are in the Plains states, said CNN.
A 2022 study led by Stephen Strader from Villanova University looked at 140 years of tornado history and found that fatalities that come from them increase by 20% at night.
"Since 1880, nearly 34% of all tornado fatalities occurred at night, but that percentage has increased to 38% during the past 30 years. explained that the tornadoes that strike at night are more deadly," the report said, according to the Weather Channel.
CNN said that having un-monitored forecast offices "is virtually unheard of in the absence of an extreme weather event, such as a hurricane or tornado, that either threatens the lives of the forecasters themselves or knocks them offline."
The budget and staff cuts are part of President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse" in government.
Once thought to be eradicated, the screwworm could be screwing up our food supply as soon as this summer, according to a Bloomberg report.
The screwworm affected live stock ranchers from the 1930s through the 1980s.
The insect is essentially a “flying piranha” that eats its host from the inside out and has the ability to kill a full-grown steer in 10 days.
Eggs are laid in a wound, eye, or even the nose, or the udders of any animal. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which burrow or “screw” deep into the host’s flesh.
“The larvae eat around and down until there is a hole inside the animal the size of your fist,” Rick Tate, a lifelong rancher from Marfa, Texas, told Bloomberg.
After three to five days, the larvae turn into a fly and begin to reproduce.
Experts warn it could be back by this summer as nearly 1,000 cases have been reported in Mexico this year.
It isn’t exclusive to farm animals; it also impacts wildlife, including deer, squirrels, raccoons, and birds.
It’s also been found in horses, dogs, “and at least one goat,” according to the USDA.
The worm has also infected humans: In 2024, screwworms were found in the leg of a Canadian man after a trip to Costa Rica.
While the screwworm was detected in the 1930s, it wasn’t until after WWII that the USDA could fight it.
They used airplanes to drop hundreds of millions of sterilized flies over infected areas. This caused the sterile flies to mate and overwhelm the reproduction of native flies, essentially rendering the population infertile.
Some called the program “wasteful federal spending,” but by 1982, it pushed the screwworms out of the United States to the Darien Gap in Panama.
The Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm (COPEG) was keeping the fly at bay until the pandemic, when a “perfect storm” happened.
The number of inspectors looking for the screwworm border decreased. Sterile fly production also slowed because of supply-chain issues. At the same time, the illegal transport of cattle across borders increased as millions of people began moving north through the Darien Gap.
Now the screwworm is making a comeback, and ranchers are attempting to stop it once more before it impacts our wildlife and food supply, the report states.
"But I felt no pain, and the day afterwards I was up and about walking," said Tanya Tanna, who reportedly just received a "breakthrough" surgery for her cancer.
Tanna, of South Ruislip, west London, "feels whole again" after becoming the "first patient in the UK to have a new form of breast reconstruction surgery," according to the BBC.
"A team of London surgeons developed and performed the keyhole procedure, which is less invasive, aids a quicker recovery and reduces the chance of getting a hernia," the outlet reported late on Thursday night. "They called it 'a massive breakthrough in cancer surgery'."
Tanna is quoted as saying, "After this complex surgery, lasting eight hours, I was expecting a large amount of pain... But I felt no pain, and the day afterwards I was up and about walking. The nurses were looking at me as if it was a miracle!"
The report continues:
"Mr Dariush Nikkhah, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital, and Mr Alistair Slesser, a consultant colorectal surgeon at Hillingdon Hospital, pioneered the approach using keyhole surgery, which modified a breast reconstruction surgery technique being used in a few places around the world."
Nikkhah is quoted as saying, "The Royal Free Hospital is now one of the few centres in the world which can offer this type of surgery... It's more difficult to perform but improves recovery. Whereas patients usually need four to seven days in hospital to recover, this surgery requires only one to two days."
Slesser further added, "This is a massive breakthrough in cancer surgery."
"The surgeon would control the instruments from a console using robotic arms. This would allow greater control and magnification, for precise and meticulous surgery," he added.
Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.
Moisture farming
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side.
One of the top medical journals in the world is now directly condemning President Donald Trump's administration over its continued attacks on the scientific community.
In a recent editorial, the Lancet — a highly regarded, peer-reviewed medical journal based in the United Kingdom — tore into the Trump administration over its threatening letters sent to editors of various journals and scientific publications. The Lancet specifically derided a letter that the CHEST medical journal (for medical professionals in the pulmonary field) got earlier this month from Ed Martin, who Trump appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia following his prior career as a Republican activist.
"This is an obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight," the editorial read. "The Lancet stands with CHEST and the other medical journals that are being intimidated by the Trump administration."
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) also received one of Martin's letters. NEJM editor in chief Eric Rubin described the letter as "vaguely threatening." First Amendment expert Amanda Shanor told the Times that the letter appears to violate basic Constitutional rights.
"There is no basis to say that anything other than the most stringent First Amendment protections apply to medical journals,” Shanor said. “It appears aimed at creating a type of fear and chill that will have effects on people’s expression — that’s a constitutional concern."
Martin's letters are asking journals about whether they allow submissions from those who subscribe to "competing viewpoints," and whether they are willing to admit being influenced by "supporters, funders, advertisers and others." But Rubin insisted that journals like his all follow strict procedures for all submissions. The Lancet's editorial encouraged the scientific community to not be afraid to resist politically motivated efforts to muzzle them.
"Science and medicine in the USA are being violently dismembered while the world watches," the editorial read. "While the risks to civil servants and academics’ livelihoods are real and understandably frightening, bullies are only emboldened by acquiescence or indifference."
Scientists whose research has been under attack by President Donald Trump's administration are reportedly clamoring to escape to a place where their contributions will be welcomed and respected.
The Guardian reported Thursday that France's Aix-Marseille University is now offering roughly 20 researchers a three-year position through a program dubbed "Safe Place for Science." The university was apparently inundated with hundreds of applications from scientists in multiple continents around the world for the small number of positions, which are expected to be filled in June.
298 have applied so far according to the Guardian, with 242 of them deemed eligible. 135 applicants were from the United States, and worked at prestigious and elite institutions like Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Yale University and even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Aix-Marseille University President Eric Berton said many of the applications were sent via encrypted messaging platforms, and that some contained "worrying, sometimes chilling, accounts from American researchers about the fate reserved for them by the Trump administration." Both Berton and former French President Francois Hollande, who is now a member of parliament, lamented that important scientific research "has become a risk for the propaganda of regimes" and called for France to create a protected status for scientists.
"[C]urrent asylum mechanisms do not take into account the specificities of the academic environment and the threats facing scientists within authoritarian regimes,” Berton and Hollande wrote in the Liberation newspaper. “This is why we are making an urgent request, one that is appropriate for the current situation: the creation of a ‘scientific refugee’ status.”
The news of the "Safe Place for Science" program comes as the Trump administration has been making steep cuts to scientific research on multiple fronts. Earlier this week, the administration announced more than $2 billion in cuts to multi-year grants for the National Institutes of Health, in addition to slashing millions of dollars in funding for Harvard University (which many Boston-area hospitals also depend on).
Recently, comedy actor Seth Rogen ridiculed some Trump-friendly billionaires in the audience during the 2025 awards ceremony for the Breakthrough Prize (deemed "the Oscars of science") including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Rogen said that it was "amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr. very fast." Rogen's comments were eventually cut from the broadcast.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a core component of a neurotech brain implant system from a rival company to Elon Musk's.
CNBC reported that Precision Neuroscience announced on Thursday that the company has received approval for its brain-computer interface, or BCI, called the "Layer 7 Cortical Interface."
The brain chip translates neural signals into commands for external technologies.
The company's website states that its goal is to help patients with severe paralysis regain some functions of speech and movement.
"Only part of Precision’s system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI," reported CNBC, citing a release from Precision.
Elon Musk's Neuralink wrote on its blog last May that it has struggled with some of the brain chip’s connective threads. The FDA has already cleared Neuralink to conduct trials. Neuralink has not received full regulatory approval to market its BCI system.
“This is a foundational moment for Precision,” said Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer. Rapoport also co-founded Neuralink in 2017, but left the next year.
So far, Precision has temporarily implanted the "Layer 7" tech in 37 patients, the report said.
“This regulatory clearance will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively,” Rapoport said.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) accused Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of being one of the worst "anti-vax conspiracy theorists" after she interrupted him at a House Oversight Committee hearing.
The clash came on Wednesday while Garcia discussed the conspiracy theories of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"RFK Jr. has said that 5G and Wi-Fi can cause brain damage, ADHD, radiation sickness," Garcia explained. "He's said that pesticides are actually turning people transgender. He's even questioned whether HIV causes AIDS."
Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) responded by attacking Democrats.
"The predecessor for the ranking member, Mr. Raskin, said that those of us who wondered if COVID came from the lab at Wuhan, we were conspiracy terrorists," he complained. "And when we started suggesting that maybe former President Biden was in mental decline, that we were conspiracy terrorists."
"It's just that, you know, conspiracy theories are in the eyes of the beholder," he added.
Garcia wondered if Comer supported the measles vaccine.
"All my children are vaccinated," the chair confirmed.
"And again, our current HHS secretary is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, and that is a fact," Garcia said. "He caused a measles outbreak in another country."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expressed support for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's crusade to remove fluoride from the nation's water supply.
Johnson was asked about Kennedy's effort during a House Republican leadership press conference on Tuesday.
"I don't profess to be an expert in chemistry," the Speaker admitted. "But I'll tell you that I think it deserves, from what I've read and from what I understand, it deserves real evaluation."
"There's a concern that it may be having a negative effect on the health of children, and obviously, we have an obligation at the federal government level to look into that," he added.
University of Florida colleagues of the state's surgeon general are wondering why he's getting paid from their school when they say he's nowhere to be found.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis hired Joseph Ladapo as the state's surgeon general in 2021, and the position adds a "tenured faculty" post at the University of Florida, recalled The Independent Florida Alligator in a Monday report.
"UF fast-tracked Ladapo into a $337,000-a-year contract as part of his role as the state’s top medical official, charging him with launching an internal medicine research program, taking on a part-time teaching role and leading an administrative team," the report explained.
Now, his colleagues are questioning how precisely he's contributing to the university.
On paper, Ladapo is an Ivy League graduate with a résumé the medical school dean called "fabulous." Three years into the term, however, more than a dozen professors and administrators have questions. Internal records also show that Ladapo's work calendar has "monthslong stretches with little or no activity."
The report recalled that Ladapo promised to bring hefty research dollars "from the University of California at Los Angeles, his previous employer. That never happened."
He claimed it was due to his former boss, who disagreed with his position on COVID-19. Ladapo has secured no grants for the University of Florida.
The course he seemed eager to teach, "Critical Evaluations of Scientific Evidence," hasn't happened either.
Yet, he can still collect "$75,000 a year leading what his contract described as an administrative team addressing healthcare disparities within UF’s hospital system," said the report, noting little evidence of the team's work has been found in records.
"Ladapo’s dual appointment is one of the most prominent examples of Florida Republicans installing party officials into lucrative posts at state universities with questionable results. State auditors recently dinged UF for continuing to pay former President Ben Sasse — previously a Republican U.S. Senator — $1 million a year to co-teach a course after his resignation," the report revealed.
Thus far, his colleagues have lodged multiple research integrity complaints. In November, he was formally rebuked by the faculty council at the medical school.
“Ladapo’s a charlatan,” said pediatrics professor Jeffrey Goldhagen. “It completely decimates the reputation of the University of Florida.”
