Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy warned of "lazy" potheads during a segment on smoking marijuana.
During a Sunday Fox & Friends discussion about a Canadian study that linked marijuana use to schizophrenia, Duffy and Fox News medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier decried the "dangers of smoking."
The segment echoed sentiments of the 1936 "Reefer Madness" film.
"Please don't legalize," Duffy said. "Please don't allow, you know, your party to get behind legalization because it's a gateway drug to other drugs."
"I have also, like you have, been very cautious about legalization of marijuana because there are known risks with it," Saphier agreed. "So it is very concerning when it comes to people using this a lot more and you're seeing rising levels of THC over the years in marijuana that people are using."
"Well, let me tell you, not everything that is natural is good for you," she continued. "Other herbs that I like that are natural that can help with relaxation and some of those are like lavender, chamomile, low-dose kava kava."
"I have been a lot concerned about its normalization, and you and I know, I mean, let's just be honest, we're moms," Duffy agreed. "We knew those potheads in high school. They're lazy. Why would we want to normalize this when we see the effects on that."
"Plus we know that it can it can really just disrupt your your motivation for life and get you hooked on something instead of motivated to have a better life."
Saphier acknowledged "conflicting research as to whether this leads to hardcore drug use in the future."
"I mean it's a no-no," the doctor argued. "And I certainly don't recommend this unless it is very specific medical conditions that are proven to benefit from it."
"I miss the just say no days," Duffy opined. "I really do."
There are trillions of charged particles – protons and electrons, the basic building blocks of matter – whizzing around above your head at any given time. These high-energy particles, which can travel at close to the speed of light, typically remain thousands of kilometers away from Earth, trapped there by the shape of Earth’s magnetic field.
Occasionally, though, an event happens that can jostle them out of place, sending electrons raining down into Earth’s atmosphere. These high-energy particles in space make up what are known as the Van Allen radiation belts, and their discovery was one of the first of the space age. A new study from my research team has found that electromagnetic waves generated by lightning can trigger these electron showers.
A brief history lesson
At the start of the space race in the 1950s, professor James Van Allen and his research team at the University of Iowa were tasked with building an experiment to fly on the United States’ very first satellite, Explorer 1. They designed sensors to study cosmic radiation, which is caused by high-energy particles originating from the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, or beyond.
James Van Allen, middle, poses with a model of the Explorer 1 satellite.NASA
After Explorer 1 launched, though, they noticed that their instrument was detecting significantly higher levels of radiation than expected. Rather than measuring a distant source of radiation beyond our solar system, they appeared to be measuring a local and extremely intense source.
This measurement led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy electrons and ions encircling the planet.
Scientists believe that the inner radiation belt, peaking about 621 miles (1000 kilometers) from Earth, is composed of electrons and high-energy protons and is relatively stable over time.
The outer radiation belt, about three times farther away, is made up of high-energy electrons. This belt can be highly dynamic. Its location, density and energy content may vary significantly by the hour in response to solar activity.
Charged particles, with their trajectories shown as blue and yellow lines here, exist in the radiation belts around Earth, depicted here as the yellow, green and blue regions.
The discovery of these high-radiation regions is not only an interesting story about the early days of the space race; it also serves as a reminder that many scientific discoveries have come about by happy accident.
It is a lesson for experimental scientists, myself included, to keep an open mind when analyzing and evaluating data. If the data doesn’t match our theories or expectations, those theories may need to be revisited.
Our curious observations
While I teach the history of the space race in a space policy course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I rarely connect it to my own experience as a scientist researching Earth’s radiation belts. Or, at least, I didn’t until recently.
In a study led by Max Feinland, an undergraduate student in my research group, we stumbled upon some of our own unexpected observations of Earth’s radiation belts. Our findings have made us rethink our understanding of Earth’s inner radiation belt and the processes affecting it.
Originally, we set out to look for very rapid – sub-second – bursts of high-energy electrons entering the atmosphere from the outer radiation belt, where they are typically observed.
Many scientists believe that a type of electromagnetic wave known as “chorus” can knock these electrons out of position and send them toward the atmosphere. They’re called chorus waves due to their distinct chirping sound when listened to on a radio receiver.
Feinland developed an algorithm to search for these events in decades of measurements from the SAMPEX satellite. When he showed me a plot with the location of all the events he’d detected, we noticed a number of them were not where we expected. Some events mapped to the inner radiation belt rather than the outer belt.
This finding was curious for two reasons. For one, chorus waves aren’t prevalent in this region, so something else had to be shaking these electrons loose.
The other surprise was finding electrons this energetic in the inner radiation belt at all. Measurements from NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission prompted renewed interest in the inner radiation belt. Observations from the Van Allen Probes suggested that high-energy electrons are often not present in this inner radiation belt, at least not during the first few years of that mission, from 2012 to 2014.
Our observations now showed that, in fact, there are times that the inner belt contains high-energy electrons. How often this is true and under what conditions remain open questions to explore. These high-energy particles can damage spacecraft and harm humans in space, so researchers need to know when and where in space they are present to better design spacecraft.
Determining the culprit
One of the ways to disturb electrons in the inner radiation belt and kick them into Earth’s atmosphere actually begins in the atmosphere itself.
These waves can then travel through the atmosphere out into space, where they interact with electrons in the inner radiation belt – much as chorus waves interact with electrons in the outer radiation belt.
To test whether lightning was behind our inner radiation belt detections, we looked back at the electron bursts and compared them with thunderstorm data. Some lightning activity seemed correlated with our electron events, but much of it was not.
Specifically, only lightning that occurred right after so-called geomagnetic storms resulted in the bursts of electrons we detected.
Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in the near-Earth space environment often caused by large eruptions on the Sun’s surface. This solar activity, if directed toward Earth, can produce what researchers term space weather. Space weather can result in stunning auroras, but it can also disrupt satellite and power grid operations.
We discovered that a combination of weather on Earth and weather in space produces the unique electron signatures we observed in our study. The solar activity disturbs Earth’s radiation belts and populates the inner belt with very high-energy electrons, then the lightning interacts with these electrons and creates the rapid bursts that we observed.
These results provide a nice reminder of the interconnected nature of Earth and space. They were also a welcome reminder to me of the often nonlinear process of scientific discovery.
The national physicians' group Doctors for America has launched an effort to stop Donald Trump's administration.
On Tuesday, the branches under the Department of Health and Human Services removed thousands of pages of health data and information from federal websites, Axios reported.
On Friday, it was announced that government websites would go offline as they deleted pages and removed information. The doctors group argues that the new agency heads "abused their discretion and arbitrarily deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients," the report said.
The information that was being deleted dealt with gender identity, diversity, HIV/AIDS and vaccine guidelines.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C. district court, specifically cites the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but looks at the umbrella of the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Health and Human Services. It asks simply to restore the webpages and datasets and requests that the court bar them from any additional content being removed.
Dr. Dorothy Fink is currently the acting secretary of HHS, overseeing these major changes. Trump's appointee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has not been approved by the full Senate. During his Senate confirmation hearings, he was not questioned about what was unfolding at HHS or whether he supported it.
Doctors for America has approximately 27,000 members.
Two U.S. biotech companies say the Food and Drug Administration has cleared them to conduct clinical trials of their gene-edited pig kidneys for human transplants.
United Therapeutics along with another company, eGenesis, have been working since 2021 on experiments implanting pig kidneys into humans: initially brain-dead patients and more recently living recipients.
Advocates hope the approach will help address the severe organ shortage. More than 100,000 people in the United States are awaiting transplants, including over 90,000 in need of kidneys.
United Therapeutics's approval, announced Monday, allows the company to advance its technology toward a licensed product if the trial succeeds.
The study authorization was hailed as a "significant step forward in our relentless mission to expand the availability of transplantable organs," by Leigh Peterson, the company's executive vice president.
The trial will initially enroll six patients with end-stage renal disease before expanding to as many as 50, United Therapeutics said in a statement. The first transplant is expected in mid-2025.
Meanwhile, rival eGenesis said it had received FDA approval in December for a separate three-patient kidney study.
"The study will evaluate patients with kidney failure who are listed for a transplant but who face a low probability of receiving a deceased donor offer within a five-year timeframe," the company said.
Xenotransplantation -- transplanting organs from one species to another -- has been a tantalizing yet elusive goal for science.
Early experiments in primates faltered, but advances in gene editing and immune system management have brought the field closer to reality.
Pigs have emerged as ideal donors: they grow quickly, produce large litters, and are already part of the human food supply.
United Therapeutics said trial patients would be monitored for life, assessing survival rates, kidney function, and the risk of zoonotic infections -- diseases that jump from animals to humans.
Currently, there is only one living human recipient of a pig organ: Towana Looney, a 53-year-old from Alabama who received a United Therapeutics kidney on November 25, 2024.
She is also the longest-surviving recipient, having lived with a pig kidney for 71 days as of Tuesday. David Bennett of Maryland received a pig heart in 2022 and survived 60 days.
President Donald Trump's administration reportedly threatened to halt grants for scientific studies that mention words like "female," "women," "systemic" or "trauma."
Darby Saxbe, a professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, shared a leaked list of words that could cause scientific studies to be flagged by the National Science Foundation.
"This is a crisis for academic freedom & science," Saxbe wrote. "These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged."
"The word 'systemic' is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?" she continued. " If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word 'biased' gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA."
"This is what makes them so stupid. Clearly, they only have an elementary school education. Good grief. Why use words at all?"
Although a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump's federal grant funding freeze, the NSF was continuing to flag scientific studies, according to reports.
Read the partial list of words below.
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged. — Darby Saxbe (@darbysaxbe.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 8:33 PM
The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now? — Darby Saxbe (@darbysaxbe.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 8:33 PM
If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word "biased" gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA — Darby Saxbe (@darbysaxbe.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Medical researchers left to compile national data by hand, contraceptive guidelines deemed essential by doctors erased, and the nation's largest tuberculosis outbreak left unreported: President Donald Trump's administration has thrown the US health system into uncharted territory.
Here's a look at some of the biggest impacts.
- Key medical journal goes silent -
Within days of Trump taking office last month, the Health and Human Services Department imposed an indefinite "pause" on communications.
One of its first casualties was The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a venerable epidemiological digest published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
For the first time in 60 years, the journal -- which once published the first case studies of what would become the AIDS crisis -- has missed two editions, with no word on when it will return.
"MMWR is the voice of science. The delay in publishing is dangerous," wrote former CDC director Tom Frieden on BlueSky.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Faust, a physician and Harvard instructor who runs the Inside Medicine Substack, reported that CDC scientists have been instructed to retract or pause all papers submitted to external journals to remove language deemed offensive -- including the word "gender."
- Critical resources for doctors scrubbed -
Doctors nationwide are reeling after the sudden removal of a CDC app that helped determine the suitability of contraceptives based on patients' medical history and medications.
Also deleted: Clinical Guidance for PrEP (a critical HIV-prevention tool), resources on intimate partner violence, and guidelines on LGBTQ+ behavioral health.
Some pages have been restored but now carry an ominous banner: "CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders." Others remain missing, causing widespread confusion.
Jessica Valenti, a feminist author and founder of the Abortion Every Day Substack, has been archiving the deleted materials on CDCguidelines.com to preserve the original, inclusive versions.
"The hope is to have it be a resource for the people who need it," she told AFP, adding that even if documents are restored, words like "trans" may be scrubbed from them.
- Infectious outbreaks unreported -
As medical associations sound the alarm over the lack of federal health communication, outbreaks are slipping under the radar.
In Kansas City, Kansas, the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history is unfolding with 67 active cases since 2024 -- yet no national health authority has reported on it.
"The National Medical Association (NMA) is calling for a swift resolution to the federal health communications freeze, which has the potential to exacerbate this outbreak and other public health threats," wrote the group, which represents African American physicians.
Similarly, a measles outbreak among unvaccinated schoolchildren in Texas has gone unreported at the national level.
Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who studies influenza trends, wrote on her blog that she has resorted to manually tallying cases from all 50 state health departments because the CDC's central data repository has been taken down.
U.S. tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called "deep research" that can produce detailed reports, as China's DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the artificial intelligence field.
The company made the announcement in Tokyo, where OpenAI chief Sam Altman also trumpeted a new joint venture with tech investor SoftBank Group to offer advanced artificial intelligence services to businesses.
AI newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with some calling its high performance and supposed low cost a wake-up call for US developers.
OpenAI, whose ChatGPT led generative AI's emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours".
"You give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst," the company said in a statement.
Altman said on social media platform X that deep research, which paid "Pro" ChatGPT users can access 100 times a month, was "slow" and required a lot of computing power, but he was also bullish.
"My very approximate vibe is that it can do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world, which is a wild milestone," Altman wrote in another X post.
One commentator, entrepreneur Michel Levy Provencal, said the new tool could mean "very big problems ahead for consultants".
- Crystal ball -
SoftBank and OpenAI are part of the Stargate drive announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
Altman and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son met Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Monday evening, and discussed extending "Stargate into Japan", Son told reporters afterwards.
"We want to create the cutting-edge AI infrastructure -- what I mean by that is the world's biggest, cutting-edge AI data centres," Son said, without giving further details.
Ishiba is expected to visit Washington to meet Trump for the leaders' first in-person meeting later this week.
At a business forum held Monday afternoon, Son announced a new joint venture equally split between SoftBank Group and OpenAI.
Holding a purple crystal ball, the Japanese tycoon outlined the services of a new AI product called Cristal, which can crunch system data, reports, emails and meetings for firms.
A joint statement said SoftBank would "spend $3 billion annually to deploy OpenAI's solutions across its group companies".
The venture "will serve as a springboard for introducing AI agents tailored to the unique needs of Japanese enterprises while setting a model for global adoption", it said.
- 'No plans' to sue -
DeepSeek's performance has sparked a wave of accusations that it has reverse-engineered the capabilities of leading US technology, such as the AI powering ChatGPT.
OpenAI warned last week that Chinese companies are actively attempting to replicate its advanced AI models, prompting closer cooperation with US authorities.
When asked if he was considering taking legal action, Altman said on Monday that "we have no plans to sue DeepSeek right now".
"DeepSeek is certainly an impressive model, but we believe we will continue to push the frontier and deliver great products, so we're happy to have another competitor," he also reiterated.
OpenAI says rivals are using a process known as distillation in which developers creating smaller models learn from larger ones by copying their behavior and decision-making patterns -- similar to a student learning from a teacher.
The company is itself facing multiple accusations of intellectual property violations, primarily related to the use of copyrighted materials in training its generative AI models.
While OpenAI has not confirmed Altman's next movements, media reports said he would travel on Tuesday to Seoul.
A spokesperson for South Korean IT conglomerate Kakao told AFP it would on Tuesday announce its "collaboration with OpenAI" but did not confirm whether Altman would be there.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) attacked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s questionable beliefs about science during his confirmation hearing by citing her son, who has "severe cerebral palsy."
Speaking to the committee Thursday, Hassan said she found it "disturbing" that Republicans accused her and her colleagues of partisanship during Kennedy's first hearing a day earlier.
"Like all of us, I take really seriously our obligation for advice and consent," she said of the Senate's role.
"And I am concerned, as Sen. [Markwayne] Mullin (R-OK) is concerned, about the need for science to help us move forward on critical, critical issues."
"Now, some of you new to this committee might not know that I'm the proud mother to a 36-year-old young man with severe cerebral palsy," Hassan continued, her voice cracking as she spoke.
"And a day does not go by when I don't think about what I did when I was pregnant with him that might have caused the hydrocephalus that has so impacted his life.
"So, please, do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn't want to know what the cause of autism is!" Hassan shouted at Kennedy.
She went on to argue that the problem with Kennedy is that he continues to try and re-litigate "settled science" about autism and vaccines. The study that Kennedy often cites looked at 12 children who were vaccinated. It then claimed a false connection to those with autism. The journal that published the study ultimately retracted it.
Department Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. refused to say that vaccines do not cause autism at his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
During an appearance before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) asked Kennedy about his views on vaccines and autism.
"Vaccines do not cause autism. Do you agree with that?" Sanders stated.
"I said I'm not gonna go into HHS with any preordained...," Kennedy said before being interrupted.
"I ask you a simple question, Bobby," Sanders said. "Studies all over the world say it does not. What do you think?"
"Senator, if you show me those studies, I will absolutely, as I promised to Chairman [Bill] Cassidy, apologize," Kennedy replied.
"That is a very troubling response," Sanders noted.
Multiple scientific studies have found no link between vaccines and autism. "Vaccines do not cause autism," the Centers for Disease Control has determined.
Pristine samples of the asteroid Bennu transported to Earth contain the "basic building blocks" for life, shedding new light on the perennial question of how life began on our planet.
The revelation, in two studies published Wednesday, is the result of work on just 120 grams of material -- about the weight of a banana -- collected from Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020.
The samples from Bennu, then around 300 million kilometers (186 million miles) from Earth, were returned in a capsule that OSIRIS-REx dropped off during a pass-by in 2023.
Initial analysis had already revealed evidence of high-carbon content and water.
But the new research found that evaporated water on Bennu's parent asteroid left behind "the raw ingredients of life", said Tim McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-lead author of one of the studies.
"We have discovered that next step on a pathway to life," he said in a press release issued by the museum.
Bennu appears to have formed around 65 million years ago from the debris of a parent asteroid dating back some 4.5 billion years.
The findings suggest Bennu's parent was once home to pockets of liquid water. When these evaporated, they left behind a "briny broth" of salts and minerals.
Some of the minerals include compounds that have never been seen in samples from outer space, the museum said.
And analysis of the samples strongly suggests a "non-terrestrial origin", adds one of the studies.
That could lend support to the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space.
The samples "give unprecedented insight into the processes that drove the formation of the Solar System," according to Yasuhito Sekine, a professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo.
"This discovery was only possible by analyzing samples that were collected directly from the asteroid then carefully preserved back on Earth," he added.
"The salts would otherwise have rapidly absorbed moisture in the Earth's humid atmosphere."
- 'Huge progress' -
The researchers believe similar salty brines may exist on other extraterrestrial bodies, including the dwarf planet Ceres and Saturn's moon Enceladus, as well as other asteroids.
They plan to reexamine specimens already on Earth for traces of compounds that previous research might have missed.
"Even though asteroid Bennu has no life, the question is could other icy bodies harbor life?" said Nick Timms, an associate professor at Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences also involved in the research.
Much about life's origin remains unclear despite the secrets revealed from Bennu, McCoy cautioned.
"We now know we have the basic building blocks to move along this pathway towards life, but we don't know how far along that pathway this environment could allow things to progress," he said.
Still, Sara Russell, co-lead author with McCoy and a cosmic mineralogist at the museum, said the research had made "huge progress in understanding how asteroids like Bennu evolved, and how they may have helped make the Earth habitable".
OSIRIS-REx wasn't the first probe to rendezvous with an asteroid and bring back samples for study -- Japan succeeded in the feat twice, returning celestial dust in 2010 and 2020.
In addition to scientific insights, better understanding of Bennu's composition could prove useful if humanity ever needs to steer it away.
Space agencies are constantly monitoring asteroids over potential impact risks.
A recently discovered asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4, estimated to be between 40 and 100 meters (130 and 330 feet) wide, has a 1.2 percent chance of impacting Earth on December 22, 2032, the European Space Agency said Wednesday.
That is only considered a level-3 risk on the 10-level Torino Impact Hazard Scale, the ESA said, adding that an asteroid's chances of impact often drop after additional observations.
Kennedy, who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, was questioned about his refusal to trust science that he disagreed with.
Tapper highlighted Kennedy's attempt to change the entirety of his anti-vaccine advocacy by saying that all of his children are vaccinated and "I've written many books on vaccines."
"But there's plenty of evidence in Kennedy's own words to suggest he is anti-vaccine — at least, not pro-vaccine — at least 20 years of this," said Tapper.
Tapper brought the receipts, showing RFK Jr. on the "Lex Friedman Podcast" in July 2023, in which Kennedy was asked if there are any vaccines he likes. Kennedy said that those vaccines are causing more problems.
"There is no vaccine that is safe and effective," said Kennedy on the podcast.
"Excuse me?" Tapper questioned. "That seems pretty cut and dry. But today, when questioned about this specific statement, Kennedy blamed it on the interviewer. The interviewer cut him off when he was going to say that there was no vaccine that is safe and effective for every person."
"Hum, okay," Tapper said with speculation. He noted that even if that's what Kennedy meant to say, there's even more proof.
He showed Kennedy's interview with Joe Rogan in June about the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. In that case, Kennedy said the flu was a "vaccine-induced flu." He claimed that all of the "samples from thousands of people" showed that most of the people who died didn't die of "bacteriological pneumonia."
Pneumonia is often a result of having the flu, a cold, COVID-19, RSV, or even strep throat, according to the American Lung Association.
"This is very, very confusing and ahistoric," said Tapper, explaining that the so-called Spanish Flu came from an H1N1 virus, not a vaccine. "Not to mention, the flu vaccine and antibiotic treatments weren't even available in 1918. The first license for a wide-use flu vaccine wasn't until 1945. According to the space-time continuum, 1918 is before 1945."
Tapper showed a moment in which Kennedy realized he may have gotten in over his head when he told Rogan later in the interview, "I don't remember enough about it."
Tapper repeated the comments, "'I shouldn't talk about this, Joe.' Words to live by, Mr. Kennedy."
He showed a clip of Kennedy being forced to face a onesie from his own organization's website for babies, bragging about being unvaccinated. Kennedy refused to respond to questions about whether he agreed with his own organization, saying only he wasn't anti-vaccine.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) raised her voice to yell back at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday as the Health and Human Services nominee tried to twist her question in knots.
Warren pointed out that Kennedy has made over $2 million from a law firm that is searching for plaintiffs to sue over vaccines. Warren asked if Kennedy would agree that he would not accept any cash payments while serving as secretary of HHS.
Kennedy twisted the comment into Warren asking if he won't sue drug companies, putting the words in her mouth.
"You're asking me to not sue drug companies. And I'm not going to agree to that," Kennedy said.
Warren shouted over him, "No, I am not!"
"So, let's do a quick count here of how, as secretary of HHS, if you get confirmed, you could influence every one of those lawsuits," Warren, a former Harvard professor and lawyer, continued. "Well, let me start the list. You could publish your anti-vaccine conspiracies, but this time on U.S. government letterhead, something a jury might be impressed by."
"I don't understand," Kennedy fumbled.
"You could appoint that vaccine panel who share your anti-vax views and let them do your dirty work," Warren continued. "You could tell the CDC vaccine panel to remove a particular vaccine from the vaccine schedule. You could remove vaccines from special compensation programs, which would open up manufacturers to mass torts. You could make more injuries eligible for compensation, even if there is no causal evidence. You could change vaccine court processes to make it easier to bring junk lawsuits. You could turn over FDA data to your friends at the law firm and they could use it however it benefited them. You could change vaccine labeling. You could change vaccine information rules. You could change which claims are compensated in the vaccine injury compensation program."
She demanded to know if he would refrain from taking a financial cut from those lawsuits while at HHS and in the four years after.
All Kennedy would commit to is to follow current ethical guidelines.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to enact a ban on the abortion drug mifepristone if President Donald Trump told him to do so after he was confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) asked Kennedy about medical abortion policies during a Wednesday Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing.
"The FDA has been under scrutiny and brought to court for failure to properly assess this drug as well as subsequent deregulations," Daines opined. "Some of these deregulations included ending the requirement that these drugs be prescribed by a doctor, ending reporting requirements for adverse events, and allowing these pills to be obtained through the mail."
"In fact, the FDA's own prescribing label mentioned that three to five percent of women taking this drug end up in the emergency room," the senator continued. "My question is, if confirmed as Secretary of HHS, will you commit to working with the FDA Commission to review these deregulatory actions that are threatening the safety of women?"
