The Colorado Supreme Court has issued a ruling siding with transgender patients who sued a hospital that stopped providing gender-affirming care due to fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. The May 18 opinion reversed a trial court’s denial of…
Trump’s EEOC targets businesses that required COVID vaccines
The Trump administration is using the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to punish businesses that required employees to get COVID vaccinations in order to protect public health. These actions appear to be inspired by the vaccine denialism of Robert F. Kennedy…
Profits from evangelical “healing farms” have RFK falsely linking school shootings to antidepressants
In his latest broadside, amateur poet (and Health and Human Services Secretary) Robert F. Kennedy Jr has promised “massive studies” to investigate a link between school shootings and antidepressants—yet another link that has already been investigated with no credible evidence found. Kennedy has nevertheless been making this…
RFK Jr. and the perfect storm of idiocy threaten us all
What would it have been like to be on a fishing trawler in the Atlantic in the perfect storm? A “perfect storm” is a meteorological event aggravated by a rare combination of circumstances. The phrase became the title of a bestselling book in…
The lunatics are now in charge
Not all ideas are equally valid, and not all beliefs are equally true. There is reality and there is fantasy. A heavy dose of “both sides are valid” denial of reality has set up the United States of America for…
The head of a new RFK Jr. support group believes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real
The director of a new organization founded to advance the priorities of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has extensively promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a famous antisemitic forgery.
Despite court order, Trump still denies unaccompanied children legal counsel
Unaccompanied migrant children continue to face immigration judges without legal assistance despite a court order to resume the service. More than a dozen nonprofit legal organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration in March to renew $200 million…
Measles outbreak inevitable due to lower vaccination rates, experts say
The spread of measles is inevitable in communities where reliance on vaccine alternatives is high and trust in medical science is low, a panel of vaccine and infectious disease experts warned during a March 20 webinar. The media briefing was…
Even RFK’s More Benign-Sounding Rhetoric is Rooted in the Dangerous Ideology Set to Guide U.S. Health Policy
Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Measles-dismisser, nepo-baby, bear cub-dumper, and vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was one of the president’s more questionable nominations. This is a significant achievement in itself when compared with other dangerously unsuitable candidates for…
Delivering the nation’s health care into the hands of anti-vaxxers is the wrong decision
When I was pregnant with our twins, I read stacks of books on “what to expect when you’re expecting.” (I’ve since discovered, with twins always expect the unexpected.) One well-marked book in my stack was about childhood vaccinations. It was…
Churches must preach the truth on vaccines
One simple way churches could proclaim truth in an era of Trumpian disinformation is to speak plainly about the importance of vaccines. At the height of the COVID pandemic, as many Americans were resistant to what they considered an untested…
‘Pro-family’ groups like Trump’s controversial nominees to cabinet
In the week since Donald Trump’s election victory, he has announced a number of key appointments — some of them highly controversial — that will shape his administration in a way that pleases “pro-family” evangelical groups. In theory, that will…