Archives for category: Health

Trump’s Insane War on Science

March 6, 2026 //

The New York Times published this excellent article by Jeneen Interlandi about the Trump administration’s mad effort to defund and distort science. Our nation’s leadership in science has been extraordinary. Our scientists have led the world in discovering cures for diseases, extending the human life span, exploring space and the oceans, and extending the bounds of knowledge. This is a gift article, meaning you can open it without a subscription. You should open it to see the many photographs and illustrations.

Interlandi writes:

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And along the way, trust has been broken between scientists and the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.

It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it — central air-conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight-loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.

The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.

Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.

It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.

The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” said Tom Frieden, the author of “The Formula for Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”

Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really flourishes only among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic no later than 2030 by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest-hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.

Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a huge research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, was abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.

Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationship.

Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.

Her husband, Dan Fridberg (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding), paced frantically behind her as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinnertime,” he said. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?”

“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms, and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category. All of their salaries (including hers) were reliant on N.I.H. funding, and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.

And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.

When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone, and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field and others, like her, were maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”

Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.

Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.

In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”

In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age, and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.

They enlisted, among others, Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.

Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced — how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.

To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.

With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood said. “We celebrate queer identity, and then in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”

The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.

On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with carrying out those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”

In the weeks after the March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as her boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.

Macapagal’s job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” Macapagal accepted and for many months afterward would tear up just recalling the kindness.

In April the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when or whether or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.

Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. He had presided for decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, and he took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But she felt awful.

Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed, and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.

It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.

She found herself making other changes, too, including dyeing her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.

As spring bled into summer and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her lab and began doing what she could to help people secure other jobs. It was a risky gamble: If they left and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.

Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa, and if his funding was cut, he would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. She found herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.

In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broken the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.

Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country) and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicines those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one in which science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled. (As a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political.) But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and, ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.

Last June the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would need to receive only twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”

The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science but also on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to his stated goals.

If health officials really wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.

At every turn, Trump and his deputies did the exact opposite. They tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They also weakened the social safety net, sowed terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.

If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.

Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after ICE had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”

A few miles away in Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. It had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC, which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar, using an acronym for “Black, Indigenous and people of color.”

It was getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on its back was starting to show. One of its regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they did before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.

She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries, in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming, and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”

By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet. The university’s funding was unfrozen in December, and thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that her group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?

No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infection test kits that they had planned to send to study participants.

“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s in the context of a research study,” Macapagal said. “And now they’re just sitting there, and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future. On the one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.

On the other hand, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was that new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now what the point of any of that had been.

She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important, and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.

Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States and also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen and who happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.

“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups, we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that, one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work and, two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”

More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work or treat words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.

Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.

Categories Creativity, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

New Hampshire: The Legislative Push to Eliminate ALL Vaccine Requirements

By dianeravitch

February 20, 2026 //

New Hampshire is an unusual state. It is a magnet for libertarians. A significant number of them have been elected to the legislature, where they use their clout to “free” people from government.

Their current goal is to eliminate all vaccine requirements. Diseases that were long ago eliminated will come roaring back. People will die of diseases that could have been avoided. But they won’t be subject to government mandates.

At the same time, with no sense of irony, Some New Hampshire legislstors are demanding greater state control over what is taught in the classroom.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH reports:

Two bills coming before the House this week are indicative of the New Hampshire Legislature: where it is heading and where it has been for the last three terms.

It is not a pretty picture unless you want to end government as we know it, or you want to use the sledgehammer of government to force everyone to believe what you do.

HB 1811 would repeal the immunization requirements for children in state statutes. All of them.

They include, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and Hepatitis B.

Last week the House passed a bill to remove the Hepatitis b vaccine from the list.

The “compromise” position, said the prime sponsor of the bill, Rep. Matt Drew, R-Manchester, is to retain the polio vaccine requirements.

House Bill 1792 or the “Charlie Kirk Act,” which would fittingly prohibit public schools from teaching critical race theory, LGBTQ+ ideologies and other alleged Marxist derived educational theories.

The bill also gives those who believe the law was breached, the right to bring a civil suit against the school and educators as well as code of conduct allegations against the teacher which could result in loss of license.

Over the last several years, the US District Court has struck down laws passed by this legislature on critical race theory or divisive concepts, and outlawing diversity, equality and inclusion programs calling them overly vague putting educators in harm’s way.

It is hard to imagine this law would pass muster either.

In the broader picture, most of the childhood diseases that plagued school children 60 or 70 years ago have been, if not eliminated, made negligible.

But measles is making a comeback in the last few years as is whooping cough because the vaccination rates in children have been trending down as parents seek to opt them out for religious or medical reasons.

In the past, immunizations were not an issue. People had their children vaccinated to protect them from the ravages of the diseases and ultimately to protect the population in general from the newborns to the elderly.

It was the responsible thing to do.

People like Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. have long disparaged vaccines, as he and others gaslighted many into believing they cause autism.

The vaccination question found a red hot burner with the new COVID 19 shots when the decade began.…

It didn’t matter that the protesters were never going to get the COVID vaccine, they wanted to block the state’s most vulnerable to the disease from having a jab.

Two years ago, lawmakers passed a bill that would have taken away the Department of Health and Human Services’ authority to determine what vaccines children need, and would have had the legislature set the list, but it failed to become law.

These same folks also wanted to eliminate the state’s free vaccination program in conjunction with insurance companies, but had to settle for a study committee instead.

The prime sponsor of House Bill 1792, Rep. Mike Belcher, at the public hearing on the bill alleged a straight-line connection between Karl Marx’s theories and ideologies to the education system that fosters concepts like critical race theory, the oppressor and the oppressed models, LGBTQ+ ideologies, identity based ideologies and systemic inequity based on identity groups, or anti-constitutional narratives.

He claimed these ideologies undermine learning and unity, and the right of parents to direct their children’s upbringing.

He claimed these worldviews are responsible for the divisions in this country and have fostered the view that white Americans are inherently racists.

Belcher claimed his bill does not infringe on a teacher’s free speech, noting a teacher has no right to say anything he wants to children who are captive.

Legislation reaching down into classroom curriculum, which always has been the responsibility of local school boards and administrations, has been a recent trend with book and material bans, anti-abortion requirements and just plain interference and requirements meant to disrupt the system while many public schools struggle to provide a quality education under the burden of high property taxes, while the state fails to meets its constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education.

Before these attempts, bills targeting public education had always been quickly dismissed, but that was before there was an organized effort to end public education.

The chair of the Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, is a co-sponsor, as is Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn.

Noble recently posted on social media that schools should be segregated to separate Republicans from Democrats and called public schools Marxist indoctrination centers, while Osborne called them black boxes where children go in, but you don’t know what comes out.

Not that long ago, people followed the concept of the public good, or the long established “Social Contract” espoused by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The concept is that people surrender some of their freedoms in exchange for protection of their remaining rights, security and social stability, with the sovereign power residing in the people as a whole.

Under that concept, the industrialized world has been able to eliminate polio and other deadly diseases to benefit society as a whole.

But that concept has been eroding along with what was once considered the moral responsibility to look after your neighbors and the most vulnerable as well as yourself. Now it’s just yourself.

The idea of individual rights overriding the greater good is not new, but the founding fathers sought to protect against the tyranny of the majority overriding the rights of the minority.

What we have today is a tyranny of the majority in the legislature driven by Free Staters and Libertarians who want to impose their will on the people of New Hampshire in education, medicine, local planning and zoning, religion and social services. It is tyranny of the minority of New Hampshire residents.

One Republican representative, Travis Corcoran of Weare said in a social media post: “The point of Republican legislation is not just to change the laws, it’s to demoralize the left . . . and encourage them to leave.”

He is a co-sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Act.

If you are passing laws for reasons like that you do not belong in New Hampshire which has always been a welcoming state with a live and let live attitude.

Maybe we should have been more discerning about people moving here who claim to be for freedom, while they trample the freedoms of those who disagree with them.

That is the definition of hypocrisy.

And voters need to be more discerning about who they send to Concord.

Yesterday, the New Hampshire legislature voted on the bill to ban all vaccine mandates: it was defeated, 192-155.

However, the bill to prohibit “woke” curriculum passed by 184-164 and now goes to the State Senate. The bill is called the Charlie Kirk Act, after the founder of the rightwing Turning Points America, who was assassinated last year.

The bill prohibits the teaching of critical race theory, LGBT ideology, or other allegedly Marxist materials. Citizens can file civil suits against teachers found teaching prohibited ideas, and teachers might ultimately lose their license.

A similar law was previously struck down by the federal district court on grounds of vagueness.

Categories Extremism, Health, Medicine, New Hampshire, Science

Annie Andrews: There Is Only One Way to Stop the Spread of Measles

By dianeravitch

February 18, 2026 //

Annie Andrews is a pediatrician in South Carolina. She is running against Senator Lindsey Graham in the November election.

She wrote:

I’ve been a pediatrician for 20 years. When I learned how to take a pediatric patient’s history, I was taught to ask parents: “Are your child’s immunizations up to date?” At the beginning of my career I’d already be writing down the answer “yes,” without hesitation or uncertainty. Now when I ask that question, I brace myself.

Right now, a measles outbreak is surging in my home state of South Carolina, where there are already more than 900 confirmed cases, most of them unvaccinated children, with hundreds in quarantine and more exposures being reported daily.

That’s hundreds of parents missing work. Kids missing weeks of school. Newborns, seniors and the immunocompromised being forced to gamble their health on their neighbors’ choices. Hospitals and health centers bracing for what comes next.

This was all preventable, and we need to be honest about how we got here.

We have an incredibly safe and effective vaccine for measles. One of the reasons scientists worked with urgency to develop the measles vaccine was because of how contagious the virus is, far more contagious than the flu or Covid-19. Every person with measles infects 20 other people, on average. Someone with measles can walk into a room, cough and leave, and the virus can still be alive in that room for hours. This is why measles doesn’t “fade out” on its own. It spreads like wildfire when community immunity drops.

So no, measles doesn’t spread like this just because a virus is good at its job. It spreads when the systems meant to protect families get replaced with noise, doubt, lies and deliberate confusion.

At the highest levels of our federal government, we have watched medical expertise get shoved aside while conspiracy theories get promoted. The message Americans keep getting is that expertise is suspect, that doubt is bravery and that your Facebook feed is just as good as your doctor’s advice. When the people at the top signal that science is subjective, confusion becomes contagious.

That message has consequences. It becomes the air people breathe. It shapes what a parent believes about vaccinations as they scroll their social media feed in the preschool pickup line. It erodes trust in medicine and threatens the fabric of our nation’s public health system.

The outbreak isn’t the fault of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alone, but we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend leadership doesn’t matter.

Kennedy has been a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement for decades, which has led communities across the country to slip below the herd immunity threshold for the prevention of outbreaks of infections like measles. Even if you replaced the name on the door at HHS tomorrow (which a responsible Congress would do), trust doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It takes years to build and minutes to burn.

And the burn is not theoretical. Just this month, the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, stepping away from the very kind of coordination that helps countries spot outbreaks early and stop them before they spread. Meanwhile, the world is looking back at us: a nation on the brink of losing elimination status for measles, a disease we fully eliminated in 2000.

We are flirting with the return of an old killer, not because the science changed, not because the virus itself changed, but because our politics did.

I didn’t set out to become a politician. I’m a pediatrician and mom of three, which means I understand deeply what it feels like to be responsible for a tiny human you’d do anything to protect. I know how heavy it is to make decisions in a world that feels more chaotic and less trustworthy by the day. And I understand that when politics is injected into public health, parents’ jobs get harder and children suffer. That is why I stepped up to fight on behalf of America’s children and the families who love them.

So here’s my plea, doctor to country, mother to community.

Stop letting politicians play games with public health. Put scientific expertise back where it belongs: in government, in policy and in the language we use when the stakes are life and death.

If you want to stop measles, you should get vaccinated.

If you want to stop the next iteration of this, you stop rewarding people who profit from confusion. You stop letting unserious leaders turn public health into a culture war. You put serious, qualified people back in the rooms where decisions are made.

Measles doesn’t care who you voted for. It cares whether we protect each other. And we still can.

Annie Andrews

Categories Ethics, Health, Science, South Carolina

Trump Reverses Climate Change Policies, Alarms Scientists

By dianeravitch

February 12, 2026 //

We have long known that Donald Trump despises science. We also know that he refuses to accept the science concerning climate change. Yesterday, Trump accepted an award as the “Champion of Coal.” He wants to turn the clock back a century. He will go down in history for his willful ignorance and for the harm he has unleashed on the public.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

*The Trump administration has repealed the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, eliminating the foundation of much of U.S. climate policy.

*The decision reverses decades of environmental progress despite overwhelming scientific evidence and opposition from health experts, environmental groups, 50 cities and 17 states.

*Experts warn the repeal will increase pollution, respiratory disease and planet-warming emissions over the coming decades.

The Trump administration on Thursday reversed the U.S. government’s longstanding scientific assertion that planet-heating pollution seriously threatens Americans, erasing a foundational piece of the country’s efforts to address climate change.

The repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding — a conclusion based on decades of science that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare — represents one of the biggest environmental rollbacks in U.S. history, and the latest in a series of actions by President Trump to scrap policies and regulations designed to curb the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to clean energy.

The administration on Thursday also repealed all federal regulations governing vehicle emissions.

Experts and scientists condemned the action. The Environmental Protection Network — a bipartisan group of more than 700 former staff and appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency — described it as “unprecedented and dangerous.”

“This move is a fundamental betrayal of EPA’s responsibility to protect human health,” said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. “It is legally indefensible, morally bankrupt and completely untethered from the scientific record.”

Independent researchers around the world have long concluded that greenhouse gases released by the burning of gasoline, diesel and other fossil fuels are warming the planet and worsening weather disasters.

Categories Environment, Fake News, Health, Trump

Tom Ultican: Leave Trans Kids Alone!

By dianeravitch

February 11, 2026 //

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, insisted that the war on trans athletes should stop. In his view, the widely publicized debate about letting them participate on high school and college teams is a bogus issue.

He writes:

With our lying President, we don’t know if he is actually a homophobe or just plays one on TV. His Department of Education recently reported finding San Jose State University violated Title IX regarding a transgender volleyball player. The transgender player, Blaire Fleming, was on the San José State roster for three seasons after transferring from Coastal Carolina. Her status as transgender apparently became known when Southern Utah forfeited its match against San Jose State in September, 2024. It was Flemming’s third year on the team.

Shortly after this came to light, San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and two former Spartans were incensed by the new knowledge about Fleming and sued the Mountain West Conference over its policies they claim muzzled them. While Slusser was the central figure among the three players that were outraged, it is very likely that a lot of that outrage was fueled by Brooke’s Christian Nationalist mother, Kim Slusser.

A dive into Kim’s Facebook page, shows that she is much more focused on being a mom supporting her kids than she is politics. However, she did recently post to Facebook “Let’s go Leigh Wambsganss for Texas Senate.” Leigh is the wife of a former Southlake mayor, founder of Southlake Family PAC and Leader of a Patriots Mobil PAC designed to take over public schools. Mike Hixenbaugh quoted Wambsganss in his book They Came for the Schools:

“… Leigh Wambsganas … said there was no hope of changing the minds of any Black Lives Matter activists. ‘Sadly, they need to die.’” (Pages 108 and179)

Besides politically supporting crazed right-wing religious zealots, Kim Slusser also posted a graphic encouraging people to listen to the Megyn Kelly show.

A Post in Kim Slusser’s Facebook

The President’s attack on transgender people is fueled by bigoted ideology.

Transgender Reality

A 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute identified of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming. The LGBTQIA WIKI defines gender nonconforming:

“Gender non-conforming is a term describing people who do not follow gender stereotypes and differ from their society’s conventional binary expectations of masculine men and feminine women. Gender non-conformity can encompass many things, such as gender expression, gender roles, or another aspect of gender. It is typically apparent in people whose gender identity is a binary gender, whether they are cisgender or transgender; for instance, a feminine trans man and a feminine cis man are both non-conforming with expectations of masculinity.”

From the 2022 study cited above about 700,000 transgender people are between 13 and 24. Extrapolating from these numbers, I would expect less than 400,000 of them to be transgender women. It is a small but not insignificant number of people considering that there are about 350 million people in America.

The bottom line is that a small subset of human beings is born with gender-dysphoria, a mismatch between gender identity and their own personal sense of gender. Scientific American reported almost all major American medical groups have “policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care”and “find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.”

Columbia University Psychiatry reports:

“It is well documented that TGNB [transgender non-binary] adolescents and young adults experience anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation, at a much higher rate than their cisgender peers. According to The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 54 percent of young people who identified as transgender or nonbinary reported having seriously considered suicide in the last year, and 29 percent have made an attempt to end their lives.”

Both homosexuality and gender dysphoria are naturally occurring phenomena. They are not a mistake and they are human beings worthy of maximum respect.

The PBS article “Why is the GOP Escalating Attacks on Trans Rights? Experts say the Goal is to make sure Evangelicals Vote” reports that “Survey after survey show that Americans support LGBTQ+ equality, and Republicans are no exception.” When Donald Trump first ran for office, he briefly vowed to be an ally to queer Americans. “In office, his administration made so many policy moves against LGBTQ+ Americans that advocacy organizations branded his leadership ‘The Discrimination Administration.”’

Even though the Evangelical community is a minority in the Republican Party, their strong unity on cultural issues has made them a must get for victorious GOP candidates. Our President quickly realized he needed them and apparently had no problem abandoning his vow to be an ally to Queer Americans.

Respecting Life and Protecting People

Sixteen-years-old trans-student, Nex Benedict, was attacked in the girl’s bathroom at her Oklahoma high school. The attack was severe enough to require some medical attention, but she was well enough to go home that night. The next day she committed suicide. Caught in a web of ignorance and bigotry she was convinced that life was not worth living. She would be about the same age as San Jose State’s volleyball player, Blaire Fleming, if she had lived until today.

A new law, that took effect January 2025 in California, says teachers, counselors and schools are not to disclose a student’s apparent gender-dysphoria to their parents without the student’s permission. The arguments in the Bill noted, “Unfortunately, not all young people are able to be their authentic selves at home safely, and, in those cases, schools can be a critical source of support.” It also highlighted the large tendency for trans students like Nex Benedict to engage in suicide. The bill claimed that students with “access to affirming homes, schools, community events, and online spaces reported lower rates of attempting suicide.”

That same month, President Trump signed many executive orders including:

“This executive order directs federal agencies and federal employees to interpret “sex” solely as an immutable binary biological classification determined at conception. The order also requires all federal agencies to enforce sex-based rights, protections and accommodations using this definition of “sex.”

A few months before Trump became President, a symposium organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute, an institute of the US National Institutes of Health completely rejected the Trumpian view. “Throughout the symposium, many speakers argued that any attempt to categorize sex runs into the same issue—human variation always provides an exception to the rule.”

An interesting case was presented by Physician Tucker Pyle, from Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. A person who was born in the 1980s was raised as a girl but felt like a boy. As a teenager, the patient received feminizing hormones but still experienced dysphoria. Years later, he learned doctors performed surgery on him as a baby to make his genitalia, which weren’t clearly a penis or a vulva, look like a vulva. But he ultimately identified as male and socially and hormonally transitioned.

A Personal Opinion

In a dialogue with youth, Daisaku Ikeda said:

“Everyone has a right to flower, to reveal his or her full potential as a human being, to fulfill his or her mission in this world. You have this right and so does everyone else. To scorn and violate people’s human rights destroys the natural order of things. We must become people who prize human rights and respect others.” Faith into Action page 276

This current attack on gay people is evil. Some gay people are not the sharpest tool in the woodshed and some are possessed of brilliance, but more importantly they are all human beings with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They all deserve respect.

I think trans kids in sports is a made-up issue. Participating in sports with their preferred gender should be accommodated. There are more gender nonconforming females whose male side leads to sporting victories than any unfairness caused by the few transgender participants.

Should someone disagree with this position, we should listen if they have valid points. However, I do not think transgender athletes are the problem that needs reforming.

It is benighted bigots who must be reformed; whose ideology must be shunned.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Gender, Health, Medicine

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2026 //

Some years back–actually it was 2019–I read an article that gladdened my heart. It was written in The Atlantic by gazillionaire Nick Hanauer. It was titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.”

Nick is an interesting guy. He is an entrepreneur in Seattle. He works alongside other successful venture capitalists, and for a time, partnered with Bill Gates to persuade the Washington legislature to endorse charter schools as a remedy to replace “failing” public schools.

But somewhere along the way, he had a change of mind and heart. He realized that the basic problem in the U.S. was income inequality, not “failing schools.”

He began his 2019 article:

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.Great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million eachto an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

Hanauer recognized that the hollowing out of the middle class was harming our entire society:

In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

Hanauer’s turnaround resonated with me. He was boldly breaking ranks with his peers. I doubt he suffered ostracism, because many of the elites toy with education; it is not a vital interest to them. In my limited experience, watching the uber-rich participate on behalf of charter schools, it appeared that many were going along with the crowd, while some thought that privatization was a miracle cure.

Hanauer understood that children need a good start in life and they need a stable, secure home life to do their best in school. He understood that economic inequality undermined many children’s interest in school, which was less important than survival or a warm winter coat or medical care. He even understood that the decades-long efforts to stamp out unions contributed to economic inequality.

We spoke on the phone. I did a podcast with him. I was impressed by his keen intellect and independence of mind.

With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.

In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders considered was test scores. But I knew that was not right. For many young people, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They chose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.

What kind of a school was that? I came to understand that the closest approximation of a school that I imagined was a community school. Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents.

Categories Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Innovation, Medicine, Parents, Philanthropy, Students, Teachers

South Carolina: Major Measles Outbreak! Thanks, RFK JR.!

By dianeravitch

January 30, 2026 //

In the year 2000, health officials declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States, thanks to a successful program to vaccinate all children against the disease.

But, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services, measles is back.

RFK Jr. is often described as a “vaccine skeptic.” He would be more accurately described as a fierce opponent of vaccines.

South Carolina reported nearly 800 cases last Tuesday, and the number is likely to grow.

CNN reported:

With 789 cases reported as of Tuesday, the South Carolina outbreak surpassed a massive outbreak in Texas, which reached 762 cases before it ended in August last year. Two children died during the outbreak in Texas…

“It breaks my heart to see that my state is the number one outbreak currently in the United States since the 1990s,” Dr. Anna Kathryn Rye Burch, a pediatric infectious diseases physician with Prisma Health in South Carolina, told CNN Wednesday. “We have this amazing vaccine that would help protect us all from getting the measles, and we are just seeing that people aren’t as excited about getting that vaccine anymore. This is why we’re seeing measles come back into the United States…”

Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, meaning there has not been continuous transmission for more than a year at a time.

Before 2025, there were an average of about 180 measles cases reported each year since elimination, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The US reported more than 2,200 confirmed measles cases in 2025 — significantly more than there have been in any year since 2000.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/health/largest-us-measles-outbreak-south-carolina?utm_source=cnn_Evening+Newsletter+-+Thursday%2C+January+29%2C+2026&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=gvqCy2mCVeUEqO7zOX61HyRkKAF7F461fS0rgklCK%2Bs9goDd85EFJdHLZMXX1kfC&bt_ts=1769725134216

Categories Ethics, Failure, Health, Medicine, Science

Wyoming Supreme Court Overturns Abortion Bans

By dianeravitch

January 6, 2026 //

The Wyoming Supreme Court overturned two laws that were intended to ban abortions. One of the overruled laws prohibited abortion. The other prohibited the abortion pill, which is used at home for DIY abortions. The court held that the two laws violated the state constitution’s guarantee that a woman has the right to make her own health care choices.

The Governor was outraged and said he will ask the legislature to amend the state constitution to prohibit all means of abortion. He would then have to hold a referendum to get public consent.

Mead Grover of the AP reported:

The Wyoming Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down the state’s near-total abortion ban and a first-of-its-kind prohibition on abortion pills, saying that the laws violated the state constitution.

In 2023, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Wyoming passed an abortion ban that included narrow exceptions for incest, sexual assault and cases where the mother’s health is at risk. Later that year, it became the first state in the country to explicitly outlaw abortion pills, setting fines and prison time for anyone found prescribing the drugs for an abortion.

But abortion remained legal in the red state because the bans were blocked in court as legal challenges played out. In the case decided Tuesday, Wyoming’s Supreme Court weighed whether the two 2023 laws violated a woman’s right to make her own health care choices as guaranteed in the state constitution.

The state argued that the laws did not violate that right because abortion is not health care. Even if it were, the state argued, the procedure could not be considered a woman’s own decision because it ended the life of the fetus.

The Wyoming Supreme Court disagreed.
“Although a woman’s decision to have an abortion ends the fetal life, the decision is, nevertheless, one she makes concerning her own health care,” Wyoming Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden wrote in the court’s ruling.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R), who signed both of the contested abortion laws, derided the court’s decision. He pressed Wyoming’s Republican-led legislature to pass a constitutional amendment on abortion as soon as possible.

If the legislature passed such an amendment, it would then go before voters during the 2026 election.

“This ruling is profoundly unfortunate and sadly only serves to prolong the ultimate and proper resolution of this issue,” Gordon said in a statement. “This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself.”

The state’s attorney who argued before the Wyoming Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case decided Tuesday was brought by Wyoming’s lone abortion clinic, a nonprofit in the state that helps fund abortion services and a group of women who live there.

Categories Gender, Health, Wyoming

RFK Jr. Endangers the Lives of Children with His Extremist, Anti-Vax Views

By dianeravitch

December 5, 2025 //

Before he was named Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was best known for his extremist views about vaccines. He has said repeatedly that vaccines are unsafe, that the vaccines cause the disease they are supposed to prevent; and that vaccines cause autism.

His views are so extreme that he was asked at his confirmation hearings by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a doctor, whether he would change the vaccine policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy insisted that he would not.

Today, it became clear that he is trashing the vaccine policies that he said under oath he would not change.

RFK Jr..’s fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his allies.

Today, that hand-picked panel voted to stop recommending that all newborns receive a vaccine against Hepatitis B.

Senator Cassidy posted this reaction on Twitter:

As a liver doctor who has treated patients with hepatitis B for decades, this change to the vaccine schedule is a mistake. The hepatitis B vaccine is safe and effective. The birth dose is a recommendation, NOT a mandate.

Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20. Ending the recommendation for newborns makes it more likely the number of cases will begin to increase again. This makes America sicker.

Acting CDC Director O’Neill should not sign these new recommendations and instead retain the current, evidence-based approach.

Senator Kennedy’s outrage was echoed by numerous medical leaders and organizations. Children will die because of this decision.

The New York Times reported on the response to the ACIP decision by experts:

For many public health experts, the vote also marked the end of trust in the C.D.C. and its vaccine advisers.

“Today is a defining moment for our country,” Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota, said. “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.”

In a statement, Dr. Richard Besser, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the agency, said “policymakers, physicians, and families must turn to reputable medical and public health groups for guidance, and health insurers should do the same for informing what vaccines they will cover.”

The votes on hepatitis B were originally scheduled for the September meeting but deferred twice because some members said there was insufficient data to make a decision. The committee attempted the vote again on Thursday, but postponed it after some panelists questioned whether a change was warranted.

Some panelists noted that the practice had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm from the shots at any age.

“We know it’s safe, and we know it’s very effective,” Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, said on Friday, and he warned that if the vote passed, “we will see more children and adolescents and adults infected with hepatitis B….”

RFK Jr. has used his power over the vast agency to fire or force out many well-respected scientists, who were replaced by people who share Kennedy’s extremist hatred of vaccines.

Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the chief medical and scientific officer at the US Food and Drug Administration, is strongly anti-vaxx, despite his sterling credentials. He recently stated that “at least” 10 children had died after taking the COVID vaccine shot, but he provided no evidence showing the causes of their deaths or how they were related to the vaccine.

Dr. Prasad said that the number of deaths might be more than 10.

Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said of the memo: “When you make that kind of sensational claim, I think it’s incumbent upon you to provide evidence that supports that claim. He didn’t supply any evidence.”

Dr. Offit was a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) at CDC but was removed earlier this year.

Nearly 24 million children between 6 months to age 17 received at least one shot of COVID vaccine, according to the CDC.

Categories Extremism, Health, Science

Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood

By dianeravitch

December 1, 2025 //

The New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article titled “America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?” It was written by staff member Jia Lynn Yang.

I anticipated that the article would be another lament about test scores, of which there have been many recently. But it wasn’t!

Instead, Yang described the explosion of mental health issues among the nation’s children. And she attributed it largely to the unending pressure to compete for ever higher test scores. EXACTLY!

Yang knows that the changes in school are not the only cause of declining mental health. There are many more culprits, including social media and the pressures of contemporary life. And there is also the possibility that children are being misdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. I can’t help but recall a story from 1994 about an elite private school that received a private $2 million grant to screen children for learning disabilities. Overrun by experts, the program “got out of hand.” Nearly half the children were diagnosed with disabilities, and the program was cancelled.

We live in a stressful world. Children are pressured to succeed, to comply, to compete, to win the approval of their peers, to dress the “right” way, to be and do things by which they will be judged by their peers, by their parents, by the world they inhabit. Some children succeed, many don’t.

Schools these days are doing things to children that add to their stress. They have been doing harmful things to children by federal mandate since 2002.

Besieged by expectations, demands, and pressures, many children are breaking. It’s our fault.

She writes:

One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.

A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016.

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance…

The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.

This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.

“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life….”

Other books have echoed this critique. I think offhand of the book by Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle: Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. This is how they summarize their argument:

“Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It’s the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed–skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills–yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.”

There is an organization–Defending the Early Years–that fights for the rights of childhood, that tries to keep academic pressures out of the classrooms of very young children.

But who defends the children in grades 1-12? There are groups of parents in almost every state who oppose the pressures of high-stakes testing, oppose the efforts by tech companies to replace actual experiences with machines and technologies, oppose the interference of politicians to standardize teaching.

One group fights off the tech companies that use personal student data to market their products: The Parent Coalition for Studebt Privacy.

Corporate America now looks to the schools as a source of profit. The schools and students need to be protected from rapacious capitalism, which wants to privatize schools for profit and sell products that monetize instruction.

Yang describes the transformation of the school from the 1980s to the present:

School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.

But as the country’s economy shifted from factories and farms to offices, being a student became a more serious matter. The outcome of your life could depend on it.

During an era of global competition, the country’s leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called “A Nation at Risk.” It warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states’ schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings.

The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush’s signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.

With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.

The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind.

The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.

The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age.

With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade.

Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.

“We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being.

The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.

I think about my own time in the public elementary public schools in Houston. We had recess every day. I don’t think it was a matter of state law. Educators then knew that children needed time to play. It was common sense. Today, parent groups organize to persuade legislatures to mandate recess. If they don’t, parents fear, every minute will be spent preparing for tests and taking tests.

They are right. The so-called “reforms” of the past quarter century–No Child Left Behind, high-stakes testing, competition, Race to the Top, punishing or rewarding teachers for their students’ test scores, closing schools and firing staff because of low test scores, the Common Core standards–have made test scores and standardization the heart of schooling.

In a continuing campaign to raise test scores, there are winners and losers. Typically, the winners are children from affluent families, and the losers are the children of not-affluent families. The winners are celebrated, the losers are stigmatized. The social class divide among children is hardened by these practices.

Worse, the pressure on students has caused an increase in anxiety, depression, and boredom. In response, parents seek diagnoses of autism or some other learning disorder so that their children will get more time or attention.

Some parents blame the public schools for the pressure and competition imposed on them by elected officials. They seek alternatives to the public schools, which are obsessed with standardization, testing, and accountability.

Yang points out:

This discontent helps empower the conservative effort to defund the public school system and let parents pick their own schools, with taxpayers covering the tuition. Each child who no longer seems to fit into the country’s education system — and more often than not they are boys — potentially expands the constituency for these ideas. And trust erodes further in the progressive project of a democracy built on giving everyone a free and equal education.

The Democratic Party is unable or unwilling to see the problems they helped create. The Republican Party is quite happy to see the public search for alternatives like charter schools and vouchers, and it has enabled the movement to have taxpayers foot the bill for private and religious schools.

By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups.

Who made that world? Both political parties. Governors. Legislatures. Think tanks. The wealthiest, who believe their financial success proves their superiority. Editorial boards.

Here is the most significant lesson that our elected officials refuse to learn. Their elaborate schemes for testing and measuring children have hurt children and undermined the joy of learning. They have raised the anxiety level of children while corrupting education itself.

Education is not what gets measured on standardized tests. Education is exploration, investigation, insight, observation, wanting to know more, learning to love learning.

Our politicians, prodded by so-called “reformers,” have managed to pollute education while demoralizing teachers and destroying public commitment to public schools.

Our public schools need to be freed from the failed ideas that hurt children. We need a rebirth of sturdy ideas that

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Education Industry, Education Reform, Extremism, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Joy, Standardized Testing, Students

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