syndication – Page 5

EPA plans to ignore science, stop regulating greenhouse gases

clean air act, CO2, EPA, greenhouse gases, Policy, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / July 30, 2025

It derives from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that named greenhouse gases as “air pollutants,” giving the EPA the mandate to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.

Critics of the rule say that the Clean Air Act was fashioned to manage localized emissions, not those responsible for global climate change.

A rollback would automatically weaken the greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and heavy-duty vehicles. Manufacturers such as Daimler and Volvo Cars have previously opposed the EPA’s efforts to tighten emission standards, while organized labour groups such as the American Trucking Association said they “put the trucking industry on a path to economic ruin.”

However, Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All Campaign, said that the ruling would be “disastrous for curbing toxic truck pollution, especially in frontline communities disproportionately burdened by diesel exhaust.”

Energy experts said the move could also stall progress on developing clean energy sources such as nuclear power.

“Bipartisan support for nuclear largely rests on the fact that it doesn’t have carbon emissions,” said Ken Irvin, a partner in Sidley Austin’s global energy and infrastructure practice. “If carbon stops being considered to endanger human welfare, that might take away momentum from nuclear.”

The proposed rule from the EPA will go through a public comment period and inter-agency review. It is likely to face legal challenges from environmental activists.

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Trump promised a drilling boom, but US energy industry hasn’t been interested

Energy, fossil fuels, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / July 29, 2025

Exec: “Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

“The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.

That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.

The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.

There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office January 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.

The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.

That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.

Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”

Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.

“They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”

Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April-June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.

These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.

The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent, and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.

“Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”

Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.

Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.

“Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”

In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.

It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry.

What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.

However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”

A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.

Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Fermented meat with a side of maggots: A new look at the Neanderthal diet

anthropology, Neanderthals, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / July 28, 2025

Traditionally, Indigenous peoples almost universally viewed thoroughly putrefied, maggot-infested animal foods as highly desirable fare, not starvation rations. In fact, many such peoples routinely and often intentionally allowed animal foods to decompose to the point where they were crawling with maggots, in some cases even beginning to liquefy.

This rotting food would inevitably emit a stench so overpowering that early European explorers, fur trappers, and missionaries were sickened by it. Yet Indigenous peoples viewed such foods as good to eat, even a delicacy. When asked how they could tolerate the nauseating stench, they simply responded, “We don’t eat the smell.”

Neanderthals’ cultural practices, similar to those of Indigenous peoples, might be the answer to the mystery of their high δ¹⁵N values. Ancient hominins were butchering, storing, preserving, cooking, and cultivating a variety of items. All these practices enriched their paleo menu with foods in forms that nonhominin carnivores do not consume. Research shows that δ¹⁵N values are higher for cooked foods, putrid muscle tissue from terrestrial and aquatic species, and, with our study, for fly larvae feeding on decaying tissue.

The high δ¹⁵N values of maggots associated with putrid animal foods help explain how Neanderthals could have included plenty of other nutritious foods beyond only meat while still registering δ¹⁵N values we’re used to seeing in hypercarnivores.

We suspect the high δ¹⁵N values seen in Neanderthals reflect routine consumption of fatty animal tissues and fermented stomach contents, much of it in a semi-putrid or putrid state, together with the inevitable bonus of both living and dead ¹⁵N-enriched maggots.

What still isn’t known

Fly larvae are a fat-rich, nutrient-dense, ubiquitous, and easily procured insect resource, and both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, much like recent foragers, would have benefited from taking full advantage of them. But we cannot say that maggots alone explain why Neanderthals have such high δ¹⁵N values in their remains.

Several questions about this ancient diet remain unanswered. How many maggots would someone need to consume to account for an increase in δ¹⁵N values above the expected values due to meat eating alone? How do the nutritional benefits of consuming maggots change the longer a food item is stored? More experimental studies on changes in δ¹⁵N values of foods processed, stored, and cooked following Indigenous traditional practices can help us better understand the dietary practices of our ancient relatives.

Melanie Beasley is assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Microsoft to stop using China-based teams to support Department of Defense

china, Department of Defense, microsoft, Security, syndication / DJ Henderson / July 26, 2025

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.

But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.

This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the US government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.

Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by US-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.

“With so much data stored in cloud services—and the power of AI to analyze it quickly—even unclassified data can reveal insights that could harm US interests,” he said.

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Inventor claims bleach injections will destroy cancer tumors

bleach, health, quackery, syndication / Beth Washington / July 25, 2025

A lack of medical training isn’t stopping a man from charging $20,000 for the treatment.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Xuewu Liu, a Chinese inventor who has no medical training or credentials of any kind, is charging cancer patients $20,000 for access to an AI-driven but entirely unproven treatment that includes injecting a highly concentrated dose of chlorine dioxide, a toxic bleach solution, directly into cancerous tumors.

One patient tells WIRED her tumor has grown faster since the procedure and that she suspects it may have caused her cancer to spread—a claim Liu disputes—while experts allege his marketing of the treatment has likely put him on the wrong side of US regulations. Nonetheless, while Liu currently only offers the treatment informally in China and at a German clinic, he is now working with a Texas-based former pharmaceutical executive to bring his treatment to America. They believe that the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US health secretary will help “open doors” to get the untested treatment—in which at least one clinic in California appears to have interest—approved in the US.

Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is embracing alternative medicines and the idea of giving patients the freedom to try unproven treatments. While the health secretary did not respond to a request for comment about Liu’s treatment, he did mention chlorine dioxide when questioned about President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed during his Senate confirmation hearing in February, and the Food and Drug Administration recently removed a warning about the substance from its website. The agency says the removal was part of a routine process of archiving old pages on its site, but it has had the effect of emboldening the bleacher community.

“Without the FDA’s heavy-handed warnings, it’s likely my therapy would have been accepted for trials years earlier, with institutional partnerships and investor support,” Liu tells WIRED. He says he wrote to Kennedy earlier this year urging him to conduct more research on chlorine dioxide. “This quiet removal won’t immediately change everything, but it opens a door. If mainstream media reports on this shift, I believe it will unlock a new wave of serious [chlorine dioxide] research.”

For decades, pseudoscience grifters have peddled chlorine dioxide solutions—sold under a variety of names, such as Miracle Mineral Solution—and despite warnings and prosecutions have continued to claim the toxic substance is a “cure” for everything from HIV to COVID-19 to autism. There is no credible evidence to back up any of these claims, which critics have long labeled as nothing more than a grift.

The treatments typically involve drinking liquid chlorine dioxide on a regular basis, using solutions with concentrations of chlorine dioxide of around 3,000 parts per million (ppm), which is diluted further in water.

Liu’s treatment, however, involves a much higher concentration of chlorine dioxide—injections of several millilitres of 20,000 ppm—and, rather than drinking it, patients have it injected directly into their tumors.

I injected myself to test it

Liu claims he has injected himself with the solution more than 50 times and suffered no side effects. “This personal data point encouraged me to continue research,” he says.

Liu has been making the solution in his rented apartment in Beijing by mixing citric acid with sodium chlorite, according to an account he shared earlier this month on his Substack that revealed that a “violent explosion” occurred when he made a mistake.

“The blast blacked out my vision,” Liu wrote. “Dense clouds of chlorine dioxide burst into my face, filling my eyes, nose, and mouth. I stumbled back into the apartment, rushing to the bathroom to wash out the gas from my eyes and respiratory tract. My lungs were burning. Later, I would find 4–5 cuts on my upper thigh—shards of glass had pierced through my pants.” Liu also revealed that his 3-year-old daughter was nearby when the explosion happened.

Liu began a preclinical study on animals in 2016, before beginning to use the highly concentrated solution to treat human patients in more recent years. He claims that between China and Germany, he has treated 20 patients to date.

When asked for evidence to back up his claims of efficacy, Liu shared links to a number of preprints, which have not been peer-reviewed, with WIRED. He also shared a pitch deck for a $5 million seed round in a US-focused startup that would provide the chlorine dioxide injections.

The presentation contains a number of “case studies” of patients he has treated—including a dog—but rather than featuring detailed scientific data, the deck contains disturbing images of the patients’ tumors. The deck also contains, as evidence of the treatment’s efficacy, a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation with a patient who was apparently treating a liver tumor with chlorine dioxide.

“Screenshots of WhatsApp chats with patients or their doctors is not evidence of efficacy, yet that is the only evidence he provides,” says Alex Morozov, an oncologist who has overseen hundreds of drug trials at multiple companies including Pfizer. “Needless to say, until appropriate studies are done and published in peer-reviewed journals, or presented at a reputable conference, no patients should be treated except in the context of clinical trials.”

WIRED spoke to a patient of Liu’s, whose descriptions of the treatment appear to undermine his claims of efficacy and raise serious questions about its safety.

“I bought the needles online and made the chlorine dioxide by myself [then] I injected it into the tumor and lymph nodes by myself,” says the patient, a Chinese national living in the UK. WIRED granted her anonymity to protect her privacy.

The patient had previously been taking oral solutions of chlorine dioxide as an alternative treatment for cancer, but, unsatisfied with the results, she contacted Liu via WhatsApp. On a spring evening last year, she took her first injection of chlorine dioxide and, she says, almost immediately suffered negative side effects.

“It was fine after the injection, but I was woken up by severe pain [like] I had never experienced in my life,” she says. “The pain lasted for three to four days.”

Despite the pain, she says, she injected herself again two months later, and a month after that she traveled to China, where Liu, despite having no medical training, injected her, using an anesthetic cream to numb the skin.

“While this act technically fell outside legal boundaries, in China, if the patient is competent and gives informed consent, such compassionate-use interventions rarely attract regulatory attention unless harm is done,” Liu tells WIRED.

Legal in China?

Experts on Chinese medical regulations tell WIRED that new treatments like Liu’s would have to meet strict conditions before they can be administered to patients. “It would have to go through the same steps in China as it does in the US, so that will involve clinical studies, getting ethics approval at the hospitals, and then the situation would have to be reviewed by the Chinese government,” Ames Gross, founder and president of Pacific Bridge Capital, tells WIRED. “I don’t think any of it sounds very legal.” The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which handles all international press inquiries, did not respond to a request for comment.

As well as the initial pain, the chlorine dioxide injections also appear, the patient says, to have made the cancer worse.

“The tumor shrinks first, then it grows faster than before,” she says, adding: “My tumor has spread to the skin after injection. I suspect it is because the chlorine dioxide has broken the vein and the cancer cells go to the skin area.”

Liu did not agree with this assessment, instead blaming the fact that the patient had not completed the full course of four injections within a month, as he typically prescribes.

The patient says that thanks to a WeChat group that Liu set up, she is also in contact with other people who have had chlorine dioxide injections. One of the women, who is based in Shenzhen, China, had at least one injection of chlorine dioxide to treat what was described as vaginal cancer, but she says she is also suffering complications, according to screenshots of conversations reviewed by WIRED.

“After the injection, there was swelling and difficulty urinating,” the Chinese woman wrote. “It was very uncomfortable.”

Despite having injected a patient in China last August, Liu tells WIRED, he is not a licensed physician—he calls himself “an independent inventor and medical researcher.” The treatment, which he says is “designed to be administered by licensed physicians in clinical settings,” is so painful that it needs to be given under general anesthetic.

While Liu’s website says the treatment is being offered at clinics in Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines, he tells WIRED that the treatment is currently only being offered at the CMC Rheinfelden clinic on the German-Swiss border. Liu features Dr. Wolfgang Renz from the clinic on his own website as one of his partners; the clinic itself does not advertise the treatment on its own website.

In conversations on WhatsApp shared with WIRED, a representative of the clinic named Lena told a prospective patient that it didn’t advertise the chlorine dioxide procedure because it was “not a legal treatment.” Lena later wrote that chlorine dioxide was not referenced on an invoice the clinic sent the same prospective patient because it is “not a legal treatment.” Lena also told the prospective patient that they had treated patients from France, Italy, and the US, according to a recording of a phone call shared with WIRED. One Italian woman is currently trying to raise money to fund her treatment in the German clinic on GoFundMe.

When asked about her comments, Lena told WIRED, “Either [the patient] misquoted me or my English was not very accurate. I repeatedly told [the patient] that it is not an approved therapy and therefore requires very detailed consent and special circumstances to be eligible for this treatment.” The prospective patient was told that she would need to bring documents detailing her prior treatment.

Renz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lena also says that patients who have exhausted every other possible treatment have “the right to be treated with non-approved interventions under strict ethical conditions, full medical supervision, and informed patient consent.” The Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, which regulates medical products in Germany, did not respond to a request for comment, but Liu tells WIRED that German authorities are investigating a complaint about the clinic.

Expanding across the Pacific

Liu now appears laser-focused on making his treatment available in the US. Despite the lack of clinical data to back up his claims, Liu claims to have signed up over 100 US patients to take part in a proposed clinical research program. Liu shared a screenshot with WIRED including what appeared to be patients’ full names, zip codes, and the type of cancer they are suffering from. It’s unclear if any of the patients had agreed to have their information shared with a journalist.

Liu says he has recruited most of his potential patients via his own website. “Are You a U.S. Cancer Patient? Join the National Campaign to legalize a breakthrough therapy,” a popup that sometimes appears on Liu’s website reads, urging visitors to fill out a patient advocacy application to potentially become part of a clinical trial.

One of those who signed up is Sarah Jones, who has been diagnosed with stage 4 anal cancer that has metastasized to the lymph nodes. Jones, whose identity WIRED is protecting with a pseudonym, has already been treated with chemotherapy and drugs like cisplatin and paclitaxel. The chemotherapy originally caused the tumor to shrink, but it has since returned, and Jones is now seeking alternative treatments.

“I spend my days treating this disease like a job. Red light therapy, guided meditations, exercising, eating a keto-strong diet, and researching,” Jones tells WIRED. “This is how I stumbled upon Liu and his intratumoral injections.”

Despite signing up for a potential trial, Jones understands the risks but feels as if she is running out of choices. “I am extremely concerned that there are but a handful of patients and no data to speak of for this procedure,” Jones says. “I am debating all of my options and am constantly looking for anything that can help.”

This sentiment was echoed by Kevin, whose father has neck cancer and who also signed up as a potential patient for the trial. “If you’re in any cancer patient’s shoes, if you’re out of options, what else do you have to do? You either keep trying new therapies, or you die.”

Another US-based patient with untreated colon cancer who signed up on Liu’s website was informed that they should consider traveling to Germany for treatment, according to a screenshot of an email response from Liu, shared with WIRED. The email outlined that the cost would be €5,000 per injection, adding that “typically 4 injections [are] recommended.”

When the conversation moved to WhatsApp, Liu asked the patient what size the tumor was. The patient, who was granted anonymity to protect their privacy, told Liu the tumor was 3.8 centimeters, according to a screenshot of the WhatsApp conversation reviewed by WIRED.

Liu responded with inaccurate details and information that the patient did not share. Liu also referred to a rectal tumor rather than a colon tumor.

When the patient said they didn’t have the money to travel to Europe for the treatment and asked about getting it in the US, referencing the Williams Cancer Institute in Beverly Hills, California, Liu suggested contacting the clinic directly.

The clinic has indicated its interest in Liu’s unproven procedure by writing about Liu’s chlorine dioxide injection protocol on its own website and mentioned it on a post on its Facebook page. Liu tells WIRED that he has spoken to Jason Williams, director of the clinic. “He is very interested and is a pioneer in the field of intratumoral injections,” Liu says. “His clinic is fully capable of implementing my therapy.”

Neither Williams nor his colleague Nathan Goodyear, who Liu also says he spoke to, responded to repeated emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Liu also gave WIRED the names of a radiologist in California, an anesthesiologist in Seattle, and a physician in Missouri who he claims to have spoken to about providing his treatment in the US, but none of them responded to requests for comment.

The Chinese inventor did, however, appear on a livestream with two US-based doctors, Curtis Anderson, a Florida-based physician, and Mark Rosenberg, who works at the Institute for Healthy Aging. The discussion, hosted on Liu’s YouTube channel, saw the two doctors ask about which cancers to treat with the injections, how to buy chlorine dioxide, or even whether it’s possible to make it themselves.

Rosenberg and Anderson did not respond to requests for comment.

Maybe RFK Jr. will dig it?

Conducting a clinical trial of a new drug in the US requires approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Liu initially claimed to WIRED that “according to Article 37 of the Declaration of Helsinki and the US Right to Try laws, my therapy is already legally permissible in the United States.” Legal experts WIRED spoke to disagree strongly with Liu’s assertions.

“It sounds like Mr. Liu may not understand how the Right to Try Act or the Declaration of Helsinki work or how they fit within the broader context in which the FDA regulates investigational drugs,” Clint Hermes, an attorney with Bass, Berry & Sims, with extensive expertise in biomedical research, tells WIRED. “If he is under the impression that the ‘breast cancer trial’ referenced on his website is sufficient on its own to allow him to market or study his therapy in the US under right to try and/or the Declaration of Helsinki, he is mistaken.”

Even advertising the efficacy of an unproven treatment could land Liu in trouble, according to the American Health Law Association (AHLA).

“Companies cannot make claims regarding safety or efficacy until their products have been approved for marketing by the FDA,” Mary Kohler, a member of the AHLA’s Life Science leadership team, tells WIRED. “From a quick glance at the website, I see several claims that FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) would likely consider violative as pre-approval promotion even if this company were in trials that FDA was overseeing.”

The FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

When asked about these issues, Liu clarified that he was planning to initially conduct a 100-person “clinical research program” that would not require FDA approval, but Liu’s treatment doesn’t appear to meet any of the most common exemptions that would allow such a trial to take place, according to the FDA’s own website.

Liu also says he is working with “patient advocates” and leveraging their local connections to lobby state lawmakers in “liberty-leaning states” to allow the experimental treatment to be administered. This would appear to circumvent federal rules. Liu says that he has yet to make contact with such a lawmaker directly.

While he has no approval from US government agencies or support of a state or national lawmaker, Liu does have the full backing of Scott Hagerman, an entrepreneur and former executive with 30 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry, including a decade working at Pfizer.

“It’s an unbelievable breakthrough,” Hagerman tells WIRED, adding that he and his wife have been using oral chlorine dioxide solution “for some time” as a preventative measure rather than to treat a specific ailment.

Hagerman’s time in the pharmaceutical industry included over a decade running a company called Chemi Nutra, which has in the past received a US patent for a soy-based supplement that addresses testosterone decline in men. He also says he oversaw teams of scientists who worked on drug applications to the FDA for oncology drugs.

Hagerman retired from Chemi Nutra in 2021, and in the intervening years his comments indicate that he appears to have become entirely disillusioned with the modern pharmaceutical industry, referring to it as a “drugs cartel” and “a corrupt entity that is only profit-driven.” One of the issues Hagerman references is the COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA technology, which he describes as a “con job” while also boosting the debunked theory that childhood vaccines are linked to increasing levels of autism reported in the population.

As a result, he sees Liu’s lack of experience as a positive.

“I would welcome the fact that he’s not a doctor, that he’s not an MD, because he’s not clouded, jaded, and biased with all kinds of misguidance that would push them the wrong way,” Hagerman says, adding, “I’d like to help him establish some network here in the US, because obviously the US is where the action is.” Hagerman says he is “100 percent sure” that there would be investors willing to fund the development of this treatment.

When asked about a timeline to have this procedure legally available in the US, Hagerman said he hopes it could be achieved before the end of 2025. Liu, however, thinks it could take slightly longer, saying that he believes clinical trials will begin in 2026.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Inventor claims bleach injections will destroy cancer tumors Read More »

Trump wants to “eliminate or expedite” environmental rules for rocket launches

commercial launches, elon musk, fee, NASA, Space, spacex, syndication / 9u50fv / July 22, 2025

Who cares about environmental impacts?

SpaceX, other commercial launch firms, have been seeking this change in policy.

In the background, a Falcon 9 rocket climbs away from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Another Falcon 9 stands on its launch pad at neighboring Kennedy Space Center awaiting its opportunity to fly.

The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought.

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites—known as spaceports—along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

The White House did not answer questions about the draft order.

“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s dominance in space without compromising public safety or national security,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Unless announced by President Trump, however, discussion about any potential policy changes should be deemed speculation.”

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

The draft order comes as SpaceX is ramping up its ambitious project to build a reusable deep-space rocket to carry people to Earth’s orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The rocket, called Starship, is the largest, most powerful ever built, standing 403 feet tall with its booster. The company has hit some milestones but has also been beset by problems, as three of the rockets launched from Texas this year have exploded—disrupting air traffic and raining debris on beaches and roads in the Caribbean and Gulf waters.

The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

Derek Brockbank, executive director for the Coastal States Organization, said the proposed executive order could ultimately force state commissions to prioritize spaceport infrastructure over other land uses, such as renewable energy, waterfront development, or coastal restoration, along the coastline. His nonprofit represents 34 coastal states and territories.

“It’s concerning that it could potentially undermine the rights of a state to determine how it wants its coast used, which was the very fundamental premise of the congressionally authorized Coastal Zone Management Act,” he said. “We shouldn’t see any president, no matter what their party is, coming in and saying, ‘This is what a state should prioritize or should do.’”

SpaceX is already suing the California Coastal Commission, accusing the agency of political bias and interference with the company’s efforts to increase the number of Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The reusable Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, ferrying satellites to orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the US. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the US is racing with China to return to the moon—in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars—and could lose if regulations don’t allow US companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

Cavossa said he sees “some sort of environmental review process” continuing to take place. “What we’re talking about doing is right-sizing it,” he said.

He added, “We can’t handle a yearlong delay for launch licenses.”

The former head of the FAA’s commercial space office said at a Congressional hearing last September that the office took an average of 151 days to issue a new license during the previous 11 years.

Commercial space launches have boomed in recent years—from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year. With more than 500 total launches, mostly from Texas, Florida, and California, SpaceX has been responsible for the lion’s share, according to FAA data.

But the company has tangled with the FAA, which last year proposed fining it $633,000 for violations related to two of its launches. The FAA did not answer a question last week about the status of the proposed fine.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution, and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

In addition to seeking to cut short environmental reviews, the executive order would open the door for the federal government to rescind sections of the federal rule that seeks to keep the public safe during launches and reentries.

The rule, referred to as Part 450, was approved during Trump’s first term and aimed to streamline commercial space regulations and speed approvals of launches. But the rule soon fell out of favor with launch companies, which said the FAA didn’t provide enough guidance on how to comply and was taking too long to review applications.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” He called for the resignation of the head of the FAA, who stepped down as Trump took office.

Other operators have expressed similar frustration, and some members of Congress have signaled support for an overhaul. In February, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., signed a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to review the process for approving commercial launches and reentries.

In their letter, Babin and Lofgren wrote they wanted to understand whether the rules are “effectively and efficiently accommodating United States commercial launch and reentry operations, especially as the cadence and technological diversity of such operations continues to increase.

The draft executive order directs the secretary of transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” sections of Part 450 to “enable a diversified set of operators to achieve an increase in commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by an order of magnitude by 2030.”

The order also directs the Department of Commerce to streamline regulation of novel space activity, which experts say could include things like mining or making repairs in space, that doesn’t fall under other regulations.

Brandon Roberts and Pratheek Rebala contributed data analysis.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Trump wants to “eliminate or expedite” environmental rules for rocket launches Read More »

Win for chemical industry as EPA shutters scientific research office

EPA, Office of Research and Development, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / July 22, 2025

Deregulation runs rampant

Companies feared rules and lawsuits based on Office of Research and Development assessments.

Soon after President Donald Trump took office in January, a wide array of petrochemical, mining, and farm industry coalitions ramped up what has been a long campaign to limit use of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assessments of the health risks of chemicals.

That effort scored a significant victory Friday when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced his decision to dismantle the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The industry lobbyists didn’t ask for hundreds of ORD staff members to be laid off or reassigned. But the elimination of the agency’s scientific research arm goes a long way toward achieving the goal they sought.

In a January 27 letter to Zeldin organized by the American Chemistry Council, more than 80 industry groups—including leading oil, refining, and mining associations—asked him to end regulators’ reliance on ORD assessments of the risks that chemicals pose for human health. The future of that research, conducted under EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System program, or IRIS, is now uncertain.

“EPA’s IRIS program within ORD has a troubling history of being out of step with the best available science and methods, lacking transparency, and being unresponsive to peer review and stakeholder recommendations,” said an American Chemistry Council spokesperson in an email when asked about the decision to eliminate ORD. “This results in IRIS assessments that jeopardize access to critical chemistries, undercut national priorities, and harm American competitiveness.”

The spokesperson said the organization supports EPA evaluating its resources to ensure tax dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.

Christopher Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who served as EPA assistant administrator in charge of ORD during the Biden administration, defended the quality of the science done by the office, which he said is “the poster case study of what it means to do science that’s subject to intense scrutiny.”

“There’s industry with a tremendous vested interest in the policy decisions that might occur later on,” based on the assessments made by ORD. “What the industry does is try to engage in a proxy war over the policy by attacking the science.”

Among the IRIS assessments that stirred the most industry concern were those outlining the dangers of formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, arsenic, and hexavalent chromium. Regulatory actions had begun or were looming on all during the Biden administration.

The Biden administration also launched a lawsuit against a LaPlace, Louisiana, plant that had been the only US manufacturer of neoprene, Denka Performance Elastomer, based in part on the IRIS assessment of one of its air pollutants, chloroprene, as a likely human carcinogen. Denka, a spinoff of DuPont, announced it was ceasing production in May because of the cost of pollution controls.

Public health advocates charge that eliminating the IRIS program, or shifting its functions to other offices in the agency, will rob the EPA of the independent expertise to inform its mission of protection.

“They’ve been trying for years to shut down IRIS,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists and lead author of a new study on Trump administration actions that the group says undermine science. “The reason why is because when IRIS conducts its independent scientific assessments using a great amount of rigor… you get stronger regulations, and that is not in the best interest of the big business polluters and those who have a financial stake in the EPA’s demise.”

The UCS report tallied more than 400 firings, funding cuts, and other attacks on science in the first six months of the Trump administration, resulting in 54 percent fewer grants for research on topics including cancer, infectious disease, and environmental health.

EPA’s press office did not respond to a query on whether the IRIS controversy helped inform Zeldin’s decision to eliminate ORD, which had been anticipated since staff were informed of the potential plan at a meeting in March. In the agency’s official announcement Friday afternoon, Zeldin said the elimination of the office was part of “organizational improvements” that would deliver $748.8 million in savings to taxpayers. The reduction in force, combined with previous departures and layoffs, have reduced the agency’s workforce by 23 percent, to 12,448, the EPA said.

With the cuts, the EPA’s workforce will be at its lowest level since fiscal year 1986.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, EPA has taken a close look at our operations to ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback,” Zeldin said in the prepared statement. “This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars.”

The agency will be creating a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions; a report by E&E News said an internal memo indicated the new office would be much smaller than ORD, and would focus on coastal areas, drinking water safety, and methodologies for assessing environmental contamination.

Zeldin’s announcement also said that scientific expertise and research efforts will be moved to “program offices”—for example, those concerned with air pollution, water pollution, or waste—to tackle “statutory obligations and mission essential functions.” That phrase has a particular meaning: The chemical industry has long complained that Congress never passed a law creating IRIS. Congress did, however, pass many laws requiring that the agency carry out its actions based on the best available science, and the IRIS program, established during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, was how the agency has carried out the task of assessing the science on chemicals since 1985.

Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, the union representing 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said the organizational structure of ORD put barriers between the agency’s researchers and the agency’s political decision-making, enforcement, and regulatory teams—even though they all used ORD’s work.

“For them to function properly, they have to have a fair amount of distance away from political interference, in order to let the science guide and develop the kind of things that they do,” Chen said.

“They’re a particular bugbear for a lot of the industries which are heavy donors to the Trump administration and to the right wing,” Chen said. “They’re the ones, I believe, who do all the testing that actually factors into the calculation of risk.”

ORD also was responsible for regularly doing assessments that the Clean Air Act requires on pollutants like ozone and particulate matter, which result from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Frey said a tremendous amount of ORD work has gone into ozone, which is the result of complex interactions of precursor pollutants in the atmosphere. The open source computer modeling on ozone transport, developed by ORD researchers, helps inform decision-makers grappling with how to address smog around the country. The Biden administration finalized stricter standards for particulate matter in its final year based on ORD’s risk assessment, and the Trump administration is now undoing those rules.

Aidan Hughes contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Win for chemical industry as EPA shutters scientific research office Read More »

UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

Apple, apple backdoor, Encryption, Policy, syndication, UK, UK Investigatory Powers Act / DJ Henderson / July 21, 2025

Under the terms of the legislation, recipients of such a notice are unable to discuss the matter publicly, even with customers affected by the order, unless granted permission by the Home Secretary.

The legislation’s use against Apple has triggered the tech industry’s highest-profile battle over encryption technology in almost a decade.

In response to the demand, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service from the UK in February and is now challenging the Home Office’s order at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which probes complaints against the UK’s security services.

Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals.

In the meantime, the Home Office continues to pursue its case with Apple at the tribunal.

Its lawyers discussed the next legal steps this month, reflecting the divisions within government over how best to proceed. “At this point, the government has not backed down,” said one person familiar with the legal process.

A third senior British official added that the UK government was reluctant to push “anything that looks to the US vice-president like a free-speech issue.”

In a combative speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites.

The UK official added, this “limits what we’re able to do in the future, particularly in relation to AI regulation.” The Labour government has delayed plans for AI legislation until after May next year.

Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption.

The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something… that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”

US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.

The UK government did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.

The Home Office has previously said the UK has “robust safeguards and independent oversight to protect privacy” and that these powers “are only used on an exceptional basis, in relation to the most serious crimes.”

UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US Read More »

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds

climate change, drought, Science, southwestern united states, syndication / Shannon Garcia / July 20, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

Currently, the Southwestern US is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the region’s water. That’s led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes, and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds Read More »

RFK Jr. wants to change program that stopped vaccine makers from leaving US market

anti-vaccines, CDC, health, rfk jr, robert f kennedy jr, syndication, vaccines / Mike M. / July 19, 2025

RFK Jr. is targeting a little-known program that underpins childhood immunizations in the US.

US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty | Tasos Katopodis

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nation’s childhood immunization system.

Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.

In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots—without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting “unnecessary and risky vaccines” on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didn’t detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.

There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the US, like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedy’s laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.

Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jersey’s state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.

“If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it,” said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. “I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.”

A spokesperson for PhRMA, a US trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program “would threaten continued patient access to FDA-approved vaccines.”

The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program “has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesn’t shield manufacturers from liability.”

Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the US government’s pledge to fund vaccinations for the world’s poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the US childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record—more cases than the US has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a US senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?”

Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling “the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.” (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)

Just about all drugs have side effects. What’s unusual about vaccines is that they’re given to healthy people—even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.

To most people, the nation’s vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.

There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Today’s version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the US market.

At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.

While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics’ cost per dose jumped 5,000 percent in five years.

“We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases,” recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDC’s immunization division at the time.

A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians, and public health workers: “Scared Shotless.” So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.

Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said he’s looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)

Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines can’t head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines — now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against — flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.

The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they don’t have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they can’t claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.

Plaintiffs who aren’t satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isn’t a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.

Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10 percent cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, “I don’t work on those cases and I’m not receiving any money from them.”

In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The program’s staff levels haven’t kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.

The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs’ attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the program’s intent. Many cases drag on for years.

In his recent interview with Carlson, he described “the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it” working on the cases as corrupt. “They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that,” he said. “And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.”

The system is “supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner,” he told Carlson. “In other words, if there’s doubts about, you know, whether somebody’s injury came from a vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.”

Kennedy didn’t identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, “We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedy’s office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for “Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise” to Downing’s firm, as NOTUS has reported.

Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didn’t reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety.”

While it’s not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedy’s interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the program’s three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders don’t realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until it’s too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.

A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.

In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots don’t cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. “We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said.

The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps, and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didn’t cause autism.

In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the program’s injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy—a type of brain dysfunction—as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps, and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, “The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.”

Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for “some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.”

Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.

Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.

What’s different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say he’d have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.

In addition, Kennedy has made it clear he’s thinking about illnesses beyond autism. “We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits,” he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies, and eczema.

President Donald Trump’s budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While that’s a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the US population.

Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.

“You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program,” he said. “These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.”

If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting what’s on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss said.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill—written in September, before Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary—quoted Kennedy saying, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”

The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again “in the very near future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said it’s hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.

“Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs’ lawyers,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade that’s on fire.”

RFK Jr. wants to change program that stopped vaccine makers from leaving US market Read More »

EU presses pause on probe of X as US trade talks heat up

content moderation, elon musk, EU, Policy, syndication, X, xAI / Kelly Newman / July 17, 2025

While Trump and Musk have fallen out this year after developing a political alliance on the 2024 election, the US president has directly attacked EU penalties on US companies calling them a “form of taxation” and comparing fines on tech companies with “overseas extortion.”

Despite the US pressure, commission president Ursula von der Leyen has explicitly stated Brussels will not change its digital rulebook. In April, the bloc imposed a total of €700 million fines on Apple and Facebook owner Meta for breaching antitrust rules.

But unlike the Apple and Meta investigations, which fall under the Digital Markets Act, there are no clear legal deadlines under the DSA. That gives the bloc more political leeway on when it announces its formal findings. The EU also has probes into Meta and TikTok under its content moderation rulebook.

The commission said the “proceedings against X under the DSA are ongoing,” adding that the enforcement of “our legislation is independent of the current ongoing negotiations.”

It added that it “remains fully committed to the effective enforcement of digital legislation, including the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.”

Anna Cavazzini, a European lawmaker for the Greens, said she expected the commission “to move on decisively with its investigation against X as soon as possible.”

“The commission must continue making changes to EU regulations an absolute red line in tariff negotiations with the US,” she added.

Alongside Brussels’ probe into X’s transparency breaches, it is also looking into content moderation at the company after Musk hosted Alice Weidel of the far-right Alternative for Germany for a conversation on the social media platform ahead of the country’s elections.

Some European lawmakers, as well as the Polish government, are also pressing the commission to open an investigation into Musk’s Grok chatbot after it spewed out antisemitic tropes last week.

X said it disagreed “with the commission’s assessment of the comprehensive work we have done to comply with the Digital Services Act and the commission’s interpretation of the Act’s scope.”

EU presses pause on probe of X as US trade talks heat up Read More »

Rough road to “energy dominance” after GOP kneecaps wind and solar

clean energy, fossil fuels, Science, solar, syndication / Kelly Newman / July 16, 2025

Experts argue that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase costs for consumers.

As the One Big Beautiful Bill Act squeaked its way through Congress earlier this month, its supporters heralded what they described as a new era for American energy and echoed what has become a familiar phrase among President Donald Trump’s supporters.

“Congress has taken decisive action to advance President Trump’s energy dominance agenda,” said American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers in a statement after the House passed the bill.

Republicans concurred, with legislators ranging from Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, to Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky releasing statements after the bill’s passage championing its role in securing “energy dominance.”

The idea and rhetoric of energy dominance has its roots in the first Trump administration, although a formal definition for the phrase is hard to come by. When Trump signed an executive order this February establishing the National Energy Dominance Council, he included expanding energy production, lowering prices and reducing reliance on foreign entities among the council’s goals, while also emphasizing the importance of oil production and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

The phrase has become something of a battle cry among the president’s supporters, with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin writing in the Washington Examiner on July 8 that “Trump is securing America’s energy future in a modern-day version of how our Founding Fathers secured our freedom.”

“Through American energy dominance, we’re not just powering homes and businesses,” Zeldin said. “We’re Powering the Great American Comeback.”

But despite claims from Republican officials and the fossil fuel industry that the megabill will help secure energy dominance, some experts worry that the legislation’s cuts to wind and solar actually undermine those goals at a time when electricity demand is rising, limiting America’s ability to add new generation capacity, raising prices for consumers and ceding global leadership in the clean energy transition.

Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at the climate policy think tank Energy Innovation, said the bill will increase domestic production of oil and gas by increasing lease sales for drilling—mostly in the Gulf of Mexico, onshore and in Alaska, O’Brien said.

A January study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute reported that a legislatively directed offshore oil and natural gas leasing program, which API says is similar to the measures included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act months later, would increase oil and natural gas production by 140,000 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day by 2034.

That number would rise to 510,000 BOE per day by 2040, the study says.

Losses likely to outweigh the gains

However, O’Brien said the gains America can expect from the fossil fuel industry pale in comparison to losses from renewable energy.

Energy Innovation’s analysis projects that less than 20 gigawatts of additional generation capacity from fossil fuels can be expected by 2035 as a result of the bill, compared to a decrease of more than 360 gigawatts in additional capacity from renewable energy.

The difference between those numbers—a decrease of 344 gigawatts—is roughly equivalent to the energy use of about 100 million homes, O’Brien said.

According to O’Brien, if the One Big Beautiful Bill had not been passed, the US could have expected to add around 1,000 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity in the next 10 years.

But as a result of the bill, “around a third of that will be lost,” O’Brien said.

Those losses largely stem from the bill’s rollback of incentives for wind and solar projects.

“Solar and wind are subject to different—and harsher—treatment under the OBBB than other technologies,” according to the law firm Latham & Watkins. Tax credits for those projects are now set to phase out on a significantly faster timeline, rolling back some of the commitments promised under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Lucero Marquez, the associate director for federal climate policy at the Center for American Progress, said that removing those incentives undercuts America’s ability to achieve its energy needs.

“America needs affordable, reliable, and domestically produced energy, which wind and solar does,” Marquez said. “Gutting clean energy incentives really just does not help meet those goals.”

New projects will also be subject to rules “primarily intended to prevent Chinese companies from claiming the tax credits and to reduce reliance on China for supply chains of clean energy technologies,” the Bipartisan Policy Center wrote in an explainer.

However, those rules are “extremely complex” and could lead to “decreased U.S. manufacturing and increased Chinese dominance in these supply chains, contrary to their goal,” according to the think tank.

Surging energy prices

O’Brien said Energy Innovation’s modeling suggests that the loss in additional generation capacity from renewable energies will lead existing power plants, which are more expensive to run than new renewable energy projects would have been, to run more frequently to offset the lack of generation from wind and solar projects not coming online.

The consequences of that, according to O’Brien, are that energy prices will rise, which also means the amount of energy produced will go down in response to decreased demand for the more expensive supply.

An analysis by the REPEAT Project from the Princeton ZERO Lab and Evolved Energy Research similarly predicted increased energy prices for consumers as a result of the bill.

According to that analysis, average household energy costs will increase by over $280 per year by 2035, a more than 13 percent hike.

One of the authors of that analysis, Princeton University professor Jesse D. Jenkins, did not respond to interview requests for this article but previously wrote in an email to Inside Climate News that Republicans’ claims about securing energy dominance through the bill “don’t hold up.”

In an emailed statement responding to questions about those analyses and how their findings align with the administration’s goals of attaining energy dominance, White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers wrote that “since Day One, President Trump has taken decisive steps to unleash American energy, which has driven oil production and reduced the cost of energy.”

“The One, Big, Beautiful Bill will turbocharge energy production by streamlining operations for maximum efficiency and expanding domestic production capacity,” Rogers wrote, “which will deliver further relief to American families and businesses.”

In an emailed statement, Rep. Guthrie said that the bill “takes critical steps toward both securing our energy infrastructure and bringing more dispatchable power online.”

“Specifically, the bill does this by repairing and beginning to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that was drained during the Biden-Harris Administration, and through the creation of the Energy Dominance Financing program to support new investments that unleash affordable and reliable energy,” the Energy and Commerce chairman wrote.

Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, also said that the bill “advances the administration’s stated goal of energy dominance,” but added that it does so “primarily in sunsetting, last-generation technologies, while ceding the renewable energy future to others.”

“It wants lower energy costs at home and more U.S. energy exports abroad—for both economic and strategic reasons … the OBBB delivers on that agenda,” Hendrix said.

Still, Hendrix added that “the United States that emerges from all this may be a bigger player in a declining sector—fossil fuels—and a massively diminished player in a rapidly growing one: renewable energy.”

“It will help promote the Trump administration’s ambitions of fossil dominance (or at least influence) but on pain of helping build a renewable energy sector for the future,” Hendrix wrote. “That is net-negative globally (and locally) from a holistic perspective.”

Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argued that he sees a lot in the bill “that is going to move us in the opposite direction from energy dominance.”

“They should have named this bill the ‘Energy Inflation Act,’ because what it’s going to mean is less energy generated and higher costs for households and for businesses, and particularly manufacturing businesses,” Hersh said.

Hersh also said that even if the bill does lead to increased exports of US-produced energy, that would have a direct negative impact on costs for consumers at home.

“That’s only going to increase domestic prices for energy, and this has long been known and why past administrations have been reluctant to expand exports of LNG,” Hersh said. “That increased demand for the products and competition for the resources will mean higher energy prices for U.S. consumers and businesses.”

“Pushing against energy dominance”

Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the lobbying firm Bracewell LLP, said that although the bill creates important opportunities for things such as oil and gas leasing and the expansion of geothermal and hydrogen energy, the bill’s supporters “undercut themselves” by limiting opportunities for growth in wind and solar.

“The Biden folks tried to lean heavily onto the energy transition because they wanted to limit emissions,” Maisano said. “They wanted to push oil and gas out and push renewables in.”

Now, “these guys are doing the opposite, which is to push oil and gas and limit wind and solar,” Maisano said. “Neither of those strategies are good strategies. You need to have a combination of all these strategies and all these generation sources, especially on the electricity side, to make it work and to meet the challenges that we face.”

Samantha Gross, director of the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative, said that while she isn’t concerned about whether the US will build enough electricity generation to meet the needs of massive consumers like data centers and AI, she is worried that the bill pushes the next generation of that growth further towards fossil fuels.

“I don’t think energy dominance—not just right this instant, but going forward—is just in fossil fuels,” Gross said.

Even beyond the One Big Beautiful Bill, Gross said that many of the administration’s actions run counter to their stated objectives on energy.

“You hear all this talk about energy dominance, but for me it’s just a phrase, because a lot of things that the administration is actually doing are pushing against energy dominance,” Gross said.

“If you think about the tariff policy, for instance, ‘drill, baby, drill’ and a 50 percent tariff on pipeline steel do not go together. Those are pulling in completely opposite directions.”

Aside from domestic energy needs, Gross also worried that the pullback from renewable energy will harm America’s position on the global stage.

“It’s pretty clear which way the world is going,” Gross said. “I worry that we’re giving up … I don’t like the term ‘energy dominance,’ but future leadership in the world’s energy supply by pulling back from those.”

“We’re sort of ceding those technologies to China in a way that is very frustrating to me.”

Yet even in the wake of the bill’s passage, some experts see hope for the future of renewable energy in the US.

Kevin Book, managing director at the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, said that the bill “sets up a slower, shallower transition” toward renewable energy. However, he added that he doesn’t think it represents the end of that transition.

“Most of the capacity we’re adding to our grid in America these days is renewable, and it’s not simply because of federal incentives,” Book said. “So if you take away those federal incentives, there were still economic drivers.”

Still, Book said that the final impacts of the Trump administration’s actions on renewable energy are yet to be seen.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is not the end of the story,” Book said. “There’s more coming, either regulatorily and/or legislatively.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Rough road to “energy dominance” after GOP kneecaps wind and solar Read More »