The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as "unethical," because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.

"In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles," the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality.

The trial has drawn widespread condemnation from health experts since notice of the US funding was published in the Federal Register in December. The notice revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—had awarded $1.6 million to Danish researchers for their non-competitive, unsolicited proposal to conduct the trial.

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Vinay Prasad, the Trump administration's top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, single-handedly decided to refuse to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine, overruling agency scientists, according to reports from Stat News and The Wall Street Journal.

Stat was first to report, based on unnamed FDA sources, that a team of career scientists at the agency was ready to review the vaccine and that David Kaslow, a top career official who reviews vaccines, even wrote a memo objecting to Prasad’s rejection. The memo reportedly included a detailed explanation of why the review should proceed.

The Wall Street Journal confirmed the report with its own sources, who added that FDA scientists attended an hourlong meeting with Prasad in early January, in which they laid out their objections to Prasad's plans to block the vaccine review. They reportedly told Prasad—a political appointee known for causing turmoil and espousing anti-vaccine rhetoric—that it was the wrong approach.

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It's been about a month since Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—an anti-vaccine activist and lawyer who has no background in medicine, health, or science—released dietary guidance for Americans. It's going about as well as expected for a man who drinks raw milk, peddles beef tallow, swims in sewage-tainted water, and keeps roadkill meat in his freezer. That is to say, it's going badly—so badly that even his favorite AI chatbot is openly defecting.

Of course, this hasn't slowed Kennedy. On Wednesday, he and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins held an event in Washington, DC, to celebrate what they called the "implementation" of the dietary guidance, which is represented in an upside-down food pyramid—or a funnel.

However, the event, which lasted about an hour, seemed mostly focused on honoring a commercial produced to promote the nutrition guidance and a new website showcasing it, RealFood.gov. That commercial, which aired during last weekend's Super Bowl, featured tightly framed shots of world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who made stigmatizing remarks about how he felt "fat and nasty" earlier in life and consequently "just wanted to kill myself." He went on to decry America's "obese, fudgy" people and lambasted "processed food," before eating an apple.

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The Food and Drug Administration has refused to review Moderna's application for an mRNA flu vaccine, the company revealed Tuesday.

While the move came as a surprise to the high-profile vaccine maker, it is just the latest hostility toward vaccines—and mRNA vaccines in particular—from an agency overseen by the fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his first year in office, Kennedy has already dramatically slashed childhood vaccine recommendations and canceled $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines against potential pandemic threats.

In a news release late Tuesday, Moderna said it was blindsided by the FDA's refusal, which the FDA cited as being due to the design of the company's Phase 3 trial for its mRNA flu vaccine, dubbed mRNA-1010. Specifically, the FDA's rejection was over the comparator vaccine Moderna used.

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The National Cancer Institute is using federal funds to study whether cancer can be cured by ivermectin, a cheap, off-patent anti-parasitic and deworming drug that fringe medical groups falsely claimed could treat COVID-19 during the pandemic and have since touted as a cure-all.

Large, high-quality clinical trials have resoundingly concluded that ivermectin is not effective against COVID-19. And there is no old or new scientific evidence to support a hypothesis that ivermectin can cure cancer—or justify any such federal expenditure. But, under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who is otherwise well-known for claiming to have a parasitic worm in his brain—numerous members of the medical fringe are now in powerful federal positions or otherwise hold sway with the administration.

During a January 30 event, Anthony Letai, a cancer researcher the Trump administration installed as the director of the NCI in September, said the NCI was pursuing ivermectin.

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As the 2026 Olympic Winter Games begin today, news articles are swelling with juicy claims that male ski jumpers have injected their penises with fillers to gain a flight advantage.

As the rumor goes, having a bigger bulge on a required 3D body scan taken in the pre-season could earn jumpers extra centimeters of material in their jumpsuits—and a suit's larger nether regions provide more surface area to glide to the gold. Even a small increase can make a satisfying difference in this sport. A 2025 simulation-based study published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living suggested that every 2 cm of extra fabric in a ski jumpsuit could increase drag by about 4 percent and increase lift by about 5 percent. On a jump, that extra 2 cm of fabric amounts to an extra 5.8 meters, the simulations found.

Elite ski jumpers are aware of the advantage and have already crotch-rocketed to scandal with related schemes. Last year, two Norwegian Olympic medalists, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, and three of their team officials were charged with cheating after an anonymous video showed the head coach and suit technician illegally restitching the crotch area of the two jumpers' suits to make them larger. The jumpers received a three-month suspension, while the head coach, an assistant coach, and the technician faced a harsher 18-month ban.

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A poor night's sleep might leave you feeling like your eyelids have filled with lead—and keeping them open is the ultimate dead lift. But for some, bad sleep brings on eyelids so droopy and floppy that they can do curl ups on their own.

That was the unfortunate case for a 39-year-old woman who sought care at an ophthalmology clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She told the doctors that for six weeks she felt like she had something in her eyes, and they were watery. By the time of her appointment, her eyelids had rolled up, flipping inside-out on their own—and were staying that way. In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report her eye-opening case—and its unexpected solution.

(You can see images of her eyelids—flipped and recovered—here. The images may seem graphic to some, but they are not much worse than that kid in elementary school who would flip their eyelids just to freak everyone out for laughs. You know the one.)

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Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Tuesday. In the wide-ranging hearing, Bhattacharya defended the chaotic and disruptive cuts at the institutes he helms while carefully wording responses related to vaccines—seemingly to avoid contradicting his boss, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As Bhattacharya testified, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the HELP committee's ranking member, released a report outlining the state of the NIH. The report concluded that the Trump administration is "failing American patients," and "destroying medical research through cuts to research grants, terminations of clinical trials, and the chaos it has created."

Since Trump took office, the NIH has terminated or frozen hundreds of millions of dollars for research grants, including $561 million in grants to research the four leading causes of death in America, the report found.

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A newborn baby has died in New Mexico from a Listeria infection that state health officials say was likely contracted from raw (unpasteurized) milk that the baby's mother drank during pregnancy.

In a news release Tuesday, officials warned people not to consume any raw dairy, highlighting that it can be teeming with a variety of pathogens. Those germs are especially dangerous to pregnant women, as well as young children, the elderly, and people with weakened immune systems.

"Raw milk can contain numerous disease-causing germs, including Listeria, which is bacteria that can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, preterm birth, or fatal infection in newborns, even if the mother is only mildly ill," the New Mexico Department of Health said in the press release.

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A debilitating infection from the parasitic Guinea worm is inching closer to global eradication, with an all-time low of only 10 human cases reported worldwide in 2025, the Carter Center announced.

If health workers can fully wipe out the worms, it will be only the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox.

Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis) is a parasitic nematode transmitted in water. More specifically, it's found in waters that contain small crustacean copepods, which harbor the worm's larvae. If a person consumes water contaminated with Guinea worm, the parasites burrow through the intestinal tract and migrate through the body. About a year later, a spaghetti noodle-length worm emerges from a painful blister, usually in the feet or legs. It can take up to eight weeks for the adult worm to fully emerge. To ease the searing pain, infected people may put their blistered limbs in water, allowing the parasite to release more larvae and continue the cycle.

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The Trump administration is delaying the release of TrumpRx, an online platform that lets people buy prescription drugs directly from pharmaceutical companies at a discount, according to Politico. While the reason for the delay is unclear, it comes as Democratic senators raise questions about how the platform will work—and whether it will be legal.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) sent a letter to the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday seeking answers on how the OIG will oversee the direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform and, specifically, how it will apply the anti-kickback statute.

"Legitimate concerns about inappropriate prescribing, conflicts of interest, and inadequate care have been raised about the exact types of DTC platforms to which TrumpRx would route patients," the senators write.

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Having a health insurance plan with a high deductible could not only cost you—it could also kill you.

A new study in JAMA Network Open found that people who faced those high out-of-pocket costs as well as a cancer diagnosis had worse overall survival and cancer-specific survival than those with more standard health plans.

The findings, while perhaps not surprising, are a stark reminder of the fraught decisions Americans face as the price of health care only continues to rise and more people try to offset costs by accepting insurance plans with higher deductibles—that is, higher out-of-pocket costs they have to pay before their health insurance provider starts paying its share.

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The explosive measles outbreak in South Carolina has now reached 789 cases, breaking Texas's outbreak record last year of 762 cases, which at the time was the largest outbreak in the US since measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000. The country is at grave risk of losing its elimination status in the coming months due to continuous spread.

With Texas' outbreak last year—which spanned January to August and spread to additional states—the US saw the largest measles case total since 1991, with 2,255 confirmed cases. Now, with South Carolina's unbridled outbreak, 2026 is already looking like it will be another record year.

Though South Carolina's outbreak began in October, the spread of the disease has dramatically accelerated this month, with cases jumping from 218 on December 28 to 789 on January 27.

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Nearly half of the databases that public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were updating on a monthly basis have been frozen without notice or explanation, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study—led by Janet Freilich, a law expert at Boston University, and Jeremy Jacobs, a medical professor at Vanderbilt University—examined the status of all CDC databases, finding a total of 82 that had, as of early 2025, been receiving updates at least monthly. But, of those 82, only 44 were still being regularly updated as of October 2025, with 38 (46 percent) having their updates paused without public notice or explanation.

Examining the databases' content, it appeared that vaccination data was most affected by the stealth data freezes. Of the 38 outdated databases, 33 (87 percent) included data related to vaccination. In contrast, none of the 44 still-updated databases relate to vaccination. Other frozen databases included data on infectious disease burden, such as data on hospitalizations from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

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