On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it's calling "Scientific Freedom Lectures," with the first scheduled for March 20. The "freedom" theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.

The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.

Freedom for me

Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.

Bhattacharya suffered no professional consequences but felt his ideas were being suppressed. He took part in a lawsuit that accused the government of censoring him, but the Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that he was unable to tie any alleged incident of censorship to the government agencies he sued. Since then, he's been animated by the idea that the scientific community needs major reform, going so far as to call for a second scientific revolution.

So "scientific freedom" is an idea that likely originated from the director himself. If one wanted the theme to resonate with the scientific community, however, it might be a good idea to launch the series with a respected scientist whose work was actually suppressed in some way. Bhattacharya hasn't gone that route.

Instead, he's chosen Matthew Ridley, a British hereditary peer and science journalist. While some of his early books on biology were highly praised, Ridley has mostly been known for his fringe ideas about climate change. While Ridley accepts that the greenhouse effect is real and we are warming the planet, he appears to be convinced that warming will be at the low extreme of the range expected by mainstream science (if he has detailed his reasons for believing this, we have been unable to find it). Instead, he argues that a boost in plant growth and lower cold-related deaths will make climate change a net win for humanity.

That, plus an interest in a coal mine on his property, has led to him being listed as a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Institute, a UK-based think tank extreme enough that labeling it a "climate change denial lobby group" is considered consistent with Wikipedia's view neutrality rules.

On the fringes

Ridley's fringe ideas aren't limited to climate change. He apparently shares Bhattacharya's belief that society would have been best served by letting COVID spread uninhibited through younger populations. He has also latched onto the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a lab leak, going so far as to coauthor a book promoting the idea.

It's an idea largely based on societal factors: the proximity of a viral research lab, the general secrecy of the Chinese government, and so on. Some features of the virus that initially seemed unusual—and were cited by lab-leak backers as evidence—have since turned up in related viruses. And over the years, actual scientific evidence has consistently pointed to the likelihood that COVID originated from a spillover event at a market in Wuhan.

This evidence continues to grow; just this week, a new study shows that, like other viruses that emerged from spillover events, SARS-CoV-2 lacks a genetic signature typically found in viruses propagated in a lab.

Obviously, Ridley is free to continue advocating for an idea that has become increasingly disfavored by the scientific community. But what he's doing hardly seems scientific, given that he has largely avoided engaging with the scientific evidence that has emerged about the virus's origins.

Given that, it's not clear what message Bhattacharya thinks he's sending by inviting Ridley to launch the lecture series. It's consistent with his willingness to entertain the fringe ideas of the MAHA movement that helped him get his current position. But it's not at all clear where he thinks this will all end up.

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For over a decade, Hino Motors Ltd. imported and sold more than 105,000 vehicles and engines with misleading or fabricated emissions data, until testing by the Environmental Protection Agency revealed the emissions-fraud scheme.

The case would lead the Toyota subsidiary to plead guilty and agree to pay over $1.6 billion in fines over five years and forfeit an additional $1 billion in profits made from the illicit sales.

On Monday, the EPA touted the case in its enforcement and compliance assurance results for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2025, contending in a press release that the agency closed more cases in President Donald Trump’s first year of his second term than in any year of the Biden administration.

Yet 75 percent of the EPA’s 61 criminal cases that were adjudicated in federal court during that time originated before Trump’s second term, EPA records and legal documents show. The EPA and the US Department of Justice announced the Hino Motors penalty Jan. 15, 2025—five days before Trump’s inauguration.

The EPA did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News about the enforcement and compliance numbers.

In announcing the Trump administration’s results, the EPA says that in the last fiscal year, it concluded 2,127 civil enforcement cases, assessed over $1.2 billion in civil penalties and criminal fees, and secured more than $6.4 billion to return facilities to compliance. The veracity of the figures listed on the EPA website hinges on when the investigations began and the nature of the compliance actions, whose details are lacking.

“This is a release that is propaganda,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and a former senior enforcement attorney at the EPA. “It doesn’t reflect reality in a number of ways.”

One example: The EPA has stopped enforcing the Clean Air Act, Whitehouse said, negotiating only one settlement since the Trump administration took office, compared to 26 in the first year of Trump’s first term and 22 in Biden’s first year. Clean Air Act enforcement actions often involve the fossil fuel and motor vehicle industries that account for most air pollution. Superfund cleanup settlements, Whitehouse said, have also hit new lows.

The data comes after multiple watchdog reports have documented major drops in enforcement under the Trump administration’s EPA, finding the Department of Justice filed just 16 cases during Trump’s first year back in office—a 76 percent decrease compared to President Joe Biden’s first year.

The EPA touted other high-profile criminal enforcement cases, including prosecution of J.H. Baxter & Co. and its president for knowingly venting hazardous air pollutants into the atmosphere. The EPA announced the $1.5 million fine in April 2025, but the Oregon-based company was charged in November 2024, under the Biden administration.

In a case against Miske Enterprise, a federal judge sentenced Delia Fabro-Miske to seven years in prison in April 2025. However, Fabro-Miske pleaded guilty in January 2024 to falsifying pesticide and fumigation records, as well as to charges unrelated to environmental protection, such as bank fraud, obstruction of justice, and wire fraud.

Under the second Trump administration, the EPA has levied nearly $17 million in criminal fines and restitution. The bulk of the penalties, $15.7 million, were incurred by Murex Management, an ethanol marketing and logistics company, in a plea agreement related to defrauding banks.

Several defendants in other cases have not yet gone to trial or are awaiting sentencing, court records show, including 13 Chinese nationals indicted for stealing and re-selling restaurant cooking oil, transporting it across state lines, and laundering the proceeds.

Experts have warned that it’s unlikely enforcement levels will be maintained, given the administration’s downsizing of the EPA and rollback of various regulations to protect the climate and environment.

The EPA lost more than 4,000 employees in the first year of Trump’s second term, bringing its staffing down to a 40-year low, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data. That represents a reduction of 24 percent, more than double the proportion of jobs lost across the entire federal workforce in that time. The DOJ’s environment division, meanwhile, lost a third of its lawyers over the past year, according to an analysis from E&E News.

“The outlook for EPA in the immediate future, for having a meaningful enforcement program, is quite bleak, and that’s by design,” Whitehouse said. “That’s what the administration wants. They want to disassemble the enforcement program at EPA. They’re [sharing] these numbers to create a false sense of security in the American public.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Wyatt Myskow covers drought, biodiversity, and the renewable energy transition throughout the Western US. Based in Phoenix, he previously reported for The Arizona Republic and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Wyatt has lived in the Southwest since birth and graduated from Arizona State University with his bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Lisa Sorg is the North Carolina reporter for Inside Climate News. A journalist for 30 years, Sorg covers energy, climate environment, and agriculture, as well as the social justice impacts of pollution and corporate malfeasance.

She has won dozens of awards for her news, public service, and investigative reporting. In 2022, she received the Stokes Award from the National Press Foundation for her two-part story about the environmental damage from a former missile plant on a Black and Latinx neighborhood in Burlington. Sorg was previously an environmental investigative reporter at NC Newsline, a nonprofit media outlet based in Raleigh. She has also worked at alt-weeklies, dailies, and magazines. Originally from rural Indiana, she lives in Durham, NC.

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The medical journal The Lancet did not pull any punches in a scathing editorial on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling the anti-vaccine activist's first year as US Health Secretary "a failure by most measures, especially his own."

The Lancet is one of the world's oldest academic medical journals still in publication and one of the most cited sources of peer-reviewed medical research. But it is also well-known for publishing an infamous study by prominent anti-vaccine activist and disgraced ex-physician Andrew Wakefield, which falsely claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. The Lancet retracted the study more than a decade later.

Kennedy is among the prominent anti-vaccine activists who continue to embrace the thoroughly debunked claim, along with other dangerous conspiracy theories. The Lancet assailed Kennedy for spreading misinformation as the country's top health official and politicizing health policy at the expense of vulnerable Americans, including children.

"The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in one year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm," the journal's editorial board wrote in its latest issue.

The journal's board noted that when Kennedy first took the role a year ago, he laid out noble ambitions of "radical transparency" and "gold-standard science." But within days, Kennedy appeared to abandon those ideals. He rescinded a 54-year-old policy of soliciting public comments on federal actions, summarily dismissed expert advisors and scientific experts, issued altered health recommendations that run counter to decades of scientific evidence, and shut down programs studying critical health issues, such as air pollution and cancer.

As secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy oversees the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—all of which Kennedy is currently driving into the ground, according to The Lancet. His "politicization at the NIH, FDA, and CDC is imperiling the future of US science and innovation and throttling the public health enterprise that keeps the country safe today," the board wrote.

Kennedy has orchestrated an unprecedented overhaul of the CDC's childhood vaccine recommendations, which has been rejected by more than half of US states. He granted $1.6 million for a vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau that the World Health Organization called "unethical," comparing it to the shameful Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. Under Kennedy, HHS has "made a habit of throwing good money after bad science," and elevated "junk science and fringe beliefs," the editorial states. Meanwhile, promising research, including on mRNA technology, and critical disease monitoring, such as for explosive cases of measles and pertussis (whooping cough), are being abandoned or neglected.

In all, The Lancet joined a chorus of voices in the medical and scientific community calling for Kennedy's resignation and for Congress to hold him accountable.

While the medical journal had no kind words for Kennedy, the feeling is mutual. In the past, Kennedy has assailed top medical journals, including The Lancet, as "corrupt" for being influenced by the pharmaceutical industry—a common attack Kennedy uses against his critics.

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Anti-vaccine activist and current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked hard to villainize infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, even writing a conspiracy-laden book lambasting the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But a year into the job as the country's top health official, Kennedy—who has no background in medicine, science, or public health—still holds less sway with Americans than the esteemed physician-scientist.

In a nationally representative survey conducted in February by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 54 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Fauci, while only 38 percent had confidence in Kennedy. Breaking those supporters down further, 25 percent of respondents said they were "very confident" in Fauci, while only 9 percent said the same for Kennedy.

Credit: Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, 2026

Overall, the survey found a clear divide between the confidence in Kennedy and other Trump administration officials and that of career scientists and medical associations.

Among federal agencies, 67 percent said they had confidence in career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. But only 43 percent said they had confidence in the leaders of those agencies.

"The public is differentiating the trustworthiness of career scientists in the CDC, NIH, and FDA from that of the leaders of those agencies and recalling substantially higher confidence in the guidance that former director Fauci provided than that offered by Secretary Kennedy or Dr. Oz," Ken Winneg, APPC’s managing director of survey research, said in a statement.

Overall confidence in federal agencies was also lower than that for medical associations. Sixty-two percent of respondents were confident in the FDA and NIH generally, while 60 percent were confident in the CDC. In contrast, the American Heart Association earned confidence from 82 percent of respondents, while the American Academy of Pediatrics earned confidence from 77 percent, and the American Medical Association earned confidence from 73 percent.

"Trust is the foundation of effective health care and public health," AMA CEO John Whyte said in a statement. "In a challenging information environment, patients need clear, evidence-based guidance they can rely on... The AMA is dedicated to helping patients cut through the clutter and elevate the valid over the viral. Accurate, trustworthy information saves lives."

In a statement to Ars Technica, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Andrew Nixon, said the decline in trust in US public health began before the current Trump administration. "Secretary Kennedy was brought in to restore credibility through transparency, gold standard science, and accountability. HHS is focused on rebuilding public confidence by ensuring that decisions are driven by rigorous evidence."

The survey also found that trust in federal agencies—the CDC, NIH, and FDA—has declined during this administration, falling from 67 percent overall in February 2025 to 60–62 percent in February 2026.

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Anthropic sued the Trump administration yesterday in an attempt to reverse the government's decision to blacklist its technology. Anthropic argues that it exercised its First Amendment rights by refusing to let its Claude AI models be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans and that the government blacklisted it in retaliation.

"When Anthropic held fast to its judgment that Claude cannot safely or reliably be used for autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, the President directed every federal agency to 'IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology'—even though the Department of War had previously agreed to those same conditions," Anthropic said in a lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California. "Hours later, the Secretary of War [Pete Hegseth] directed his Department to designate Anthropic a 'Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,' and further directed that 'effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.'"

Anthropic said the First Amendment gives it "the right to express its views—both publicly and to the government—about the limitations of its own AI services and important issues of AI safety." Anthropic further argued that the process for designating it a supply chain risk did not comply with the procedures mandated by Congress. The supply chain risk designation is supposed to be used only to protect against risks that an adversary may sabotage systems used for national security, the lawsuit said.

Trump's directive "requiring every federal agency to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, and actions taken by other defendants in response to that directive, are outside any authority that Congress has granted the Executive," and violate the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, Anthropic said.

Anthropic's lawsuit was filed against Hegseth, the Department of War (previously called the Department of Defense), and numerous other federal agencies. Anthropic also filed a motion for preliminary injunction and a second lawsuit asking for review in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

White House: Anthropic is "radical left, woke company"

The Pentagon declined to comment. The White House responded by calling Anthropic a "radical left" and "woke" firm.

“President Trump will never allow a radical left, woke company to jeopardize our national security by dictating how the greatest and most powerful military in the world operates," a White House spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars. "The President and Secretary of War are ensuring America’s courageous warfighters have the appropriate tools they need to be successful and will guarantee that they are never held hostage by the ideological whims of any Big Tech leaders. Under the Trump Administration, our military will obey the United States Constitution—not any woke AI company’s terms of service.”

A brief supporting Anthropic was filed in the California federal court by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Progress, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association. The groups said that Pentagon retaliation against Anthropic will "silence future speech from those who fear the government attempting to harm their business or extinguish it entirely."

Calling the government’s actions "transparently retaliatory and coercive," the advocacy groups wrote that the court "need not guess at the government’s retaliatory motives because the Pentagon has already announced them... Until recently, it was rare for government leaders to so openly and proudly boast about retaliating against someone for their protected speech. Now it is commonplace. Evidently only those who agree to be complicit in this administration’s assertion of unfettered power are safe."

Google and OpenAI staff support lawsuit

Another brief supporting Anthropic was filed by various technical, engineering, and research employees of Google and OpenAI. Google is an investor in Anthropic. The Google and OpenAI employees wrote that "mass domestic surveillance powered by AI poses profound risks to democratic governance—even in responsible hands." On the topic of autonomous weapon systems, they wrote that "current AI models are not reliable enough to bear the responsibility of making lethal targeting decisions entirely alone, and the risks of their deployment for that purpose require some kind of response and guardrails."

The Google and OpenAI employees said that in using the supply chain risk designation "in response to Anthropic’s contract negotiations, [the Pentagon] introduces an unpredictability in our industry that undermines American innovation and competitiveness. It chills professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems and various ways that risks can be addressed to optimize the technology’s deployment."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explained the company's objections to certain AI uses in a February 26 post. "We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values," he wrote.

Current law allows the government to "purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant," and "AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale," Amodei wrote.

CEO: Autonomous weapons too risky

Amodei expressed support for partially autonomous weapons like those used in Ukraine, but not for fully autonomous weapon systems "that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets." He said that fully autonomous weapons "may prove critical for our national defense" eventually but that AI is not yet reliable enough to power them.

"We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk," he wrote. "We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today."

Trump responded with a Truth Social post on February 27. "The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution," Trump wrote. "Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY."

Hegseth then wrote that "Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon." Hegseth said the military "must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic."

Anthropic said later that day that it had engaged in months of negotiations with the government and would challenge any supply chain risk designation in court. "Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company... No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons," Anthropic said.

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For the second time, Vinay Prasad is set to leave the Food and Drug Administration.

In a post on social media Friday, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that Prasad will exit in April, adding that he got "a tremendous amount accomplished" during his year at the agency.

Prasad's tenure was generally marked by controversy, but he is departing amid a cluster of self-destructive decisions. Those include a shocking rejection of an mRNA vaccine (which was over the objections of agency scientists and quickly reversed); a demand for an additional clinical trial on a gene therapy for Huntington's disease, which was widely seen as moving the goalpost for the therapy; his startling choice to publicly attack the maker of that gene therapy, UniQure; and alleged abuse of FDA staff, who say he created a toxic work environment.

The moves have collectively roiled those within the agency, the Trump administration, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, as well as patient advocacy groups.

On Monday, BioSpace reported that financial analysts were all but cheering Prasad's departure, calling it "a big win for biotech, especially for companies in the rare disease space." Several biotech companies that have faced setbacks and rejections at the hands of Prasad saw stock bumps on Monday. UniQure, for instance, saw its stock leap around 25 percent from Friday afternoon.

Constant controversy

This will be Prasad's second exit from the FDA during the current Trump administration. In July, he resigned amid his controversial handling of a gene therapy treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, as well as criticism from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who called Prasad a "leftist saboteur." He was reinstated less than two weeks later.

Since his return, Prasad has held key roles at the FDA; he is the chief medical and scientific officer and the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which also makes him the top regulator of vaccines, gene therapies, and other biologic products.

His qualifications for those roles were always questionable. While Prasad is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and a practicing hematology-oncologist (a doctor specializing in blood disorders and cancers), he came to the FDA with no regulatory experience and no expertise in vaccines or gene therapies. Prasad's rise to regulatory relevance stemmed instead from his online criticism of pandemic-era public health policies, including COVID-19 vaccines, and his appearances on podcasts.

His undoing appears to stem from continuing to act more like a brash podcaster than a level-headed federal regulator who understands the FDA's measured procedures.

In November, Prasad wrote a memo to staff, unilaterally announcing sweeping changes to how the agency regulates vaccines. He included a warning that staff who disagreed with his style should resign. He also included a claim that the COVID-19 vaccine killed 10 children but has yet to provide any evidence to back that extraordinary claim.

After that memo leaked, 12 former FDA commissioners united to write a scathing rebuke to Prasad's directives, calling him a "threat" to the agency's evidence-based work.

The last straw

In his time at the FDA, he was known for overruling staff scientists and career officials and blindsiding companies with rejections or moved goalposts. But his treatment of UniQure reached a new level of egregiousness.

UniQure's gene therapy for Huntington's—for which there are no current treatments—could slow progression of the disease by 75 percent. In 2024, the FDA told the company that it could submit its therapy for an accelerated approval without having a placebo-control arm in its trial. The therapy requires a 10–12-hour brain surgery, thus a placebo-controlled trial would require some patients to undergo a lengthy sham surgery that could involve drilling a superficial hole in the skull, raising clear ethical concerns.

But, under Prasad, the FDA reversed course, telling the company that it needed those sham surgeries. Last week, the FDA doubled down on the requirement.

In a New York Times report Thursday about the FDA's growing denials, Janet Woodcock—a retired FDA official who was with the agency for nearly 40 years—blasted the FDA's UniQure decision, calling it "truly evil."

The criticism apparently struck a nerve with Prasad. The FDA held a press briefing later Thursday in which an unnamed "senior FDA official"—who identified himself as a hematology-oncologist—launched into a diatribe against UniQure, saying its "failed therapy" was supported by "distorted and manipulated" data. As for Woodcock's comments, the official said he "expect[s] better" from her.

When a reporter asked the official how long he would stay at the agency, he responded that he missed speaking freely on his podcast and working as a hematology-oncologist, but would "serve happily" as long as he was "in alignment" with Makary and Trump.

Makary said Friday that Prasad's replacement will be announced before his departure.

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