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In mid-February, a measles outbreak started at the Manatee Bay Elementary School in Broward County in South Florida. There are now at least nine cases in the county and one additional one in Polk County in Central Florida.

Several public health researchers say Florida's current response to the outbreak goes against well-established public health guidance. Florida's surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has so far not urged parents of unvaccinated children at the school with the outbreak to get their children vaccinated, or to quarantine them. In a Feb. 20 letter, Ladapo left it up to parents to decide whether to send their kids to school.

Talk to people addicted to street drugs in Lisbon, Portugal's capital, and you hear confusion and dismay over the carnage of overdose deaths taking place an ocean away in the U.S.

Ana Batista, a soft-spoken woman in her 50s who's been addicted to heroin for years, said she hasn't lost a single friend or family member to a fatal overdose.

"No, no, no," she said, speaking at a safe drug consumption clinic, where she had come to inject under the supervision of nurses and counselors.

Earlier this month, the academic publisher Sage retracted three studies that had run in one of its scientific journals, citing a “lack of scientific rigor.” One of these studies had received particular attention in the context of a court case attempting to restrict access to the medication abortion drug mifepristone — a case with potentially far-reaching implications that will soon be heard by the Supreme Court.

Taking a closer look at this study shows that the decision to retract it was justified — and exposes the larger context in which unsound science is used to drive an anti-abortion agenda in courts and legislatures.

Alabama’s Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are people, the first time a court has ever given rights and protections so early after conception.

The ruling is limited to Alabama, but it has far-reaching potential and seems poised to open a new front in the fight over reproductive rights in the country.

Alabama has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation, and advocates and legal experts worry it could show a path forward for the “personhood” movement in other conservative states.

The White House on Tuesday condemned the decision as “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make.”

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The new study, published in the journal Vaccine, is the largest study of its kind since the pandemic began and could reignite the debate over the risks and benefits of the vaccine.

Over the past three years, more than 13.5 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world. The World Health Organization recently announced that vaccination has saved at least a million and a half lives in Europe alone.

The study links vaccines to slight increases in neurological, blood and heart-related conditions such as myocarditis, pericarditis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Researchers stressed that an association between the vaccine and adverse side effects does not prove the vaccine caused them and that side effects were rare.

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Nurse midwife Beverly Maldonado recalls a pregnant woman arriving at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Maryland after her water broke. It was weeks before the baby would have any chance of survival, and the patient’s wishes were clear, she recalled: “Why am I staying pregnant then? What’s the point?” the patient pleaded.

But the doctors couldn’t intervene, she said. The fetus still had a heartbeat and it was a Catholic hospital, subject to the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” that prohibit or limit procedures like abortion that the church deems “immoral” or “intrinsically evil,” according to its interpretation of the Bible.

“I remember asking the doctors. And they were like, ‘Well, the baby still has a heartbeat. We can’t do anything,’” said Maldonado, now working as a nurse midwife in California, who asked them: "What do you mean we can’t do anything? This baby’s not going to survive.”

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