This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines. Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event. > “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a > need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.” “VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.” Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe. Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models. One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event. LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.” Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first. “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says. With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how. In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world.  Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine movement. Many of the 21 new members have previously worked in some capacity with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy founded. Others are parent advocates with little to no apparent scientific training. In keeping with IACC requirements, the committee has three autistic members; one of them is a high school senior. Many of the new committee members have been involved with movements that claim there is a biomedical “cure” for autism, a stance that is opposed by most autistism self-advocacy groups. A few of the other committee members have an unusual specialty in common. Several have relationships with organizations that promote “spelling to communicate” a controversial technique that claims to help non-speaking autistic people communicate with the use of letter boards. However, several expert organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, warn that there’s scant scientific evidence that spelling to communicate works, that unconscious influence might be exercised by the person interpreting the speller’s apparent messages—often a parent or a caregiver—and that focusing on spelling might discourage caregivers from using more evidence-based interventions.  Here’s a non-exhaustive guide to some of Kennedy’s controversial picks: Tracy Slepcevic is an “integrative health practitioner” who claims that she cured her son’s autism. In 2022, she was a speaker at Reawaken America, a MAGA-meets-evangelical Christian tour convened by former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. As Kiera Butler wrote at the time: > Last year, Slepcevic was a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour where > she hawked her new book, Warrior Mom: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Her Son > With Autism, with an introduction by Andrew Wakefield. In December, Slepcevic > was interviewed by [far-right live streamer] Stew Peters. She told Peters the > story of her son’s “recovery” from autism with supplements and diets. In > January, Michael Flynn promoted Slepcevic’s book, tweeting “check out this > e-book for only $.99 cents on how one Mama Bear nurtured her son back to > health from autism resulting from a jab!” In 2024, as our colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman reported, Slepcevic and her husband, Steve Slepcevic, hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Steve was also present at the rally at the Capitol that preceded the insurrection of January 6, 2021.  Toby Rogers is an anti-vaccine activist and fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a libertarian think tank founded in 2021 which opposed Covid safety measures during the pandemic. Rogers has said he believes that vaccines are the primary cause of autism, and he often uses extreme rhetoric to express this view. Vaccines, he has said, are “genocidal,” and vaccine makers, he argued in an article last year on the Brownstone Institute website, “enslave society.” He believes that “no thinking person vaccinates.” In a 2024 tweet, Rogers argued that Anthony Fauci was “in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He must be arrested and prosecuted.” He also has a habit of waxing conspiratorial on X. Earlier this month, for example, he mused, “What if the entire Covid disaster—the design and release of SARS-CoV-2, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, the suppression of effective meds, Remdesivir, the toxic Covid shots, etc.—was engineered by AI to increase the power of AI?” Ginger Taylor is a former marriage and family therapist-turned-anti-vaccine activist who “writes on the politics of autism, health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.” She previously served on the “Spiritual Advisory Committee” for Children’s Health Defense. The founder of a Maine-based anti-vaccine group, she also runs NoDeception.org, a website on vaccines and Christianity where she writes about “the removal of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates” and what this “means for the Body of Christ.” Elena Monarch is a neuropsychologist who does not appear to specialize in autism; rather she runs an independent clinic in Massachusetts for people who suffer from Lyme disease and the controversial strep-related neurological condition PANS/PANDAS. Fellow committee-member Sylvia Fogel, who has opposed efforts to eliminate religious exemptions for routine childhood vaccination requirements, works as a psychiatrist at the same practice. Monarch appeared at events with Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and Fogel was a recent guest on a Children’s Health Defense podcast. John Gilmore is, like many of the others on the committee, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. He’s the co-founder of the Autism Action Network, which he created after his now-adult son was, according to him, injured by a vaccine. He, too, has ties to Children’s Health Defense and co-authored an editorial in 2021 with Mary Holland, the organization’s legal counsel and current CEO.  (On Children’s Health Defense’s website, Holland is quoted as saying, “It is wonderful news that there are now people on this committee who are truly motivated to solve many of the existential autism issues, including prevention, treatment, education, employment opportunities, long-term care and housing.”) Walter Zahorodny, Ph.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school. He appeared onstage with Kennedy during his first-ever press conference as HHS Secretary in April 2025. As Mother Jones reported at the time, Zahorodny has ties to researchers who deal in autism-related pseudoscience. He appeared in a 2018 video for the organization SafeMinds, which has falsely suggested that autism is caused by mercury exposure in vaccines. (In the video, Zahorodny didn’t take a position on mercury exposure, but instead talked about what he described as an increase in autism prevalence.) Zahorodny also co-authored a study in 2020 of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. Dan Rossignol is a family medicine doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida and California. Rossignol has advocated for “chelation” therapy, a debunked autism treatment. In 2010, he was sued by the father of a child for using “dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments” on his son. (The outcome of that suit is unclear.) Two people on the panel are nonverbal communicators. One of them, Minnesota community college student Caden Larson, communicates with spelling and serves on the board of an organization called the Spellers Freedom Foundation. Another person on the board, Elizabeth Bonker, an autism advocate, uses typing to communicate and is the executive director of Communication 4 ALL, a group which advocates for typing-based communication for nonverbal students, saying that they should be provided access to “spelling on a letterboard or typing on a keyboard with a communication partner.” Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs (MedMAPS). While the organization looks, from a certain angle, like a professional medical body, it often shares decidedly pseudoscientific ideas that aren’t supported by actual medical organizations. Several of its experts previously worked with Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) , a program created by the Autism Research Institute that advocated for unproven “biomedical” interventions to “cure” autism, including massive doses of supplements and chelation therapy, a process that removes heavy metals from the blood; there is no evidence that either approach “treats” autism, and both have the potential to cause serious harm. (The Autism Research Institute stopped promoting DAN in 2011.) Today, MedMAPS contributors often promote the idea that autism and other neurodevelopmental delays could be caused by vaccines; contributors have also made other pseudo-medical, vaccine-skeptical claims, including promoting the false idea that Covid vaccines were actually “gene therapy.” MedMAPS also uncritically cites other anti-vaccine, pseudomedical groups with anodyne names, including the National Vaccine Information Center.  Katie Sweeney is another self-proclaimed “autism warrior mom” who works as an executive support manager for MedMAPS, meaning that two people from the same pseudomedical organization are now serving on the IACC.  Krystal Higgins is the executive director of the National Autism Association, a small nonprofit whose board consists of people whose children have autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The organization has expressed skepticism about vaccines: in a 2012 statement to a Congressional committee — before Higgins was the executive director — the NAA claimed that vaccines “can cause immune and/or inflammatory injuries to  the brain that  eventually manifest as an autism diagnosis,” which is not a thesis that is shared by any mainstream medical body. (Today, the NAA’s website does not seem to take a specific position on the debunked vaccine-autism connection.) The organization also advocates for assisted communication, including S2C (Spelling 2 Communicate) and RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) both of which are controversial in mainstream medical bodies. The American Speech-Hearing-Language Association says, of RPM, “There is no scientific evidence supporting the assertion that messages produced using RPM reflect the communication of the person with a disability.” Higgins is, per her bio on HHS’ website, “a certified Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner, and is a devoted mother to an adolescent with complex medical needs.”  In all, Kennedy’s selections are another startlingly blatant effort to stack HHS with people who distrust vaccines and, in many cases, have devoted long careers to promoting debunked medical misinformation about them, as well as people who promote unproven “cures” and treatments for the condition. In a statement, Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a body that focuses on funding actual scientific research and evidence-based autism interventions, called the new committee “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific experts.”  “The IACC, created through the efforts of the broad autism community’s work with Congress and sustained for more than two decades by the dedicated service of leading scientists, advocates, and public servants, has been fundamentally compromised,” ASF added in its statement. “The current committee has been hijacked by a narrow ideological agenda that does not reflect either the autism community or the state of autism science. By sidelining rigorous, evidence-based inquiry, this shift will stall scientific progress, distort research priorities, and ultimately harm people with autism and all who love and support them.” 

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Biden administration enforced a rule in 2022 mandating that retail pharmacies receiving any federal funding had to carry and dispense mifepristone, misoprostol, and methotrexate—drugs used in medication abortions and, in the case of methotrexate, the treatment of ectopic pregnancies and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus—in order not to discriminate on the basis of sex and disability. The Trump administration formally withdrew that rule on Tuesday, allowing pharmacists to refuse to stock or dispense misoprostol and methotrexate, despite their other uses. Even under the Biden-era rule, pharmacists could still refuse to dispense the drug if they suspected or knew a pregnant person was past the date allowed in their state for a medication-induced abortion. Mifepristone was removed from the Biden rule in 2023, after a lawsuit involving anti-abortion litigators at the arch-conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in a case that was subsequently dismissed. I asked the two leading pharmacies in the United States—CVS and Walgreens—if they will continue to stock and dispense methotrexate. A spokesperson from CVS told me that “all our pharmacies continue to stock and dispense methotrexate where legally permissible.” Walgreens did not respond by the time of publication. ADF, meanwhile, celebrated the win it couldn’t get in court, writing that “we are grateful to the Trump administration for rescinding Biden-era guidance that forced Americans to dispense abortion-inducing drugs against their conscience.” Days prior to the Biden administration issuing the rule, NBC’s Today Show covered the challenges faced by patients with chronic illnesses in trying to get their lifesaving medication. With the rule rescinded—and coupled with efforts to criminalize abortion drugs in states like South Carolina, raising concerns that even sympathetic doctors will be scared to prescribe mifepristone, misoprostol, and methotrexate—their availability at smaller pharmacies is likely to drop. That’s despite the fact that people who are able to conceive are supposed to take contraceptives while on methotrexate, which can cause fetal abnormalities, according to the American College of Rheumatology, meaning that their risk of getting pregnant—let alone pursuing an abortion—is in fact quite low. Autoimmune disorders primarily affect women, who have also been the main target of abortion restrictions, underlying how treatment for both shows how women’s health is under attack. Research from KFF found that of reproductive-age women who have used methotrexate in the previous year, over 90 percent did so for reasons unrelated to pregnancy. According to the John Hopkins Arthritis Center, around 60 percent of rheumatoid arthritis patients currently are on or have been on methotrexate. It’s unclear how challenging filling methotrexate prescriptions for chronic illnesses remained under the Biden rule, but it will almost certainly become more difficult without it. Without reliable access to treatment, autoimmune disorders can be very dangerous for those who have them. A 2018 brief report funded in part by the Lupus Foundation of America found that systemic lupus erythematous, one form of lupus, is tied for the top ten leading cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 24. Among Black and Latina women, it’s the fifth leading cause of death for that age group.

With 789 cases and counting, the current measles outbreak in South Carolina is now the nation’s largest since measles was officially eliminated in 2000. The highly contagious virus “is circulating in the community, increasing the risk of exposure and the risk of infection for those who are not immune due to vaccination or natural infection,” the state’s Department of Public Health says on its website. Measles is spreading especially quickly among unvaccinated individuals—692 of the South Carolina cases are in unvaccinated individuals—just as it did in the large outbreak in Texas last year, which ultimately sickened 762, hospitalized 99, and killed two children. Yet despite that recent experience, the Department of Health and Human Services insisted last month that this time wouldn’t be that bad. In a December 16 email to Mother Jones, at which time South Carolina already had more than 100 cases, a spokesperson from HHS downplayed the threat of measles in South Carolina. “CDC is not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak as was seen in Texas earlier this year and whose outbreak has been declared over,” wrote HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard in bold text. When I followed up on Tuesday this week to ask for comment on those earlier predictions, a spokesperson did not address my question but instead stated that “CDC is working closely with South Carolina health officials, including through regular coordination meetings.” The spokesperson added that the agency had provided $1.4 million in financial assistance to the state, and that “most cases are occurring in an under vaccinated immigrant community in the Spartanburg area.” In an emailed statement, South Carolina state epidemiologist Linda Bell wrote that DPH was currently collaborating with CDC on surveillance, testing, reporting, and outbreak control measures.  “Due to the fact that measles has been rare in the U.S. for over twenty years, we have benefitted from [CDC] experts,” she wrote. In her December email to Mother Jones, HHS’ Hilliard insisted that “Secretary [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] has been very clear that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles. Any attempts to spin this are baseless.” In the email this week, the HHS spokesperson reiterated that “vaccination remains the most effective way to prevent measles, and the Secretary has been clear and consistent on this point.” Yet at the height of Texas’ measles outbreak last year, Kennedy speculated that the measles vaccination had harmed children in that state. He also falsely claimed that officials “don’t know what the risk profile” is for vaccines that prevent measles. In a press conference last week, CDC principal deputy director Ralph Abraham said of South Carolina’s outbreak, “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated,” he said. “That’s their personal freedom.” If the United States loses its measles elimination status, he added, that’s the “cost of doing business.”

About a decade ago, when Doris Tyler was 76, she still had her eyesight. She’d quit driving, but she could see well enough to cook, do laundry, and clean her Central Florida home. But when the treatment for her macular degeneration stopped working, she began exploring other options. Stem cell therapy—whereby patients receive injections of their own stem cells, usually sourced from fat or bone marrow—isn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for her condition, but it sounded “promising,” she says. Representatives at a clinic in Georgia assured her, according to court documents, that injecting stem cells into her eyes would be safe and might even save her vision. After pulling together $8,900 for the procedure, she made an appointment for September 2016. “We were hopeful and very excited at that point,” she recalls. “Until things began to fall apart.” Within a month of the treatment, Tyler woke up unable to see in one eye—her retina had detached, a doctor would confirm. Soon after, the other one did, too. She tried several surgeries to fix the problem, but by December, she was permanently blind. “I don’t see any shapes or anything,” Tyler, now 85, told me. “All I see is blackness.” > “It’s completely changed my life. And I don’t want this to happen to anyone > else.” The clinic, part of the Cell Surgical Network, is one of thousands that have cropped up across the United States over the last two decades, touting stem cell treatments for a wide range of conditions: Alzheimer’s, autism, erectile dysfunction, Covid, joint pain, and more. While some stem cell therapies—like bone marrow transplants—are proven, many clinics, experts say, operate in a legal gray area, jumping ahead of the current science. Rather than rein them in, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to end the FDA’s “war” on alternative medicine, which may include unapproved stem cell treatments. (Tyler sued Cell Surgical Network and eventually settled out of court. The company did not respond to a request for comment.) Some stem cells are like a wild card in the game Uno; the embryonic ones can develop into any tissue type (blood, heart, nerve, etc.), whereas nonembryonic “adult” stem cells are limited by the tissue in which they reside—blood stem cells, for example, produce only red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. It’s “a very promising field,” notes Sean Morrison, who chairs the Public Policy Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, but scientists are still striving to understand stem cells and evaluate their potential as therapies. “We can’t just skip over the process of testing in clinical trials,” he says. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis, has read “encouraging” stem cell studies involving Type 1 diabetes, spina bifida, Parkinson’s, and age-related macular degeneration like Tyler’s. But clinics “are prematurely marketing stuff that’s not really ready for primetime yet.” And they are proliferating. In 2016, Knoepfler and a colleague tallied 570 clinics nationwide offering stem cell treatments. By 2021, there were more than 2,700, with hotspots in California, Florida, and Texas—many promoting stem cells for things like pain relief, sports medicine, and general wellness. That same year, Pew Charitable Trusts identified 360 reports of bacterial infections, blindness, cardiac arrest, organ failure, tumors, and other “adverse events” related to unapproved stem cell and regenerative medicine procedures from 2004 through September 2020. Toronto resident Srini Subramaniam told me he spent $28,000 at a Florida stem cell clinic to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition, to no avail: “It was just that money down the drain.” How is this even allowed? Well, the FDA covers drugs, but regulation of medical practice—licensing, exams, surgical procedures—falls to the states. In 2018, the Trump administration sued clinics in Florida and California, along with the Cell Surgical Network, arguing that stem cell treatments are drugs and should be regulated as such. The case made it to the US Supreme Court, which effectively sided with the FDA. But under RFK Jr., the FDA seems less eager to crack down. Last May, Kennedy told a podcaster—the biologist and wellness influencer Gary Brecka—that he didn’t want to see a stem cell “Wild West,” but added that “charlatans” and “bad results” are an inevitable risk of medical freedom. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that.” He himself had gone to Antigua for stem cell therapy to treat spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice condition, and it helped him “enormously,” Kennedy said. Several states, including California, now require clinics to disclose to customers when therapies aren’t FDA-approved. And a few state attorneys general have sued clinics for deceptive marketing. But several other states, as Knoepfler wrote in Stat last July, have introduced “right to try” bills that would allow clinics to offer biologically derived drugs like stem cells, and let the buyer beware. That’s not such a healthy policy for experimental medicines. Tyler told me that she never would have agreed to stem cell injections had she known the risks. “I grew up in the time when you went to a doctor, you expected them to tell you the truth,” she says. “And you trusted them. And that’s not true anymore.” As for RFK Jr., “if he thinks it should be approved,” he should talk to patients like her first. “It’s completely changed my life,” Tyler says. “And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

As US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has drawn a lot of attention for promoting pseudoscience and disproven theories, especially on vaccines. He is using that playbook on another major public health issue: gun violence, which remains the leading cause of death for kids in America. When it comes to school shootings and other mass shootings, here’s what RFK Jr. wants you to believe: It’s not the guns, he argues, it’s the pills. The fringe theory that antidepressants can cause people to turn violent has been around for decades, focused primarily on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are the most common class of these drugs. But extensive research by mental health and violence prevention experts has found no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass shootings. As I wrote recently, the history of how this failed theory gained attention online is also telling: > The generalized claim that SSRIs can make people violent—and that they > supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—traces in part to an > unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of > Scientology and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High > School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped > create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook > Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory. > > > > Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about > shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from > experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory > has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s > Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that > psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent > researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not > previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no > direct or causal association was found.” In the above video, I show how RFK, Jr. has been using his top government post to continue spreading the failed theory—a misinformation campaign in which he makes at least a half dozen false or misleading claims about guns, psychiatric drugs, and mass shootings.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations. Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life. In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns—usually referred to as PM2.5—and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.” So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.” The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another dishonest, fake news claim” and that the agency is still considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. > “You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking > apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars.” I spoke with several experts, including former EPA officials, and in fact, the change could lead to worsening air quality and harm public health. The EPA exists to regulate pollution that harms people, and when it comes to things like ozone and tiny particles, there is robust evidence of the damage they can do, contributing to heart attacks and asthma attacks. Measured over populations, air pollution takes years off of people’s lives. Every year in the United States alone, air pollution pushes 135,000 people into early graves. “There is a lot of science that shows very clearly that being exposed to increasing levels of PM2.5 has significant health impacts,” said Janet McCabe, who served as the EPA’s deputy administrator under President Joe Biden. Anytime the EPA wants to issue a new regulation—say, revising how much mercury a power plant is allowed to emit—it looks at both the costs and the benefits before finalizing the rule. The EPA adds up how much companies would likely have to spend on things like installing upgraded scrubbers in smokestacks. Then the agency estimates the economic benefit of imposing the regulation, such as more days with cleaner air or fewer workers calling out sick. The biggest benefits usually come from improving health through things like avoiding hospital visits and reducing early deaths. There is some fuzziness in the numbers on both sides of the ledger though. If a bunch of companies turn to a handful of suppliers for pollution control equipment, that could drive up compliance costs. And how exactly do you price a hypothetical emergency room trip that didn’t happen? “In my experience at EPA, there’s never a perfect estimate of costs or benefits,” McCabe said. Yet even with imperfect calculations, regulators could get a decent sense of whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to a new pollution standard, and the public would get a window into how the decision was made. Under the Biden administration, the EPA found that enforcing the more stringent PM2.5 regulations it issued in 2024 would add up to $46 billion in health benefits by 2032, vastly more than the cost of complying with the rule. The EPA now effectively wants to put receipts from the benefits side of the ledger through the shredder. In theory, the EPA could still include the number of lives saved in how it considers the upside of a regulation without attaching a dollar value to it. But experts say that in practice, leaving the dollar costs of compliance in the equation and ignoring the economic value of the health benefits will likely skew the balance toward less regulation. “You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Clean Air Program at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. This change in math is part of a broader pattern at the EPA—and across the federal government—of just measuring and counting fewer things under the second Trump Administration. The EPA has already closed its Office of Research and Development, which was meant to provide the scientific basis for environmental regulations, like tracking the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body. With less data on science and economics, agencies like the EPA have less accountability for their actions as they face more pressure from the White House to cut regulations and craft policies benefiting politically favored industries. It also sets the stage for taking the teeth out of other regulations, like the Clean Air Act. The EPA has already dismantled its legal foundation for addressing climate change. Joseph Goffman, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s air and radiation office under Biden, said this change in how the EPA calculates health benefits is part of a broader campaign against air pollution regulations. “It really illustrates what the ulterior motive is and that is to mute or mask the true impact of [particulate matter] exposure and the huge benefits that flow from reducing it,” Goffman said. “Suddenly deciding that you can’t ascribe a dollar value to reducing PM really is convenient to the point of being instrumental to Zeldin’s efforts to weaken PM standards.” If the EPA never comes up with a new way to monetize the health benefits of regulations, it’s likely that improvements in air quality will stall, and air pollution could get worse. “One would anticipate that we could see PM 2.5 levels rising across the country,” Hasenkopf said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One year on from the Eaton Fire, long after the vicious winds that sent embers cascading from the San Gabriel mountains and the flames that swallowed entire streets, a shadow still hangs over Altadena. Construction on new properties is under way, and families whose homes survived the fire have begun to return. But many are grappling with an urgent question: is it safe to be here? The fire upended life in this part of Los Angeles county. By the time firefighters brought it under control, 19 people were dead, tens of thousands displaced and nearly 9,500 structures destroyed, primarily in Altadena but also in Pasadena and Sierra Madre. Guardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. All times are localGuardian graphic. Fire extent source: Cal Fire. Building damage source: analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. Using building data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and fire perimeters from NIFC/FIRIS. Note: all times are local The flames incinerated many older homes and businesses filled with lead paint and asbestos. They showered the community with toxins, leaving tall piles of ash and unseen traces of heavy metals in the soil and along and inside standing structures. Research has indicated some hazards remain even after properties have undergone remediation, the clean-up process that is supposed to restore homes and ensure they are safe to occupy. As Altadena fights to return, residents—some eager to stay in the community and others who simply can’t afford to go anywhere else—are facing immense challenges while trying to rebuild their lives and come back home. Official information about the health risks was limited early on and those returning often only learned about the dangers as they went. Some people have developed health concerns such as migraines and respiratory issues. Many are still battling their insurance companies to fully cover their costs, and make certain their homes are habitable. Their predicament highlights the increased dangers that come with urban fires, and shows how Altadena has come to serve as a sort of living laboratory with scientists and residents learning in real time. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, and her family moved back into their Altadena home over the summer after their property underwent an extensive cleanup process, but their air purifiers still register high levels of particulate matter, heavy sediment appears when they vacuum and when it rains the distinctive smell from the fire returns. “The toll of displacement was really high on my family. And I just had to move home and try [to] mitigate risk and keep fighting the good fight,” she said. “There’s always that back-of-your-mind concern: Did I make the right choice? But I also don’t have other choices.” Early on in those first careening hours of the fire, as thick smoke and ash fell like snow over her yard, Dawn Fanning was sure her home would not be spared. The wind was blowing from the fire straight to the Spanish bungalow the producer shared with her adult son, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. Dawn Fanning outside her home in Pasadena, California, on December 28 2025. The interior of her home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/Guardian Fanning’s home, miraculously, escaped the flames. But, while the stucco structure was intact—clothes still hanging undisturbed in her closet and her son’s baby photos packed carefully in bins in the garage—it hadn’t been unscathed either. Virtually nothing in Altadena was. “It’s dusty and there’s piles of ash in the windowsills and on the floor. At first glance, it doesn’t look any different,” Fanning said. “Your house looks the same—but it’s not. There’s toxicity in your attic and in your crawlspace and on your mattresses and on all the things.” Confused and frustrated with the local government’s handling of health concerns, Maccalla and Fanning joined other fire survivors to form Eaton Fire Residents United in hopes of ensuring the impacted areas recover safely. The community group is developing testing and remediation guidelines, gathered hygienic testing reports of hundreds of homes, and advocated for fire survivors and workers. > “When she awoke at 3 a.m., the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her > house, and smoke filled the room.” “There [have been] huge threats to the health and safety of residents, children in schools, elderly and immunocompromised, workers that are coming into this area that are being exposed to hazards in the workplace,” Maccalla said. “We’re still trying to work on that and get the protections people need.” Barely 15 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles, Altadena at the start of last year was home to some 43,000 people, many lured by the affordable home prices, proximity to the mountains and bucolic feel. It has long been one of the most diverse cities in the region with a thriving Black community that began to grow during the great migration. In the early evening on January 7 2025, Fanning, who had lived in her home in the area for two decades, had a feeling she couldn’t shake that something could go very wrong. There were treacherous winds that forecasters warned posed a serious fire risk. Already, a fire was spreading rapidly on the other side of the county in the Pacific Palisades, where frantic residents were trying to evacuate and firefighters were clearing the area. Some 35 miles away, Fanning and her son were watching coverage of the unfolding fire while readying their property. Then came an alert—not from officials—but from a local meteorologist who was telling his followers to get out now. Fanning spotted flames several blocks away and she and her son decided it was time to leave. A few miles to the east, Rosa Robles was evacuating with her grandchild in tow, leaving her husband and adult children. She wanted them to go—but they were protecting the home. Armed with garden hoses, they tried to save the residence and the other houses on their block. Sometimes the wind was so strong it blew the water back in their faces, Robles said. Maccalla’s power had gone out that morning, and she and her children were sitting around watching the TV drama Fire Country on an iPad in the dark when they got the call about the fire. It seemed far away at the time, Maccalla recalled, and she felt prepared as a member of a community emergency response team. They got out lamps and began packing in case they needed to leave. She set alarms hourly to monitor the progress of the fire while her children slept. When she awoke at three, the blaze had formed a horseshoe shape around her house, and smoke filled the room. The family evacuated with their two dogs and two cats. Tamara Artin had returned from work to see chaos on the street, with fierce winds and billowing smoke all around the house she rented with her husband. Artin, who is Armenian by way of Iran and has lived in Los Angeles for about six years, always loved the area. She enjoyed the history and sprawling green parks, and had been excited to live here. Now the pair was quickly abandoning the home they had moved into just three months earlier, heading toward a friend’s house with their bags and passports. Fanning and her son had gone to a friend’s home too. As they stayed up late listening to the police scanner, they heard emergency responders call out addresses where flames were spreading. These were friends’ homes. She waited to hear her own. > “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals > without knowing what it is.” In the first days after the fire began, the risk remained and there was little help available with firefighting resources spread across Los Angeles. Maccalla and her son soon returned to their property to try to protect their home and those of their neighbors. “I was working on removing a bunch of debris that had flown into the yard and all these dry leaves. I didn’t know at the time that I shouldn’t touch any of that,” she said.” The devastation in Altadena, as in the Palisades, was staggering. Many of the 19 people who died were older adults who hadn’t received evacuation warnings for hours after people in other areas of town, if at all. Physically, parts of Altadena were almost unrecognizable. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, bright red flame retardant streaked the hillsides. Off Woodbury Road, not far from where Robles and Artin lived, seemingly unblemished homes stood next to blackened lots where nothing remained but fireplaces and charred rubble—scorched bicycles, collapsed beds and warped ovens. The pungent smell of smoke seemed to embed itself in the nose. Robles would sometimes get lost in the place she had lived her whole life as she tried to navigate streets that had been stripped of any identifiable landmarks. Fire scorched the beloved community garden, the country club, an 80-year-old hardware store, the Bunny Museum and numerous schools and houses of worship. Artin and her husband returned to their home, which still stood, after a single night. They had no family in the area and nowhere else to go—hotels were packed across the county. For nearly two weeks they lived without water or power as they tried to clean up, throwing away most of their furniture and belongings, even shoes, and all of the food in the fridge and freezer. “We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals without knowing what it is, but we didn’t have a choice,” Artin recalled. As fires burn through communities, they spread particulate matter far and wide, cause intense smoke damage in standing structures and cars, and release chemicals even miles beyond the burned area. > After one round of remediation, “six out of 10 homes were still coming back > with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds.” When Fanning saw her home for the first time, thick piles of ash covered the floors. She was eager to return, but as she tried to figure out her next steps, reading scientific articles and guides, and joining Zoom calls with other concerned residents, it was clear she needed to learn more about precisely what was in the ash. Asbestos was found in her home, meaning all porous items, clothing and furniture, were completely ruined. “You can’t wash lead and asbestos out of your clothing. I was like, OK, this is real and I need to gather as much evidence [as I can] to find out what’s in my house.” In Altadena, more than 90 percent of homes had been built before 1975 and likely had lead-based paint and toxic asbestos, both of which the EPA has since banned, according to a report from the California Institute of Technology. All sorts of things burned along with the houses, Fanning said: plastic, electric cars, lithium batteries. “The winds were shoving this into our homes,” she said. The roof on Maccalla’s home had to be rebuilt, and significant cleanup was required for the smoke damage and layers of ash that blanketed curtains and beds. Despite these concerns, residents grew increasingly frustrated about what they viewed as a lack of official information about the safety of returning to their homes. Many also encountered pushback from their insurance providers that said additional testing for hazards, or more intensive remediation efforts recommended by experts, were unnecessary and not covered under their policies. So earlier this year a group of residents, including Fanning and Maccalla, formed Eaton Fire Residents United (EFRU). The group includes scientists and people dedicated to educating and supporting the community, ensuring there is data collection to support legislation, and assembling an expert panel to establish protocols for future fires, Fanning said. They’ve published research based on testing reports from hundreds of properties across the affected area, and advocated that homes should receive a comprehensive clearance before residents return. Research released by EFRU and headed by Maccalla, who has a doctorate in education and specializes in research methodology, found that more than half of homes that had been remediated still had levels of lead and/or asbestos that rendered them uninhabitable. “There’s still widespread contamination and that one round of remediation was not sufficient, the majority of the time. Six out of 10 homes were still coming back with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds,” said Maccalla, who serves as EFRU’S director of data science and educational outreach. The interior of Dawn Fanning’s home has been found to have lead and asbestos after the Eaton Fire.Stella Kalinina/The Guardian Maccalla moved back home in June after what she viewed as a decent remediation process. But she hasn’t been able to get insurance coverage for additional testing, and worries about how many people are having similar experiences. “We’re putting people back in homes without confirming that they’re free of contamination,” she said. “It feels very unethical and a very dangerous game to be playing.” She couldn’t afford not to come home, and the family couldn’t keep commuting two hours a day each way from their temporary residence to work and school or their Altadena property where Maccalla was overseeing construction. But she’s experienced headaches, her daughter’s asthma is more severe, and her pets have become sick. “I don’t think anybody that hasn’t gone through it can really comprehend what [that is like],” she said. “For everything in your environment that was so beloved to now become a threat is mentally a really hard switch,” she said. Robles settled back to the home she’s lived in for years with a few new additions. Seven of her relatives lost their homes, including her daughter who now lives with her. “I thank God there’s a place for them. That’s all that matters to me.” Nicole Maccalla with her dog, Cami, outside her home in Altadena. Stella Kalinina/The Guardian After the fire, she threw away clothes, bed sheets and pillows. The family mopped and washed the walls. Her insurance was helpful, she said, and covered the cleanup work. Robles tries not to think about the toxic contamination and chemicals that spread during the fire. “You know that saying, what you don’t know?” she said, her voice trailing off. Artin said she received some assistance from her renter’s insurance, but that her landlord hadn’t yet undertaken more thorough remediation. She’s still trying to replace some of the furniture she had to throw away. The fire had come after an already difficult year in which her husband had been laid off, and their finances were stretched. > “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” She shudders when she recalls the early aftermath of the fire, a morning sky as dark as night. “It was hell, honestly.” Her rent was set to increase in the new year, and while she fears exposure to unseen dangers, moving isn’t an option. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. We can’t do anything,” Artin said. Fanning has been battling her insurance company to cover the work that is necessary to ensure her house is safely habitable, she said. Her provider is underplaying the amount of work that needs to be done and underbidding the costs, Fanning said. She and her son have been living in a short-term rental since late summer, and she expects they won’t be able to return home before the fall. Sometimes she wonders if she’ll be up to returning at all. Even now, when Fanning drives through the area to come get her mail or check on the house, she gets headaches. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe, no matter all the things that I know and all the things that I’m gonna do. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” In between trying to restore her home, she’s focused on advocacy with EFRU, which has become her primary job, albeit unpaid. “There are so many people that don’t have enough insurance coverage, that don’t speak English, that are renters, that don’t have access like I do … I feel it’s my duty as a human.” There’s much work to do, Fanning said, and it has to be done at every single property. “It’s a long road to recovery. And if we don’t do it right, safely, it’s never gonna be what it was before.”

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter. Marc Dervaes sat straight-backed in a circle of 10 men at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. The glass window behind him looked out on a pool deck and the Pacific Ocean beyond.  Inside, sunglasses masked his eyes, and a beard grew down to his chest. His blank expression invited no sympathy, and Dervaes had none to give.  “I’m sorry if this offends anyone,” he said at the introductory circle, “but I really don’t care about any of you. I’m here for me.” Dervaes knew the men would be curious about his amputation. He mentioned losing his right arm in Afghanistan but had no intention of sharing more.  The pool deck at one of Ambio Life Sciences’ clinics near Tijuana, Mexico. Natanya Friedheim Each man had his own reason to visit the clinic, where patients pay around $8,000 for a psychedelic treatment with little scientific backing. They all hoped suffering through a brain-bending, vomit-inducing, existential jolt would cure their ailments, which ranged from malaise to traumatic brain injury. A veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Dervaes had one foot in the grave before contacting Ambio Life Sciences. Two months earlier, he had spent two days in a hospital back home in Colorado Springs with alcohol poisoning that he hoped would end his life.  “Peace was totally gone in this house,” said Michaela Dervaes, his wife of 26 years. Dervaes called the clinic after leaving the hospital. The earliest it could schedule him was April 2026—a nine-month wait. Dervaes told the man on the phone he would be dead by then.  Michaela and Marc Dervaes at an archery range in April 2021. Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes Two companies operating clinics in Tijuana, Ambio Life Sciences and The Mission Within Center, say they have treated about 3,000 U.S. veterans in the last decade. Both use the psychedelics ibogaine—derived from the root of a central African shrub—and 5-MeO-DMT—a chemical secreted by the Sonoran desert toad. A common motivation among participants has emerged: The talk therapy and prescriptions offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs proved ineffective.  Every time Breanna Morgan opens the clinic’s oversized wooden door and shows patients into the foyer—where a half-dozen staffers wait to greet them—she assumes it’s the worst day of their lives. “They’re not here because they really want to be here,” Morgan, Ambio’s guest experience manager, said in an interview. “They’re here because it’s their only option.”  > “They’re not here because they really want to be here. They’re here because > it’s their only option.”  This is the story of one of those guests—a broken veteran whose ibogaine experience would put him face-to-face with everyone in his life he had ever wronged. His tears would soak through the eye mask patients wear to limit sensory input.  Back home, confronted by another tragedy, Dervaes would quickly regret his visit to the cliffside mansion and resent the clinic that took thousands of dollars from him.  Then, four months later, he would return. Breanna Morgan, Ambio’s guest experience manager, explains to patients how to mentally prepare for ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim MEDICAL RESEARCH AND COASTAL RETREATS For decades, overseas drug rehab clinics have offered ibogaine to people addicted to cocaine and opioids. The drug’s use among military veterans has surged over the last four years. Despite support from veterans, a push for more research, and efforts by advocates to legalize the psychedelic treatment in the United States, much remains unknown about the drugs’ long-term effectiveness and safety. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration considers both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT Schedule 1 substances, meaning the agency finds both have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. A nurse checks Marc Dervaes’ blood pressure before he and nine other patients go to a backyard sweat lodge. Ibogaine can cause heart arrhythmias.Natanya Friedheim Psychedelic medicine advocates fear the expensive, decade-long process of bringing a new drug to market in the U.S. will adulterate both the drugs and the environments in which people take them.   Researchers, meanwhile, fear that the media hype and the proliferation of ceremonies replete with New Age rhetoric and dubious claims will undermine their efforts to gain FDA approval.  As debates play out at state legislatures and research conferences, it is here, in a coastal retreat center down the road from an open-air fruit stand, that veterans come in a desperate attempt to find relief.   Behind the clinic, a steep path, wide enough for trucks full of families, boogie boards, and fishing poles, leads to a beach covered in sand blackened with pollution.Natanya Friedheim ALIVE DAY  Dervaes’ journey to the clinic began more than a decade ago. It was in September 2009 in eastern Afghanistan. Corn grew 8 feet high on either side of the unpaved road outside of Jalalabad.  Dervaes clutched the passenger’s seat grab handle as the mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle rumbled along. A platoon sergeant with 15 years as an Army infantryman under his belt, Dervaes felt invincible.  He had survived a bullet to his helmet during his first deployment to Iraq. On his second, he spent 16 grinding months guarding nighttime construction crews in Baghdad.  His convoy drove in a tight pack. That day, a gap formed between his truck and the three others ahead, Dervaes said. “The enemy took full advantage.” Dervaes bent over a junction box to fiddle with a defective cord, his right arm still clutching the grab handle. When he looked up, he saw a man outside, a rocket-propelled grenade mounted on his shoulder aimed at Dervaes.   A big flash, pressure, and heat. Dervaes collapsed over the junction box. His right arm, wristwatch still attached, landed in the driver’s lap. He came to as the driver, his foot still on the gas, pulled Dervaes up by his helmet.  Another RPG shot through the passenger door and out the roof. The truck caught fire and filled with smoke. Chunks of flesh and bone covered the side of the cab. Dervaes heard screaming. “Someone else is hurt,” he thought. “Someone else in the truck is either dead or hurt.”  Before he was medevaced, Marc Dervaes pulled a camera out of his pocket to chronicle the ambush in which he lost his right arm in Afghanistan. He said the photo shows resilience.Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes His body tingled. His vision grew blurry. A man with a belt-fed machine gun emerged from the stalks of corn. Somehow, the truck kept moving forward. “Drive. Drive. Don’t stop,” Dervaes said as bullets shattered the windshield.  He spent eight months recovering at an Army hospital in San Antonio, Texas, then returned to Fort Carson, Colorado, just as his unit got back from Afghanistan. He and the driver finally had time to look back. Dervaes longed to fill gaps in his memory.  “Who was screaming?” Dervaes remembers asking.  “It was you,” the driver said.  LIFE AFTER WAR Like so many Americans, Dervaes battled prescription opioid addiction after his surgeries. He faced a personal crisis, described by many veterans, of adapting to a civilian life that lacks the structure, urgency, and adrenaline soldiers grow accustomed to at war. He sought thrills as a U.S. Paralympic snowboarder. He and his wife began cave diving. As a volunteer for the nonprofit Team River Runner, he designed prosthetics for adaptive kayaking. He helped to launch the Colorado Springs chapter of the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. He instructs children with disabilities in snowboarding.  Dervaes threw himself into extreme sports after his battlefield injuries.Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes More than a decade of athleticism landed him seven rib fractures, a concussion, a bruised lung, and three surgeries on his left arm, all between 2021 and 2025. So damaged was his left arm, his only arm, that he could hold neither a Voodoo Ranger beer can nor his basset hound puppy Ruby.  The pain led him to spiral.  Hours before traveling to Tijuana, Dervaes paced around the lobby of the Sheraton San Diego Resort. A hotel staffer asked if he was OK. The night before, his wife blocked the hotel room door to prevent Dervaes from leaving. Sober for three months, a requirement of attending the clinic, Dervaes wanted a drink. He feared the treatment, a last-ditch effort to address his deteriorating mental health and excessive drinking, would fail.   Two SUVs pulled up in front of the hotel’s entryway fountain. It was a Tuesday morning in early August. Dervaes sat alone in the back seat of one as drivers piled luggage into the trunks.  “How’s it going, man?” asked Brad Banks, a medical device salesman trying to quit drinking, as he slid next to Dervaes. Maintaining his forward gaze, Dervaes barely grunted.  The men rode in silence past the border checkpoints where Mexican officers wore rifles slung across their chests. In the beachside community of Playas de Tijuana, the SUVs turned down an unpaved road.  Across from a cluster of shanties, a concrete wall fortifies the clinic, an 11-bedroom compound where foreigners come and go each week. The entrance to one of Ambio Life Sciences’ clinics in MexicoNatanya Friedheim A stay at Ambio starts with an EKG, one of many medical tests the clinic requires to ensure patients are fit for ibogaine. The drug has a narrow therapeutic window, meaning a little more than an effective dose can be toxic. Too much can cause heart arrhythmias.  A 2022 review of literature published on ibogaine found 38 deaths and 20 medical emergencies associated with its use documented in medical literature. In most of those cases, the drug was used to treat opioid addiction. Other emergencies may have gone undocumented given ibogaine’s use in nonmedical settings.  Both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT can exacerbate existing mania or psychosis, according to Martín Polanco, a doctor who founded The Mission Within Center in Tijuana. Three hours after arrival, the men changed into swim trunks and crowded back into the Suburbans. Dervaes’ tough-guy veneer started melting away on the drive to a backyard sweatlodge. “I think it’s time we discuss sweat lodge etiquette,” he said from the back seat, squished beside two passengers. “No farting in the sweat lodge.”  A nurse checks Marc Dervaes’s heart with an EKG within hours of his arrival at Ambio Life Sciences. Monitoring is required to ensure patients are fit to take ibogaine. Natanya Friedheim ‘DON’T COME HERE TO GET HIGH’ Few people report enjoying their experience on ibogaine. Many have visions. Some see deceased relatives. To some patients’ chagrin, they see and feel nothing.  People who have taken ibogaine refer to the frequent vomiting during the more than 10-hour trip as “purging” and frame it as part of the healing experience.  The men sat around the large wooden dining table on Wednesday, the morning before they took ibogaine. Over French toast and chicken enchiladas, Isaac Pulido told them he could not predict how they would feel that night. “Many years of doing this and we still don’t have the power,” he said.  Pulido estimates he has overseen more than 4,000 treatments over the last 16 years. A nurse with a doctorate specializing in intensive care, he oversees treatments at all Ambio’s clinics in Mexico.  “Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high,” he told the men. “But if you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.” Intensive care nurse Isaac Pulido administers the treatments in Ambio’s Mexico clinics. Natanya Friedheim Doses at Ambio vary based on each patient’s body weight. If the person feels nothing after about two hours, they can take a booster pill.  > “Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high. But if > you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.” It’s possible that lower, nonhallucinogenic doses have benefits without cardiotoxicity, said David Olson, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and director at the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics. But a lot of people who take hallucinogenic drugs want to trip out and end up disappointed if they don’t.  “They expect to see unicorns and all that shit,” Pulido said in an interview. Dervaes did not see unicorns.  The third and final dose of ibogaine is taken with honey. Natanya Friedheim DANTE’S INFERNO Around 10 p.m. that night, the men had swallowed their third pill. They collected pillows and descended stairs to the clinic’s treatment room. Twin mattresses lined the walls, each with a mirror propped in front of it. The men sat cross-legged on the edge of their mattresses like preschoolers getting ready for nap time. They shook rattles and stared in their mirrors. Over the next hour, lo-fi music gave way to a chaotic mix of plucked string instruments, traditional ceremonial Gabonese music.  Six nurses, two paramedics, and two doctors kept watch over the patients, who wore heart monitors throughout the night.  Patients wear heart monitors throughout the night as they experience the effects of ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim As Dervaes shook his rattle, his reflection showed him something evil, as he recalled 36 hours after his ibogaine trip. He tried to smile or change his expression. He slid on an eye mask and lay back to visions he feared would continue all night: wave after wave of people he had wronged. Each time he tried to apologize, a new vision appeared.  The drug exacerbated the severe tinnitus in his left ear. When he lifted his mask, Dervaes saw the room on fire with piles of bodies and people retching.  In the early afternoon the following day, as the drug’s effects waned, Dervaes looked in the mirror. His big brown eyes looked back at him. His downturned and angry brows had vanished.  Ibogaine’s effect on the brain has long puzzled pharmacologists. The drug reduces depression and anxiety and blocks drug withdrawals, said Deborah Mash, a pioneering ibogaine researcher who received FDA approval to study the drug in the mid-1990s.  While ibogaine leaves the blood within 24 hours, its metabolite noribogaine—what the liver creates after processing ibogaine—stays in the body longer. Noribogaine pumps the brain with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with mood and motivation. Drug abuse and depression are associated with dopamine deficiency. “You’re helping to restore dopamine homeostasis in the brain,” Mash said. “The enduring effect is a question that neuroscience hasn’t completely worked out.”  Ambio nurse Angie Serrano puts smoke from burning sage, a practice known as “smudging,” around Mark Dervaes’ body before he takes ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim THE SECOND TRIP The men ambled back to their rooms around midday Thursday. The sleepover party had ended. Many people experience hangover symptoms after the hallucinogenic effects of ibogaine wear off.  Only a few of the patients made it to breakfast the following morning. After a day of rest, the men would inhale another psychedelic, a synthetic version of 5-MeO-DMT.  The men circled up in the living room around noon on Friday. An Ambio employee’s prelude to the upcoming drug sounded like a warning: “For the people who are going to be here, waiting for their turn,” she said, “if you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.” > “If you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about > to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.” Controversy exists over whether 5-MeO-DMT should be used in conjunction with ibogaine. “There’s no good medical or scientific reason for that at all,” said Albert Garcia-Romeu, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who studies psychedelics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dervaes sat in a hallway waiting his turn. He had arrived at the clinic indifferent to others. Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about a fellow patient, a young man whose bad ibogaine trip caused him to cry throughout the night.  Dervaes slipped off his sandals and relaxed in a hammock during down time at the clinic. In a few hours, he would smoke 5-MeO-DMT.Natanya Friedheim The sounds of wailing traveled down the hallway from a room where another patient, a fellow veteran, took 5-MeO-DMT.  “I have a feeling this is going to hurt,” Dervaes said. “It’s OK. I’ve got to let it go. I have to let all this go. I don’t want to carry it anymore.” When his turn came, Dervaes sat on a cluster of mattresses covered in serape blankets. He inhaled vapor from a pipe and lay back. In less than a minute, he began to cry. “Holy shit,” he said, starting to sit up before lying back down to convulsions.  Dervaes came out of the trip ready for a second dose. “How do you feel?” the woman asked after he sat up minutes later. “I feel reborn,” he said, his eyelashes wet with tears.  Five days later, back home in Colorado, Dervaes updated the group on his progress via their Signal chat.  He had gone to Costco.  “I DON’T GO TO COSTCO!” he wrote. “It was amazing, I didn’t feel like I wanted to strangle anyone! There was no anxiety, fear, or anger; I felt safe!!” Ambio nurse Angie Serrano props her head up on her hand as she waits for Dervaes to come out of his 5-MeO-DMT trip. Natanya Friedheim TRAUMA RETURNS  If patients experience stress after taking psychedelics, the drugs “can do more damage than good,” according to Gul Dolen, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.  Dolen’s work found psychedelics reopen “critical periods”—windows when the brain is more sensitive to its environment and more capable of learning during early childhood and other critical periods. In the same way a person who just had open-heart surgery shouldn’t climb stairs, people who take psychedelics shouldn’t expose themselves to traumatic events. “Think of this as open-mind surgery,” Dolen said.  For Dervaes, the trauma returned less than a month after returning from Ambio. He lost a friend to suicide. The devastation ripped through his community of friends. In a Zoom call hosted by an Ambio counselor with about 30 former patients, frustration mounted. The healing stopped. Dervaes started drinking. “Regression,” he said.  Marc Dervaes looks out at the Pacific Ocean minutes after taking 5-MeO-DMT. Natanya Friedheim Suddenly, he questioned everything about his ibogaine journey: the healing, the expense, the hope. “I was angry for even going there and wasting my time and money.” Still, his wife, Michaela, noticed subtle changes. He was showing less rage on the road and making progress on letting things that upset him go. Over the next three months, he read more books than he had willingly read in his life, including A Lifetime at War, about a veteran more severely wounded than Dervaes.  “It was like: Wake the fuck up, man,” Dervaes said, “because you’re not the only one that’s out here hurting.” Instead of retreating, he would double down. In early December, as the first snow peppered Colorado Springs, Dervaes packed his bag. Like a growing number of Ambio’s patients, he was returning. Things fell into place quickly. A spot became available at the clinic. A nonprofit agreed to sponsor his trip. On the last day, Breanna Morgan presents Marc Dervaes with his rattle to take home from the clinic. Natanya Friedheim At a fireside ceremony before taking ibogaine for a second time, Dervaes vowed never to touch alcohol again. He has new goals, he said, and the tools to maneuver through life: prayer, meditation, plus treatments like magnetic e-resonance therapy for his post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. He said he might go back to Ambio again. Michaela Dervaes met her husband at the San Diego airport as he returned from his second trip to Mexico. She looked into his face. The soft eyes and smile were back. The ups and downs have left her exhausted.  “Even though everything seems wonderful right now, there could be just something happening, and it’ll go downhill,” she said. For now, she is hopeful. She sees how hard he is trying. “With this new treatment, I’m thinking we’re at peace.”    This War Horse news story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.