So are we having a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. or not? University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm has forecast a COVID “Category 5 hurricane” this spring. To some people, a look at hard-hit Michigan could justify this level of alarm.

But Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia could also claim to be ...Read more

2020 was the year that the climate crisis came to my doorstep — again. Just eight years after my parents’ home was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy, record-breaking wildfires swept through the West, claiming homes, lives and even an entire town. For one terrifying day, my sky turned orange; for weeks afterward, my family and I and millions of ...Read more

The news that Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, will not run for the U.S. Senate is something of a shame. That’s not because she would certainly be a good senator, or even a good candidate. Those are unknowns. But she would have been different.

Is different good in itself?

No.

But when politics seems broken, ...Read more

So, I’m reading about the cop who shot Daunte Wright in Minnesota on Sunday and the police chief who defended her deadly mistake, and I’m wondering if there has ever been a time in the history of law enforcement when an officer grabbed his Taser by accident when he meant to pull his gun.

Kim Potter’s weapon was still warm when stories ...Read more

Stephen Miller, the former Trump White House senior adviser and speechwriter from Santa Monica, has gone back to the California conservative playbook for his next act: launching a legal group that co-opts social justice strategies to fight social justice.

Miller is characterizing his group, America First Legal, as a conservative version of the ...Read more

Bernie Madoff is dead, and it is unlikely that even the people who were once closest to him will shed a tear. Not his wife, Ruth, whose life was destroyed when Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was revealed in December 2008. Not his brother, Peter, Madoff’s former chief compliance officer, who spent nearly a decade in prison after pleading guilty to a ...Read more

All medicines, including those sold over the counter, come with a risk to the user. And as those otherwise breezy commercials for pharmaceuticals remind us, the most serious risk may include death. COVID-19 vaccines are no exception.

That’s why federal regulators responsibly recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 ...Read more

The operating room nurse, a trim, muscular white man in his 30s, possessed the brisk and efficient movements of one well-versed in the elaborate ritual of running a surgical suite.

My assistant that night, a young male surgeon-in-training, and I had been called to a hospital a hundred miles from ours to help procure organs from a patient ...Read more

Growing up in Texas, I did not feel comfortable revealing that I identify as gay. In addition to experiencing homophobia all around me, I remember walking into my doctor’s office and realizing that I didn’t feel safe discussing my sexuality with the very person for whom my health was supposed to be a priority.

As a young person, I didn’t ...Read more

When a quarterback leads his team to the Super Bowl, he usually says something along the lines of, “We’re glad we made it this far, but we’re not done yet.” The same could be said our planet’s health. Celebrating progress is no excuse for accepting the status quo.

But how we move forward is just as important as why. To meet the ...Read more

As the COVID-19 vaccines show, pharmaceutical innovation provides the best hope of ending the pandemic. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is launching what amounts to a federal assault against such innovation.

That assault will take the form of federal price controls on prescription medicines. When the House of Representatives attempted ...Read more

The destructive effects of ocean-bottom trawling are easy enough to imagine from any basic description of the practice. Heavy nets 100 yards wide, equipped with weighted rollers and steel doors, are dragged across the seafloor to scoop up cod, halibut, flounder, rockfish, shrimp and other deep-dwelling prey.

In the process, corals, sponges, ...Read more

The frequency of natural disasters has soared in recent decades. Total damage topped $210 billion worldwide in 2020. With climate change, the costs attributed to coastal storms will increase dramatically.

At the same time, coastal habitats such as wetlands and reefs are being lost rapidly. Some 20% of the world’s mangroves were lost over the ...Read more

A year ago, as the world was coming to grips with the pandemic, many of us moved away from simply seeing masks as a necessary evil to a form of creative expression. Sometimes they would be bedazzled. Other times a team logo.

My favorite are the ones with popular TV catchphrases etched on them, like "How you doin'?" from "Friends," which, in ...Read more

Anyone who has parented a toddler will be able to relate to the day Michaeleen Doucleff, in her own words, “hit bottom.”

She was lying in bed in San Francisco before sunrise, the house still quiet as her 3-year-old daughter and husband slept. “I was preparing for battle,” she later wrote. “I was going over in my head how to handle the...Read more

In a comeback story for the ages, the U.S. bald eagle population in the lower 48 states has quadrupled in the last 12 years.

At its most endangered point in 1963, there were only 417 known nesting pairs of bald eagles in the very country that chose the eagle as its national symbol.

Now there are more than 300,000, up from about 72,000 in 2009....Read more

Blood clots in veins that drain blood from the brain can lead to alarming strokelike results. The symptoms can be severe headaches, abdominal pain, leg pain and shortness of breath.

That’s why it made sense for federal, state and local health officials to hit the pause button Tuesday and again on Wednesday on continued distribution of the ...Read more

On Aug. 11, 2017, a self-styled “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, horrified the country with a chilling display of hundreds of young white men marching by torchlight, chanting racist slogans like “blood and soil,” “white lives matter” and “you will not replace us.” The next day, a young neo-Nazi plowed a car ...Read more

Despite recent setbacks in Michigan and elsewhere, the United States is gradually approaching the day when we may be able to declare the COVID-19 pandemic under control — within our borders, that is.

But that won't mean the problem is over in the rest of the world — or even here at home in the long run.

Until there is worldwide control of ...Read more

Our hearts sank on word Tuesday that officials at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, zealously guarding their reputations as the most careful and protective regulatory agencies in the world, were recommending a pause in the safe, easy-to-store, proven-to-be-effective, one-dose Johnson & Johnson ...Read more