July 6, 2020 3:05 PM EDT
The vilification of public health officials in the COVID-19 crisis reminds us of their vital role as the crossing guards of science. When their vigilance gives us the green light to eat, drink, and recreate, we hardly notice them waving us onto normal activities, barely knowing their names.
June 11, 2020 6:22 PM EDT
The potential health impacts of protests pales in comparison to the rioting of the virus and the looting of lives incited by the incompetence of the Trump administration and state decisions to prioritize reopening for business over public health. Read more >
May 8, 2020 12:49 PM EDT
This is what reopening looks like in the United States today. To the White House, governors, and the privileged, they are merely reopening business. To the laborers who keep those businesses open, the madness of being forced back to work when coronavirus still rages reopens the enduring wounds of structural racism. The coronavirus is proving beyond anything we’ve known in modern times how an infected wound can become a death sentence. Read more >
April 25, 2020 10:00 AM EDT
In its latest act of abdication, the Environmental Protection Agency has published its Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register, removing protections from half of America’s wetlands and a fifth of streams and tributary headwaters. Read more >
April 9, 2020 11:00 AM EDT
As much as the denial of science is a hallmark of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, Wisconsin Republicans took things to a new level with their cynical decision to hold in-person voting in the midst of a deadly pandemic. As my scientist wife, Dr. Michelle Holmes, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, put it, “This isn’t just denial of science. This is pure exploitation of science.”
