Original Content Archives - Genetic Literacy Project

America’s health care apparatus is caught in a downward spiral of bureaucratic bloat, runaway expenses and eroding patient care. On this episode of the Facts and Fallacies podcast, emergency medicine physician Dr. Liza Lockwood and host Cameron English pick up their dissection of the systemic failures destroying modern medicine, tracing the crisis to decades of heavy-handed government intervention and corporate consolidation.

What began in the 1990s with HMOs and pre-authorizations metastasized into an administrative nightmare. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) devolved into cumbersome billing engines, while federal mandates like the High Tech Act and the Affordable Care Act priced independent practices out of existence. Saddled with massive student debt and restrictive non-compete clauses, young physicians are funneled into hospital systems as underpaid employees, permanently severing the doctor-patient relationship.

Meanwhile, predatory litigation—such as long-tail liability for obstetricians—and rampant fraud within government programs like Medicaid siphon billions from taxpayers. Perverse economic incentives dominate the landscape, leaving insured patients facing steep deductibles and medical bills that remain a primary cause of personal bankruptcy. This systemic breakdown has also driven disillusioned patients toward unverified alternative treatments.

Dr. Lockwood argues that true reform will not emerge from inside the machine or through top-down regulations, which only expand administrative waste. Instead, the path forward requires bypassing corporate and federal middlemen. By embracing Direct Primary Care, transparent surgical centers, health savings accounts and alternative financing networks, medicine can restore genuine competition, slash overhead costs, and empower physicians to focus on healing rather than paperwork.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they continue to examine America’s broken health care system.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Is Europe’s ideological aversion to air conditioning quietly killing thousands of people? A surprising body of evidence suggests that the continent’s green activism and energy degrowth mindset have turned a solvable public health challenge into a deadly political failure. As climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. explains in his recent analysis, Europe has warmed about 0.5°C per decade since the 1980s, driving clear increases in extreme heat stress days and summer heat mortality, with 68,000 deaths in 2022 marking a recent high point.

Yet Europe largely chooses these outcomes. Household air conditioning penetration sits at just 19% across much of the EU, compared to roughly 76% in North America and over 90% in Japan. Rigorous U.S. data show AC deployment cuts the risk of dying on extremely hot days by roughly 75%, despite more frequent heat waves. Indeed, northern European countries with relatively temperate climates and low AC rates (e.g., Germany 3%, UK 5%) contribute surprisingly large shares of avoidable deaths alongside hotter Mediterranean nations.

Pielke estimates that matching North American AC use could avert roughly 26,000 heat deaths in a particularly hot summer like 2022. Near-universal coverage could save some 35,000 lives annually. And the gains would concentrate among the elderly—over-65s comprise roughly 93% of deaths—making targeted cooling in homes, care facilities and hospitals effective and affordable.

This could be done without compromising the EU’s climate goals, since countries like France already have largely decarbonized electrical grids; more energy use does not necessitate higher CO2 emissions.

The core problem lies in ideological policies that treat energy consumption itself as a vice: EU building directives, national thermostat rules, permitting barriers, and a broader cultural hostility to “active” cooling all elevate heat-death risk. These policies are reversible with sufficient political will.

As with most sustainability debates, balancing environmental protection with adaptation is not only possible in this case but necessary since lives are on the line. Europe’s experience stands as a cautionary tale against letting degrowth dogma override public health. Evidence-based pragmatism protects the vulnerable. Symbolic technophobia costs lives.

Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Weiser spoke with KFF Health News on the evening before World AIDS Day, which the U.S. government, for the first time since 1988, didn’t acknowledge this year. That was only the latest blow to efforts to combat HIV. The Trump administration has cut funds to provide lifesaving HIV care abroad, withheld money to prevent and treat HIV in the U.S., and fired HIV experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Weiser was fired from the CDC during mass layoffs in April, was rehired in June, and then resigned. He continues to treat patients at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. In November, he published an article that warns against complying with presidential orders to censor data about transgender people.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

LISTEN: Former CDC official John Weiser speaks with KFF Health News correspondent Amy Maxmen about his resignation from the agency and why he thinks complying with President Donald Trump’s orders to erase transgender people is bad for science and society.

In the first weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump issued several executive orders with implications for HIV programs. One directed federal employees to exclude gender identities that didn’t correspond to a person’s biological sex assigned at birth.

On how this played out at the CDC:

We were told to scrub any mention of gender or transgender people from dozens of research papers and surveillance reports that had already been published or were going to be published, and to stop collecting information from participants about their gender identity. For example, we had to recalculate our numbers on HIV among men who have sex with men, or MSM, a category that the CDC changed to “males who have sex with males.”

The CDC had no director at the time. The order came from on high. And there was no discussion about whether we wanted to comply with the directive.

On how this directive has affected his research:

Using data from the Medical Monitoring Project, we found that people with HIV who misused opioids were more likely to engage in behaviors that could pass on HIV to another person — through unprotected sex or shared injection. And we found that very few people who misused opioids were receiving treatments for substance misuse. This information could have been useful to change clinical practice and boost funding to treat people with HIV who misuse opioids.

We were getting ready to publish this study, but when I put the paper through CDC’s clearance process, I was told to remove data about the prevalence of opioid misuse among transgender people.

I thought carefully about that, and I decided not to do that, because it’s bad science to suppress data for ideologic reasons and because erasing people from the story harms actual people. I thought about my transgender patients and how I would face them, and what I would say to them while I’m sitting with them in the exam room, knowing that I had erased their existence from CDC.

I withdrew the paper. It remains unpublished.

On how removing data harms people:

Purging data about transgender people has the effect of erasing them from the real world, pretending that they don’t exist. This group of people is heavily affected by HIV, and this type of information informs improvements in treatment. My transgender patients struggle with poverty, with unstable housing, with food insecurity, with mental health disorders, with substance misuse, and face a huge amount of stigma and discrimination in their daily lives.

My transgender patients are trying to get by, day by day. They’re trying to survive. I think it’s important to realize that somebody who is transgender needs to feel comfortable in their own body to be healthy — and denying them recognition compounds their challenges.

After the executive order came down, one of my patients said she felt even more afraid of being in public and not passing, and so she was considering having additional surgical treatment to feel safer. Her concern was not about politics. It was about survival.

On why the CDC went along with orders to remove transgender data:

I think the hope was that by complying with the directive, other work at the CDC would be spared. And unfortunately, that hasn’t proved to be the case. Funding for the Medical Monitoring Project was terminated after 20 years, and the concern within CDC is that the president will eliminate all HIV prevention and surveillance funding.

One of my concerns while there was that if it’s OK to comply with a directive to remove information about gender, what if the next demand is that we don’t report about people who emigrated from other countries, or on people who are experiencing homelessness? What if there’s a directive to suppress data about a particular racial or ethnic group that’s unpopular? How far would we go?

Some HIV clinics and organizations have considered curtailing their work with transgender people and undocumented immigrants, or on equity initiatives, because they fear the loss of federal funds.

His advice on these decisions:

People making these decisions are in a really tough spot. They want to do what’s best for their programs. They want to do what’s best for their employees. They want to do what’s best for the people they’re charged with taking care of. Those are careful decisions that need to be made weighing all of the considerations. What I want these leaders to do is also consider how a decision to essentially throw one group of people under the bus undermines scientific integrity and harms everyone.

 And I think that it’s also necessary for the rise of autocracy to go along, to compromise, to acquiesce. While all of this was going on, I heard an interview with Masha Gessen, who is a Russian American journalist who writes about the rise of autocracy. Gessen explained that decisions to go along are not made because people are unethical or heartless. They’re rational choices. They’re made in order to protect something that’s important — institutions, families, jobs — even if it means sacrificing principles. Gessen’s point is that this gradual process of compromising ultimately is what solidifies an autocrat’s power.

On why he resigned from the CDC:

As a physician working at the CDC, numbers have always described individual people, people whose suffering I witness. When you know somebody, they’re no longer just a concept that you make a judgment about.

I realized that I could do more good by spending more time with my patients than I could working for the CDC under this administration.

Amy Maxmen is a science journalist in New York City who covers the entanglements of health, climate, policy and the people behind research. Find Amy on X @amymaxmen

A version of this article was originally posted at Kaiser Family Foundation Health News and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find Kaiser Health News on X @KFFHealthNews

Americans across the political spectrum embrace this rights-based rhetoric, even people who are generally hostile to Kennedy’s agenda; for instance, scientists who advocate for universal health care often frame access to medicine as a human right. Nevertheless, critics of the MAHA campaign argue that health freedom is merely a smokescreen masking an insidious agenda. Kennedy and his compatriots cloak their policy goals in the language of liberty, the argument goes, but they have no problem imposing their preferences on Americans when they can get away with it.

For example, the FDA under Kennedy’s leadership recently changed federal recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, a move that could limit access to the shots even if people want them and could benefit from the protection they provide. And earlier in his career, RFK, Jr. was caught on camera advocating for the imprisonment of prominent businessmen he deemed proponents of climate change misinformation. The man clearly has an authoritarian streak, in other words.

These observations invite some important questions: is health freedom a legitimate concept that has been abused by cynical MAHA activists? Is the very idea of “health freedom” a fiction? Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they scrutinize “health freedom.”

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Rather shamefully, the email was carefully tailored to avoid several awkward facts that refuted the firm’s litigation narrative.

First, the recall—and the subsequent litigation—stemmed from North Carolina health officials alerting the FDA to lead in Wanabana products, ultimately triggering the bankruptcy of the U.S. company and the closure of its Ecuadorian cinnamon supplier. By October 2024, the CDC reported 130 asymptomatic cases of elevated blood lead levels, four illnesses, and no deaths: isolated incidents caught by health officials, not a widespread crisis. An extensive 2025 review found that “… the daily inorganic arsenic exposure for most Americans … did not rise to a level that was a concern to pose elevated risks of harmful health outcomes,” a conclusion echoed by another expert who analyzed the data.

More broadly, the American Academy of Pediatrics (2021) notes that baby foods contribute minimally to overall metal exposure, while a 2016 study detected negligible lead in U.S. samples. The simple fact is that heavy metals are ubiquitous; zero exposure is impossible, and lead levels have plummeted since the 1970s. Trial lawyers are again peddling fear in pursuit of profit. U.S. baby foods are carefully tested and regulated. In rare cases where companies sell unsafe products, they face financial ruin.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they deconstruct an anti-chemical litigation pitch from a tort law firm.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Labels from the Non-GMO Project imply that genetically engineered crops are inherently harmful when they aren’t. The Project’s marketing capitalizes on consumer confusion, ignoring that genetic modification is an unavoidable feature of all plant breeding methods—including those that produce products affixed with the Non-GMO Project butterfly. The result? Consumers pay inflated prices without receiving any tangible health benefits.

Similarly, “hormone-free” meat claims are misleading, because all meat contains naturally occurring hormones. The term typically refers to meat from animals not given synthetic hormones. But in poultry and pork, synthetic hormones are already banned in the U.S., making the label redundant. For beef, the FDA ensures hormone residues are negligible and safe. Studies confirm no health risks from approved hormone use in livestock. The label creates a false dichotomy, suggesting conventional meat is unsafe. It also ignores the fact that hormone supplementation reduces the environmental footprint of animal agriculture, allowing farmers to produce affordable, sustainable proteins that promote healthy eating.

Detox programs, often marketed as cleanses or diets to “flush toxins,” lack scientific credibility. The human body has evolved efficient detoxification systems—primarily the liver, kidneys, and digestive tract—that eliminate harmful substances naturally. No quality studies support the need for detox diets or supplements. Claims of removing vague “toxins” are unquantifiable and often exploit wellness trends for profit.

These marketing strategies thrive on pseudoscience, misrepresenting complex processes to instill fear. Consumers seeking healthier choices are misled into paying premiums for products offering no proven benefits, diverting attention from evidence-based habits that actually promote better health.

Join Dr. Kevin Folta and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they discuss the flaws behind these popular but baseless marketing fads.

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker, and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on X @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

How does this process work? IVF is a fertility treatment where eggs are retrieved from ovaries, fertilized with sperm in a lab, and resulting embryos are transferred to the uterus. Embryo selection, often through preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), involves screening embryos for genetic abnormalities before implantation. While these technologies offer hope to many, they come with notable risks.

Technical challenges

The first problem is that IVF isn’t seamless. Multiple embryo transfers increase the chance of twins or higher-order pregnancies, raising complications like preterm birth and low birth weight. Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a potential side effect from fertility drugs, can cause abdominal pain, bloating, and in rare cases, blood clots. There’s also a slightly elevated risk of birth defects and hypertensive disorders. If more people opt to use IVF as a means of “designing” their babies, there’s a chance these negative outcomes will become more frequent.

Then there are concerns about the accuracy of embryo screening. Polygenic risk scores are not iron-clad guarantees, they’re statistical associations based on limited population data. While they’re accurate up to a point, they can’t account for every variable that influences the traits we’re interested in, for example environmental factors that affect disease risk. In short, PGT can’t tell you when or even if a particular trait will materialize—only that it might.

Ethical dilemmas

But assuming these reproductive technologies work as intended, the greatest concerns stem from unresolved ethical dilemmas. For instance, what happens when parents select an embryo with a lower risk of cancer but a higher risk of diabetes? Or consider a scenario where someone wants a child with a physical deficit like deafness? These scenarios raise the question of regulation. Who determines how these reproductive technologies are used, and what basis do they make these decisions? The risk of abuse by governments is obvious.

Philosopher Jonathan Anomaly is a well-known proponent of embryo selection and the author of Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement. While he acknowledges the validity of these myriad concerns about designer babies, he argues that they’re surmountable with technological improvements and sensible rules that balance parental autonomy with common sense.

Is embryo selection the start of a biomedical revolution, or a gateway to a totalitarian future? Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they explore the messy ethics of embryo selection with Jonathan Anomaly.

Jonny Anomaly is a former professor and currently head of communications at Herasight, a company that provides polygenic embryo screening. Find him on X @JonathanAnomaly

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

In hyperreal environments like Instagram and X, fine-tuned narratives—cultivated by capable but ethically suspect storytellers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr—create a “reality” that feels authentic but lacks an original reference point. Author and legal scholar Ron Chapman argues that these platforms surgically exploit psychological truths to guide decisions, fostering a world where emotion trumps fact. Combined with the prevailing social dogma that “my lived experience” is the ultimate standard of morality, hyperreality distorts our judgement—driving us to make decisions that could harm ourselves and others.

The core challenge in hyperreality for both content creators and consumers is balancing persuasion’s power with ethical responsibility. But how do we do that exactly?

In his book Truth and Persuasion: In the Digital Revolution, Chapman explores how influence shapes our world in an era of competing truths, examining how persuasion is crafted, consumed, and contested across political speeches, TikTok trends, and brand campaigns. It offers a roadmap to decode, resist, and responsibly wield influence in a digital age dominated by social media algorithms and viral content.

Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they explore the consequences of hyperreality with Ron Chapman.

Ron Chapman is a federal criminal defense attorney and author of the book Truth and Persuasion. Visit his Substack and follow him on X @RonChapmanAtty.

Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

The ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S. has fueled intense speculation about how politics influences vaccine hesitancy. With over 1,200 confirmed cases reported across 37 jurisdictions by mid-2025, the outbreak underscores the reemergence of a disease once eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, largely due to declining vaccination rates. According to recent data from a Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Tracking Poll, a significant portion of Americans, particularly Republicans, are encountering and accepting misinformation about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The poll indicates that 20 percent of Republicans and 21 percent of independents believe or lean toward the notion that the MMR vaccine is more dangerous than measles itself, compared to just 11 percent of Democrats. This dichotomy is also evidenced by 35 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of independents accepting the false link between the shot and autism, against only 10 percent of Democrats.

While these numbers suggest that partisanship is a useful metric for measuring vaccine hesitancy, zooming out and considering a broader context paints a different picture. The same polling data shows that, despite widespread exposure to false claims—such as the idea that vitamin A can prevent measles—83 percent of adults and 78 percent of parents remain confident in the MMR vaccine’s safety.

Moreover, less than five percent of adults say it’s “definitely true” that the MMR vaccine has been proven to cause autism, or that getting the measles vaccine is more dangerous than a measles infection. Finally, “much larger shares [of the public] say those same claims are ‘definitely false,'” KFF reported. Most Americans, whatever their political affiliation, are not anti-vaccine, with about half falling in the “malleable middle,” meaning they can be convinced to immunize their children.

This points to a potential but serious issue with politicized vaccine messaging. Research shows that amplifying vaccine hesitancy tends to encourage more of it; if the media reports that vaccine skepticism is commonplace, Americans are more likely to adopt that perspective. “The most powerful way to convince students to get vaccinated for influenza was telling them that a large proportion of fellow students had also opted for vaccination,” one analysis of vaccine-promotion strategies concluded. “There is considerable evidence that letting people know what other people do is one of the most effective ways of increasing that behavior,” the authors added.

In other words, since large majorities of the public and parents are “very” or “somewhat confident” that the MMR vaccine is safe, those facts should be stressed to the minority who are scared or skeptical of vaccines. Bottom line: politicizing vaccine hesitancy is a PR faux pas. Public health experts, physicians, and journalists should be encouraging all Americans to vaccinate their kids.

Join Dr. Liza Dunn and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they discuss the link between political partisanship and vaccine hesitancy.

Dr. Liza Dunn is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish

Over the last decade, a growing chorus of scientists has declared that biological sex is not binary. Properly assessing human diversity requires us to apply a broader definition of this word, the argument goes. “The term ‘biological sex’ has been used to sort all people into one of two groups,” a May open letter from hundreds of scientists to the UK’s Minister for Women and Equalities asserted. “However, a strict, binary categorization is an over-simplification.”

The letter – signed by more than 350 academics, clinicians, and activists – is carefully argued, meticulously footnoted—and fundamentally mistaken about a basic biological reality. “Such statements … are most astounding as they ignore or even reject the well-established biological concept of sex and, thus, they ultimately deny fundamental principles of biology,” a team of evolutionary biologists wrote in 2023, responding to similar statements published by several academic journals.

Evolution, a scientific concept as well established as gravity, excludes the idea of a sex spectrum by confirming that biological sex is a binary trait in humans and most mammals. Evolution has shaped organisms to maximize reproductive success, resulting in two distinct sexes—male and female—defined by their roles in producing sperm or eggs. Males produce small, mobile gametes (sperm), while females produce larger, resource-heavy gametes (eggs). This binary system, driven by the need for genetic recombination, is a fundamental mechanism of sexual reproduction, observable across species. “With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size,” the 2023 essay  added.

Intersex conditions, which are rare (approximately 0.018% of the population) and often involve ambiguous genitalia or chromosomal variations, are medical anomalies, not evidence of new sexes or a spectrum. They do not alter the binary framework, as they typically derive from disruptions in male or female developmental pathways.

The notion of a “sex spectrum” conflates sex with gender identity or secondary sexual characteristics, ignoring the objective, gamete-based definition of sex. Evolutionary biology shows no mechanism for a continuum of sexes. Scientists who endorse the sex spectrum often prioritize social or ideological considerations over empirical evidence, denying the binary reality established by evolutionary pressures.

By rejecting these basic facts, sex-spectrum advocates undermine the rigor of biology, misrepresenting a field that relies on testable, reproducible evidence. They also fuel mistrust of science, making it even harder for experts to convince the public that their scientific and medical claims are grounded in solid evidence.

Join Dr. Liza Dunn and Cam English on this episode of Facts and Fallacies as they discuss the science of reproduction and raise some critical questions about the sex spectrum.

Dr. Liza Dunn is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish