Category «Medical Research»

Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health and the Rule of Law – Part 9

This article is the ninth in a series by Sabrina I. Pacifici focused on the Trump administration’s unrelenting policy of attacking science, healthcare, public health, and the rule of law. The cornerstone of this series are topical highlights on hundreds of anti-government actions conducted by this administration. The greater goal of the series is to identify the consequences of these actions to shatter the health and welfare of our nation – terms broadly used to encompass our nation’s democracy. Together these articles form an actionable pathfinder to identify what must be restored or recreated and relaunched, when we commence the hard work of rebuilding our government.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Health, Healthcare, KM, Leadership, Legal Research, Medical Research, United States Law

Hold Fast, Harvard

Since 2025 the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has engaged in battles with major American institutions of higher education and research. Using the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, McMahon demands strict adherence to “educational principles” that include elimination of ‘DEI’ programs to quality for ‘preferential federal funding.’ In the case of Harvard University, this funding is on the order of $2.2 billion annually. Lawyer Kyle K. Courtney unravels the litigation at the heart of Harvard’s effort to preserve academic freedom and deny the administration another huge payoff with no transparency as to where the exortion money actually ends up.

Subjects: Economy, Education, Financial System, Free Speech, Healthcare, Legal Research, Medical Research, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 4, 2026

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Should AI Tools For Doctors Be Licensed Like Doctors?; The New Surveillance State Is You; Mojeek, the independent search engine worth trying; WIRED Data Breach; an How the human harms of cybercrime shook the world in 2025.

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Healthcare, Medical Research, Privacy, Search Engines

The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health, and the Rule of Law – Part 4

This the fourth in a series by Sabrina I. Pacifici on the Trump administration’s relentless attacks against science, medicine and public health, government sponsored data collection and reporting, climate science, and censorship of government documents and federally funded academic research and scholarship. Our country continues to face daily attacks on our civil liberties, access to accurate, actionable and science based medical and health information, broadening censorship of government information, and the dismantling of our non partisan federal workforce. These attacks have bypassed laws and regulations that exist to ensure equality, justice, the rule of law and the safeguarding of civil liberties. These dangerous cracks in the pillars of US democracy have shattered long agreed upon norms that have until January 20, 2025 defined how the institutions and procedures of our three co-equal branches of government, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches sustain democracy. In the month of October alone, our government and the economy, public health and safety, our legal system, science and research, food and nutrition programs, public health and critical vaccine programs, have sustained irrevocable blows by the Trump administration.

Subjects: Archives, Big Data, Civil Liberties, Economy, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Healthcare, Leadership, Legal Research, Medical Research

The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research and Public Health – Part 2

This is a follow up to Sabrina I. Pacifici’s July 31, 2025 article, The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research and Public Health. In just one more month the administration has ramped up its use of unsupportable actions to expand the cancellation of billions of dollars of congressionally approved funding for a broad swath of government-funded agencies, institutions, programs and leading edge initiatives. They also relentlessly target and censor academic research in the sciences, public health, medicine, and on the climate crisis. The deliberate collateral damage has purged the leadership in organizations whose subject matter expertise drives vast knowledge acquired through decades of public service. The continued decimation of the country’s long standing support for the sciences impacts every person in America. It has fractured our collective human and technological systems and resources. The scope and specificity of the bare knuckle attacks and the implications are exposed.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Education, Health, Healthcare, Legal Research, Medical Research, Viruses & Hoaxes

Trump Administration Continues Scrubbing Statistics and Disappearing Data

What is the status of the official data published by U.S. federal statistical agencies? As the current administration continues its disassembling of huge swaths of the federal government, not only are the workers and services gone, so of course is much of the data generated by those employees. And federal statistical data and datasets, whether census data or statistics on the economy, health, education, or other critical public matters, are what librarians and information professionals rely upon to answer patron questions and perform research and analysis for internal, data-driven projects. This article by Robert Berkman is a roundup of where these cuts and significant changes are happening and offers alternatives to locate datasets and statistical data that are no longer available.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Economy, Education, Energy, Government Resources, Health, Healthcare, Legal Research, Medical Research

Censor, purge, defund: how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science and universities

Professor of Operational Research Christian Pagel has mapped 35 of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and universities to the authoritarian playbook – and considers what it means for attacks still to come. Pagel states that the attacks on science and universities are neither random nor new, and identifies key factors at work – controlling research to serve those in power; undermining independence and suppressing dissent; and attacking work that the Trump roadmap characterizes as having a foundation in neoliberal agendas that undermine national sovereignty and prioritize global elites over local needs.

Subjects: Education, Health, Healthcare, Leadership, Management, Medical Research

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human live. To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, Frederik Joelving, contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France’s Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier and Cyril Labbé , and Guillaume Cabanac, Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills.

Subjects: AI, Education, Health, Healthcare, KM, Medical Research, Technology Trends

Long COVID puzzle pieces are falling into place – the picture is unsettling

Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime. New research and reports conclude that long COVID is a complex chronic condition that can result in more than 200 health effects across multiple body systems. Physician scientist, subject matter expert and author Ziyad Al-Aly helps us understand the science and the real world implications of suffering from Long Covid.

Subjects: Health, Healthcare, Medical Research