Latest Stories By Victoria Knight

The gun safety law forged through tense bipartisan talks in the Senate last month has been heralded as the first federal legislation in 30 years to combat rising gun violence. But what often falls below the radar is the new law’s focus on improving mental health services. News coverage has largely centered on the law’s […]

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Health dramatically and rapidly alters the landscape of abortion access in the U.S. The court on June 24 ruled 6-3 to uphold a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, but also to overturn the nearly half-century precedent set in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed the constitutional […]

As the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that guarantees the constitutional right to an abortion, reproductive rights advocates are thinking about a new legal landscape for medication abortion.. One of their strategies  involves preserving the availability of medication used to initiate an abortion in states poised to restrict […]

It’s estimated that millions of people in the U.S. use period-tracking apps to plan ahead, track when they are ovulating, and monitor other health effects. The apps can help signal when a period is late. After Politico published on May 2 a draft opinion from the Supreme Court indicating that Roe v. Wade, the landmark […]

The highly transmissible omicron variant is sweeping through the U.S., causing a huge spike in COVID-19 cases and overwhelming many hospital systems. Besides urging Americans to get vaccinated and boosted, public health officials are recommending that people upgrade from their cloth masks to higher-quality medical-grade masks. But what does this even mean? At a recent […]

Eleven months ago, President Joe Biden assumed office during one of the most critical moments of the COVID-19 pandemic. Case counts and death rates were shockingly high. The vaccine rollout, which had started under former President Donald Trump, was disjointed. People were generally sequestered in their homes, and kids were relegated to remote learning. Biden promised […]

As more indoor venues require proof of vaccination for entrance and with winter — as well as omicron, a new COVID-19 variant — looming, scientists and public health officials are debating when it will be time to change the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include a booster shot. It’s been more than six months since many […]

Earlier this month, Dr. Rashid Buttar posted on Twitter that COVID-19 “was a planned operation” and shared an article alleging that most people who got the COVID-19 vaccine would be dead by 2025. His statement is a recent example in what has been a steady stream of spurious claims surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines and treatments that […]

In recent weeks, many medical experts started to question whether the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is administered in a single dose, would be as effective as the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine in protecting against the new, highly transmissible delta variant that is poised to become the dominant strain in the U.S. The reason […]

Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) posted a Twitter thread asserting that people who have survived a COVID-19 infection were unlikely to be reinfected and have better immunity against variants than those who have been vaccinated against — but not infected by — SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. The social-media communication represented his latest […]

In his first speech before Congress, President Joe Biden argued it was time to turn the coronavirus pandemic into a historic opportunity to expand government for the benefit of a wider range of Americans, urging investments in jobs, climate change, child care, infrastructure and more.  Biden said that taxes should be increased on corporations and […]

In early April, YouTube took down a video featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a group of controversial scientists at a March 18 coronavirus roundtable. The online video platform, owned by Google, cited as its rationale that the video contained false statements about the efficacy of children’s mask-wearing. The decision has drawn public blowback on […]