An old tuberculosis vaccine known to bolster the immune system did not prevent Covid infections among health care workers, scientists reported on Thursday. But the trial was shorter and smaller than originally designed, and the investigators said that the results did not rule out other potential benefits associated with the vaccine, known as B.C.G. for […]

For the past decade, the White House and Congress have relied on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a renowned advisory group, to help shape the federal response to the opioid crisis, whether by convening expert panels or delivering policy recommendations and reports. Yet officials with the National Academies have kept quiet about one […]

Penny, a 3-year-old sorrel mare with a white blaze, had been slobbering her feed and fighting her bit, signs of a likely toothache. An exam confirmed that she needed two wolf teeth extracted and the sharp edges of some molars ground down, procedures that required propping her jaws open with a speculum. To protect Penny […]

WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial in January 2022 and condemned the federal government’s coronavirus response by railing against totalitarianism. Jews in Nazi Germany, he suggested, had more freedom than Americans facing vaccination mandates and school, church and business closures in the era of Covid-19. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you […]

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday asking the justices to allow a common abortion pill to remain widely available while a challenge to it moves forward. The administration’s brief, in the first major abortion case to reach the justices since they eliminated the constitutional right to […]

In late 2019, Molly Stuart’s contract ended at the community college where she worked. “Normally, I’d just get a new job, but then Covid happened,” she said. So she collected unemployment for awhile, then retired. In 2021, hoping to give herself some financial breathing room, she tried to refinance the three-bedroom ranch house she had […]

WASHINGTON — The dramatic dueling rulings by two federal district judges on Friday about access to a widely used abortion pill set up a lower court conflict that legal experts say will almost certainly send the dispute to the Supreme Court. “It really turbocharges the imperative for the Supreme Court to step in and to […]

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration plans to allow older and immunocompromised Americans to get a second updated coronavirus booster shot in the near future, an acknowledgment of the virus’s continuing risks to vulnerable people whose immunity might be sagging months after a previous inoculation. Federal regulators are expected to authorize the additional dose […]

Nowhere are the disparities more apparent than in health care. Technically, it has long been available to all, thanks to the universal health care law passed when Andrés and Marleny were children. But in practice, the barriers to access are often insurmountable: a lack of reliable transportation; clinics that are understaffed and often difficult to […]

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Texas who once declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional issued a far-reaching ruling on Thursday that prevents the Biden administration from enforcing a provision of the law that provides patients with certain types of free preventive care, including screenings for cancer, depression, diabetes and H.I.V. The decision, by Judge […]