In past years there has been ongoing concern that not enough people got the annual flu vaccine.

Some of it was laziness, some of it was lack of education. There were few outright deniers that flu was a problem. Instead, it seemed to be the opposite. If someone had a bad cold they still said they had the flu, and some said they think they might have the flu, which led most doctors to remind people that if you think you have the flu, you don't have the flu.

The real vaccine deniers were more coastal elites who believed a discredited former doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was interested in selling a competitor to existing vaccines, and used a tiny sample of hand-picked kids to claim that vaccines caused autism in a paper that was then retracted.

For much of 2020, it looked like media was trying to pivot the anti-vaccine movement from being predominantly left wing to one afflicting right. More right-wing people than left in America didn't want to wear masks, after all, so it seemed easy to claim they would be less likely to take a vaccine.

A small fish in central Texas, a freshwater mussel in the Mobile River basin, and another mussel in Alabama’s Coosa and Cahaba Rivers have something strange in common; they appeared on an EPA list of threatened species “likely to be adversely affected” by a popular herbicide named atrazine.

I don't see how could things get worse for the San Marcos gambusia, the Upland Combshell and the Southern Acornshell. They're all extinct. I lived in the southern US in the early 1970s and never saw a Southern Acornshell. It would have been impossible, it was gone by then.

Rather than making affordable health care reality, the Affordable Care Act sent costs for many privately-insured people up as much as 700 percent. The federal government allowed insurers to pass through their new losses to everyone else and even with that, many insurers fled states due to the program being insoluble.

Perhaps the solution is not to have people pay 700 percent more, but to force hospitals to be transparent about costs. And that would mean more realistic pricing without a reduction in quality.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission manages 1.5 million acres of land for its citizens and all "public land owners" are able to use it for hiking, hunting and various activities.

Despite such an enormous responsibility, the Game Commission receives no General fund appropriations. The Game Commission and state biologists instead get to be stewards of nature thanks to nearly all of its $120,000,000 in funding coming from licenses like deer hunting. 

Coca-Cola and Disney do not simply share being on Interbrand's Global Top Brands, says a new paper, they also share linguistically feminine names, and that helps their success with men and women. In fact, the highest-ranking companies have, on average, more feminine names than lower-ranked companies, they claim.