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This story works best on ProPublica’s website . Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks. When immunization rates drop, however, plagues from the past can come roaring back, as measles has in American communities where parents decided not to vaccinate their children. Imagine what would happen if even the people who wanted shots couldn’t get them. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt the handful of companies that make most shots for American children to stop selling them here. Over the last year, he has been transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of vaccines into one that questions their safety here and around the world. Shortly after Kennedy was nominated, questions swirled over how he might overhaul America’s immunization system. Two Stanford University researc...

The woman, 52, lay on the exam table at a clinic in Richland, Washington. Her legs were parted and propped up. The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators. She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland. “Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint. The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.” Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.” “Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked...

In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio. As a result, he’s quick to add, a landmark racial profiling court case dictating much of what the Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff’s department does should be dismissed. “I believe we are in compliance with the court order. We’re not a racist organization, and we don’t racial profile,” he said on Phoenix-area talk radio in March 2025.  In May, he told the same radio host: “Is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office racially profiling or are they racially biased? We have documentation for well over 10 years that that is not the case.” His evidence for ending oversight stemming from Melendres v. Arpaio, the federal case whose 2013 settlement imposed parameters the department has operated under ever since, was a monthly sampling of a few dozen traffic stops. The settlement requires deputies to document eac...