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It was déjà vu all over again at a tense hearing on childhood vaccines held last week by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Health. The committee is considering a bill that would eliminate the section of the state’s compulsory vaccination law for school children that allows parents to cite “religious” reasons to opt out of otherwise required shots for their kids. Just like a couple of years ago, when the legislation was last filed without success, this week’s virtual hearing drew hundreds of parents and lawyers who testified against the measure for hours. (7/19)

Cooney has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes tics, twitches, and—in some people—a symptom called coprolalia, which the Tourette Association of America characterizes as “the involuntary outburst of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.” Living with the disorder is tiring, because of both the tics themselves and the effort of trying to repress them. Coprolalia adds to the burden. Cooney, a 42-year-old who runs a window-cleaning business on the British island of Guernsey, tells me that he recently approached a woman on a mobility scooter and shouted in her face that she was lazy. Soon after that, when he saw nuns in the grocery store where his wife works, he shouted “Nuns on the run!” before observing out loud that “all priests are pedophiles.” ... On Twitter, such behavior would get Cooney canceled a dozen times a day, but on TikTok, it has made him a star. (Helen Lewis, 7/19)

In 1988, at the height of the AIDS pandemic, playwright Larry Kramer exposed the Centers for Disease Control for slow-walking AIDS therapies. ... In 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had initially resisted Kramer, credited him with totally transforming “the relationship between activism and the scientific, regulatory and government community.” He recognized that end-users of therapies should have the authority to empower doctors and scientists, not the other way around. That thinking must now be applied to America’s mental health crisis, which has reached pandemic proportions. (Monnica Williams and Morgan Campbell, 7/19)

For as long as he could remember, Razel Colón had known pain. It ripped down his neck and back, shot through his legs and traveled on to his feet, often leaving him writhing and incapacitated. He suffered occasional attacks of “acute chest,” in which breathing suddenly becomes difficult. “It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest, with tight, tight pain,” Colón tells me. ... Colón, from Hoboken, N.J., is just 19, but the sickle cell disease that produced these effects had been a constant, if unwelcome, companion. But he tells his story now from the perspective of one who has gone a year and a half without that pain. (Carolyn Barber, 7/17)

In 2013, I was researching a book about the opioid epidemic and found myself with a lawyer touring a neighborhood known as the Bottoms in the town of Lucasville in southern Ohio. The Bottoms is a neighborhood of poor people living in trailers and small, rough houses, and it is flooded every so often by the Scioto River, which runs nearby. Among the things that had mangled the lives of folks in the Bottoms was addiction to what everyone by then called “OC.” OC was an abbreviation for OxyContin, the narcotic prescription pain pill sold with what we now know was historic flagrancy by the Connecticut company Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family. (Sam Quinones, 7/18)

"I had no idea how many funerals I'd be going to," Dave Marlon of Las Vegas told us. "Including this weekend. "Marlon is a licensed alcohol and drug counselor and CEO of CrossRoads, an addiction treatment center in Nevada. We spoke just after U.S. government statistics released this week revealed that a record 93,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2020, what we might call the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. (Scott Simon, 7/17)

Opioids like heroin, morphine, OxyContin, and fentanyl occupy a spot in the public imagination as particularly dangerous and addictive substances. Amid an addiction epidemic with no end in sight, this class of drugs has been given special attention in the news, funding bills, and the 2017 President’s Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. But does the evidence justify that view? (Lauren Aguirre, 7/19)