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Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the […]

Whether we like it or not, AI is now a huge part of our world. Websites like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are where a lot of people are going to get advice, information, and even recipes. There’s a ton of rightful uproar about its place in creative spaces, from crafting film and TV scripts to using the likeness of deceased actors in new projects. So it is not shocking that a recent study found that one third of relatively new websites are AI-generated. We learned about this rather bleak news via 404 Media, and it really makes us question what is powering some of our favorite websites. 

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To be clear, your team at Nerdist are all very much so human. So no worries there! Now, more about this study. Researchers from Stanford University and the Imperial College London teamed up with the Internet Archive and found that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. That is the same year that ChatGPT launched, which is certainly not a coincidence. They published their findings in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet,” and said that these websites are making the internet less verbose. And that really means less creativity and meaningful content and conversation. 

“The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments,” the researchers write in the paper. “We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.” 

Prime Video

It took so many years for the Internet to become a driving force that connected humanity in unprecedented ways. Now, in just a few years, that landscape is totally different. There’s very real consequences of heavy AI usage to our environment as well as our workplaces as people in some industries are losing their livelihood to AI tools. But, like death and taxes, it seems that AI is simply unavoidable, especially if one third of newer websites are created by it.

The post Study Reveals One Third of Newer Websites Are AI-Generated appeared first on Nerdist.

The Trump administration did some genuine stormtrooper garbage earlier this week when it arrested David Morens, a 78-year-old research scientist who served as an aide to Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022. Morens is accused of pretty much the most nonviolent crime ever: concealing federal records, which—even if true—does not really warrant…

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The Current Work List The Fix List Thank you all for your help with researching the “Server Error” on the polls and the grayed out POST button that some users were seeing on Safari. It turns out that both of these issues were caused by privacy settings. Server Error When Voting On Polls This is apparently a known issue with this polling plug-in — it’s been a problem…

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Exploitation was underway before patches landed, at least one victim reports ransomware demand

CISA has added a critical cPanel bug to its known-exploited list, confirming that attackers are already poking holes in one of the internet's most widely used hosting stacks.…

When Disney+ dumped all eight episodes of Marvel Studios’ Wonder Man at the end of January, many people prejudged the series. Being “dumped” like that meant it had to be a stinker, right? Well, the series wound up getting great reviews from both critics and fans, especially for its two lead stars, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Sir Ben Kingsley. An exploration of trying to make it as Hollywood actors, coupled with a buddy comedy, Wonder Man won over people who rarely pay attention to Marvel projects. But will the upcoming second season keep that quirky tone? According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter, fans need not worry. Here’s what Wonder Man showrunner Andrew Guest had to say:

The people who like this show and like it because it feels different are going to be rewarded. And the people who think that this show is going to suddenly turn into something else, I’m sorry to say, it’s not.

Marvel Studios

So, don’t expect Simon Williams to suddenly join the Avengers or even the X-Men. (We do think he might be a mutant in the MCU, however.) And don’t expect Simon to toss cars in the street against some super villain. This will likely remain a series about newly minted superstar Simon Williams and his unlikely friendship with actor Trevor Slattery. When the first season ended, an undercover Simon busted Trevor out of prison after he took the fall for him. So where season two goes is anyone’s guess.

Marvel Studios

After playing two different DC characters, Black Manta in Aquaman, and Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, Yahya was eager to play a Marvel character. However, he knew it had to be the right character. Because in a shared universe, you (usually) only get to play one character. Here’s what Yahya Abdul-Mateen II said while speaking to Kevin Feige:

I only get one Marvel buck to spend. Is this worth my dollar, because I can wait. And I’m so glad this is the role I got to spend my dollar on because I’m getting all of the super stuff and I’m getting all of the human stuff at the same time.

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Even though it won’t be a typical Marvel show when it returns, we do hope for a little bit of classic superhero storytelling. After all, who doesn’t want a bit more of Yahya in the Wonder Man suit, flexing his powers? For those of you who missed the first season of Wonder Man, it’s currently streaming on Disney+.

The post WONDER MAN Season 2 Will Keep Its Quirky Tone and Bromance Vibes appeared first on Nerdist.

A viral fruit-shaped mousse dessert at a Capitola bakery has drawn long lines and daily sellouts, with hundreds of pastries gone within hours as customers flock from across the region. The surge in demand is pushing owner Ela Crawford to shift focus from wholesale to her storefront, even as the labor-intensive treats limit how many she can produce.

The post Crowds line up for viral fruit desserts at Capitola’s Sugar Bakery appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Lots of fixes, some performance tweaks. Fingers crossed there's no out-of-band patch to follow

Microsoft is following through on its promise to prioritize Windows stability with its April 30 non-security update.…

After three decades at Soquel High School, retiring band director Jim Stewart leaves behind a program defined as much by community and belonging as by musical achievement. Through a mix of humor, discipline and care, Stewart shaped generations of students — many of whom went on to careers in music and education.

The post More than music: Jim Stewart’s 30 years of building community in Soquel High’s band class appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

70% of collateral arrests are for immigration-related crimes or violations only. By Tim Henderson for Stateline A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights. Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP uses shooting to shill for Trump’s gaudy ballroom…

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The company saw a 30% year-on-year jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday.

Under the threat of a lawsuit, the Capitola City Council voted Thursday night to start the process of switching to district-based elections. The complaint from a Southern California law firm charges that the current at-large system disenfranchises minority communities by diluting the power of Capitola’s Latino voters.

The post Capitola City Council to begin transition to district-based elections appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Gillian Greensite has lived in Santa Cruz for more than 50 years and has been politically active for most of that time. But this year marks her first run at any elected office. 

Why now? She said she believes the city is promoting “overdevelopment.” She said that outgoing mayor Fred Keeley leaves “big shoes to fill,” but that she’s up to the task.

ELECTION 2026: Read more local, state and national coverage here from Lookout and our content partners

“My research into that made me think that it’s time for leadership to take the city in a direction more responsive to the neighborhoods who are being impacted by the overdevelopment,” she said, adding that she listened to neighbors speak at a community meeting on a project at 930 Mission St. who were fighting back tears. 

“I feel that our neighborhoods and our existing community is being shoved aside,” Greensite said, “and the impetus is on more development, and I think that needs a change in direction.”

In the decades since Greensite moved to Santa Cruz from Australia, she’s been active in the community. She’s a frequent attendee and public commenter at Santa Cruz City Council meetings, an advocate for rape prevention, having worked as head of rape prevention education at UC Santa Cruz for 30 years, and a longtime environmentalist who has pushed back against the city on numerous occasions. She was involved in lawsuits regarding the Wharf Master Plan, as part of her work with community group “Don’t Morph the Wharf,” and a lawsuit when the city tried to change its heritage tree ordinance. She served on the city’s Commission of Prevention of Violence Against Women, its Parks and Recreation Commission, and the civil grand jury in 2023 and 2024.

Greensite said the city is developing far beyond what the state is requiring, adding that although the state required the city to plan for more than 3,700 units by 2031, there are already more than that in the pipeline just halfway into the cycle. She pushes back on the argument that the rapid pace of building is because the city failed to build enough in past years, and while she doesn’t think Santa Cruz can stop building, it can control its pace and promotion. She also wants more transparency regarding who is getting into the new units. 

“We still don’t know what percentage of any of the affordable housing is actually going to local workers,” she said. She cited research from San Francisco that argues whoever occupies new units, more than anything else, dictates the cost of housing.

“If you have expensive housing, which most of the new housing is,”she said, “people who move in have higher incomes. Since we’re overbuilding more than we’re required to, it is going to make this community less affordable.”

Greensite also is against “ministerial approval” for housing developments, meaning that there would be no public hearings in front of elected bodies regarding new projects, an idea the city is considering. 

“I think councilmembers and the mayor should hear from people that they are hurting with this development if they’re living right next to it,” she said. “If the council says we can’t do anything, well, you better hear how people feel about it rather than squash public hearings.”

At the city government level, Greensite would like to cut managerial bloat in some departments, particularly the housing and economic development departments, and redirect funding to what she believes are undervalued bodies. That includes the parks department, where she said she has seen “neglect.”

Greensite said she’d encourage all councilmembers and the mayor to hold regular, moderated meetings with constituents in each of the city’s six districts, giving them the chance to connect more directly and ask questions of their representatives. She also would like to hold a town hall with state representatives like state Sen. John Laird and Assemblymember Gail Pellerin to explain support for state laws making it easier to build.

“There are cities who push back against the state,” she said. “Not very successfully, but why aren’t we a leader amongst them?”

Greensite said that although Keeley runs efficient meetings, she doesn’t like that there’s no discussion of an issue until a motion is on the floor. By that time, councilmembers often have already drafted a motion with city staff before the meetings, she said. She thinks the lack of transparency isn’t a new problem, but it is growing along with local bureaucracy. She thinks that councilmembers should be working through motions with their colleagues during a council meeting, rather than beforehand.

“I think it’s done a disservice and I think that people feel their comments are wasted,” she said.

Greensite, drawing from her experience in rape prevention advocacy, also wants to see more transparency around the law enforcement response to reported rapes. She wants more robust data, and a regular evaluation of how the city is responding to ensure the “best possible response to those who report rape.”

On the topic of law enforcement, Greensite said that she understands the law enforcement benefits that automated license-plate readers provide, but that the city council made the right move pulling out of the Flock Safety contract, and is not interested in bringing the technology back.

Although that is in line with all candidates other than Ryan Coonerty, Greensite said she believes she diverges from them on the issue of homelessness. She said she has compassion and empathy for people struggling with mental health and substance-abuse issues to the point that they cannot take care of themselves, but that “a small group of folks” exhibit destructive behavior. She said she does not take a blanket approach to homelessness, and thinks if people turn down shelter offered to them, they should not be allowed to live on the streets and should possibly be involuntarily committed to a facility where they can get the treatment they need.

“We’re not living in an era where these big institutions locked people up and did experiments on them,” she said. “We’ve sort of swung the pendulum to saying ‘Whatever you want to do in public is OK and we can’t impose on your rights.’ I think it needs to be brought back into balance, but not repeat the mistakes of big institutions of the past.”

Greensite believes that her platform and feelings on the state of Santa Cruz will resonate with locals, and if not, at least she made her case.

“I think the community is actually quite concerned at the nature of the changes to Santa Cruz,” she said. “I may be wrong, and if I can get my message out and I’m not elected, that’s alright. Then the community sees it differently.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post In first run for elected office, Santa Cruz mayor hopeful Gillian Greensite wants to stop ‘overbuilding’  appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Altman's crew now doing the same gatekeeping it recently mocked

OpenAI is lining up a limited release of its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a handpicked circle of "cyber defenders," just weeks after taking a swipe at Anthropic for doing almost exactly the same thing.…

Affordability is the new buzzword. It’s yapped by politicians and pundits across the spectrum. It’s as popular as a new TikTok dance. And it’s genuinely an important and mobilizing concept.

But the truth is, it doesn’t really capture what’s ailing us.

What makes this moment unique is insecurity. Struggling with bills isn’t new to most Americans; what is different today, across lines of social class lines, is the degree of unpredictability that comes with ordinary ways of making a living: ICE grabbing people at workplaces and schools, at bodegas and hospitals, and taking them to American concentration camps; hundreds of thousands of formerly secure, essential federal workers being laid off, part of a Trump administration program of destroying any institution or program that led people to associate government with stability and security, like Medicaid-backed home care and FEMA. And then there’s the threat of AI ending our jobs as we know them.

In this era, instead of walking on solid ground, terra firma, we dwell on shaking, shifting terra infirma. While affordability is a handy reframe of pervasive income inequality—talking about prices and the cost of living, rather than structural forces that stymie mobility, makes people feel less blamed and less-than—it doesn’t cover the gamut of social instability that the last few years have wrought. Call them “economic-plus” factors.

Of course, much of this insecurity has been manufactured by merchants of doubt, the henchmen of an “insecurity-industrial complex.”

That complex is the brainchild, in part, of what former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has dubbed “muzzle velocity,” a rapid political communications strategy that presents a constant stream of wild news events and outrages, shocks designed to both overwhelm the media and put the populace on edge.

It entails the steady downpour of confounding right-wing populist dreck. Bannon described it to Frontline as “three things a day—they’ll bite on one.” When it lands on media platforms, viewers’ fears are then exploited in predatory fashion, for monetary or political gain.

The new insecurity also follows on more than a decade of gleeful “disruption” by Silicon Valley, whose titans have gutted or taken over so many familiar institutions in the last decade that experiences like shopping feel fundamentally less secure, with constant developments like the idea of dynamic pricing in stores, so that budgeting for coffee or eggs feels like playing a slot machine.

On a wider level, it also extends to predictive gambling mega-sites, which monetize the increasingly unpredictable news generated by the White House, benefiting inside traders in government and enabling corporate forces to cash in at scale on our feelings of instability.

Prediction market Kalshi’s co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour are now billionaires, according to Forbes; New York University anthropologist Natasha Schull characterizes their platform as “making everything into a set of binary choices” and bettable outcomes, both offering a kind of false reassurance.

The insecurity-industrial complex also includes the nationalist politicians who incite volcanic policy shifts and mass layoffs.

Take Tara Fannon, for years a research director at a consulting agency serving the federal government, responsible for communication outreach across agencies and direct work with veterans. In 2025, her government contracting job was DOGEd into oblivion. Fannon now makes a fraction of her former salary, and her unemployment has run out. At 50, she’s looking for a full-time job and “struggling”—Fannon says “the job market is the worst in my life: an absolute hellscape.” Her health care premiums are colossal.

“For me, ‘insecurity’ is a good word to describe all the ways I feel precarious right now,” Fannon says from her apartment in Brooklyn. “I can’t afford great medical care, and that’s going to affect my health, which causes me to worry and feel more anxious. I can’t afford to go to the gym or eat the kind of food that makes me feel healthy, and that affects me in other ways.”

She didn’t want to take all that turbulence lying down. Fannon started an oral history site interviewing government workers who had been laid off equally unceremoniously. Most, like her, she says, are still unemployed, “patching things together.”

And the war against our security entails crushing reliable government, including funds allotted to the caregivers of our most vulnerable citizens. United Domestic Workers deputy director Johanna Hester is on the front line of that battle. GOP-led cuts to Medicaid, she tells me, have been brutal for her members, who struggle with reduced paid hours as well as the fear of ICE raids at their workplaces. Many make less than $20 an hour and need food assistance from the union; some have been driven to live in their cars, struggling to afford gas.

Terra infirma is also a place where people fear speaking freely. The bravest are those who continue to, like Amisha Patel, a Chicago activist and mother of two who passed away this week at age 50, a month and a half after we spoke. Opposing the second Trump administration while struggling with metastatic cancer, Patel epitomized to me degree of courage that some Americans are showing today, standing up even while they teeter on the personal and political edge.

Before she passed, Patel underwent treatments, hoping to find something that would give her extra time. But by March, she was told she had just a few months to live. Still, when we spoke, she was trying to “show up,” as she put it, for her wife and neighbors in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood amid an escalation of ICE raids.

What kept her together in the last months of her life, in a time of massive turmoil, was the opportunity “to fight fascism.” “It’s easy to be frozen and not to act,” Patel said. I knew what she meant: public defiance was harder in a time of street kidnappings, campus crackdowns, and organized attacks on free speech (of, say, anyone who called Charlie Kirk…well, a Charlie Kirk). “But my disease has shown me that we are not going to have certainty,” she continued—only “possibilities.”

Fannon, Hester, Patel, and so many of us are standing in a frightscape and yearning for security from the political developments that snap at us like carnivorous plants.

I am not the only one who sees our main vibe as uncertainty, anxiety, and nervousness, our mood rings always turning to a muted gray or black. The Urban Institute’s “True Cost of Economic Security” metric, which factors in costs like health insurance, childcare, and retirement, defines 52 percent of US families as financially insecure, many more than define themselves (or are defined by other standards) as poor.

In the age of gig work, volatile income is another source of systemic insecurity around our labor. It makes planning for the future or even giving consistent time to family and other obligations, far more difficult. (No wonder Gen Z, has come up with corecore, a TikTok aesthetic that specializes in confusing, overwhelming juxtapositions.)

So does indebtedness: consumer debt is among the reasons that Americans’ available income has dropped by more than a quarter in recent years, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker’s Economic Security Index. Businesses look to the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, a financial instrument that tracks the effects of economic instability in the US and twenty other countries, going back to 1900.

Political uncertainty is approaching an all-time high here, says EPUI director Scott Baker, a professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin. Baker believes that insecurity about the future has made “firms and households less comfortable” spending and more likely to reduce consumption, while business have become less productive as a result, leery to make investments or increase hiring.

As Baker puts it, “sudden shifts in policy across a wide range of fields [have] made it hard for businesses and financial markets to know what is coming next.” According to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 47 percent of American adults  are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a job they would want. That figure was 37 percent in late 2023. 

Of course, the insecurity-industrial complex wasn’t born yesterday: exploiters have been making us nervous for generations. In her 1989 book Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the anxieties of an American middle class barely holding on to its social position by one high-thread-count pillow-set. In the 2009 collection The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, nineteen ethnographers parsed how our leaders produce social insecurity, from the war on terror to the war on welfare.

But now that insecurity is everywhere, all the time. As economist Pranab Bardhan argues in his 2022 book A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries, insecurity, rather than poverty or inequality, is our new constant, bringing with it the forces that have caused an erosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike. As societal uncertainty, both real and manufactured, has risen in countries like the US, India, and Turkey, populists have taken over and tilted the political tables toward despotism, exploiting citizens’ economic and cultural instabilities to get their votes.

What would really restore our sense of certainty? On a governmental level, bolstering the hardy social programs we have, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Paid leave, which I depended on over the last year to care for two family members.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the National Academy for Social Insurance, tells me that this is the “moment to return to the moral and even spiritual foundation of the New Deal—the idea that we are in this together—and to carry that further into the next chapter of public policy. The question isn’t whether uncertainty will exist, it’s whether we will meet it with solidarity or fragmentation.”

When I attended a conference Vallas recently organized in Washington on the future of American social programs, attendees struck similar notes, harkening back to that great moment of the birth of Social Security, the New Deal; of Frances Perkins and FDR. But we can also push new policies that have a grandeur of spirit;  some of the threats to our security are too deeply contemporary to do otherwise.

Will we strategize and develop policies akin to universal basic income, updated to account for the six-fingered monster that is AI? An experimental “AI dividend” piloted by the nonprofit AI Commons Project and What We Will proposes to compensate 50 workers who have lost paid jobs or opportunities due to AI to the tune of $1,000 a month for a year, no strings attached. If it works, it will be a new model for basic income set to help the hundreds of thousands who may ultimately lose work due to AI.

And then there’s the personal piece of this: standing up to the insecurity complex, starting to naturalize the term “insecurity” when we talk about citizens’ state of mind, their needs and what informs their political will. I believe that part of surviving uncertainty is framing it, living with it—and acting despite it. Therapists I have spoken to speak of treating patients’ sense of “overwhelming and overweening threat,” in the words of psychologist Harriet Fraad, including fear of the encroachments of AI, while increasingly “unable to afford heat or gas for their car” as a consequence of Trump’s war in Iran.

Fraad tries to make her clients recognize the real culprit: “that their fears aren’t just because of their mother or something” but rather the nature of America today. She tries to ensure that they aren’t blaming themselves for their nerves, personalizing the effects of the insecurity-industrial complex into a singular failure on their part. To these patients, Fraad recommends “not being alone” and embracing “activism, love and solidarity.” 

Similarly, it can’t hurt for us to recognize when we are participating in habits that reflect and exacerbate terra infirma—we can reject predictive betting markets and their janky fake sense of relief, for example, or use tools that strip our feeds of AI slop wherever they find it, demanding a more human internet.

I am trying to acknowledge the political and economic uncertainty and nihilism around me, to live with it and name it. Otherwise, there is always the danger of repression, which leads, according to psychologists, to our splitting into metaphorical parts. The version of myself that tries on tinted sunscreen, makes sure to Docusign contracts, and  watches regional UK TV procedurals late into the night co-exists with the version of myself that is hyper-vigilant to the extreme events that keep unfolding.

In my quest to gain a greater sense of equilibrium, I also look for mirrors of our current precarity. Perhaps weirdly, I find reassurance in poetry reflecting extreme events, like poems composed shadows of the gulag, or one of Jorie Graham’s latest. As she writes, “I/will let go/of the world/as it was/once. It was probably/ never that way.”

This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. Subscribe to follow EHRP.

In April, the MAHA Mom Coalition, an organization that claims it advocates for “parental rights, holistic health, clean food & water, and medical freedom,” put out an unusual call. They wanted to talk to the farmers who’d been finding mysterious boxes of ticks in their fields—farmers and boxes that, by every available indication, don’t seem to exist. 

“Can anybody reading this right now validate this?” the MAHA Mom Coalition wrote on their Instagram page. “We’d love to connect with and speak to these farmers!!” 

The reason for such a request, as one conspiracist on Twitter explained in a post with over a million views, is with a potential new “Lyme disease vaccine coming out next year,” they “fear our government is going to release plague like levels of ticks upon us in order to incentivize the masses into getting another vaccine.”

The roots of the tick rumors originate, according to the fact-checking website Snopes, with an Iowa woman named Sarah Outlaw. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she wrote alongside a March 30 Instagram video post that’s been watched over 10 million times. “Reports of boxes of ticks being found. Reports of ticks being seen in ways that feel out of the ordinary. At the same time, we are seeing a very real increase in tick populations across our region…in my practice, I am seeing the impact. More Lyme. More chronic symptoms. More alpha gal,” an allergic reaction to red meat triggered by tick bites.

The suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing ticks to give us all Lyme disease keeps spreading.

Outlaw hasn’t provided documentary evidence to support these claims. She wrote on Threads that she heard them at a private seminar in late March from someone familiar with a “rural Missouri community.” But when Snopes reached out to hundreds of public health and other governmental officials in Missouri, they couldn’t find a single person who could corroborate seeing even one box of ticks. Snopes also wrote that in correspondence with Outlaw she “declined to provide us contact information for any involved parties, citing their privacy.” Outlaw didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. 

All evidence—or lack thereof—aside, Outlaw’s not-so-veiled suggestion that mysterious forces are distributing boxes of ticks to try to give us all Lyme disease has kept spreading. It wasn’t long before people on social media began to connect Outlaw’s claims to a newly developed Lyme disease vaccine from the drug companies Pfizer and Valneva. While the vaccine technically failed a late-stage clinical trial—which its makers attributed to a decrease in Lyme cases during the study period, resulting in less data than expected—the companies still hope to gain regulatory approval and release it in 2027. In a March press release, the companies boasted of the vaccine’s “strong efficacy,” reporting it reduced Lyme cases by 70 percent.

One major vector for the rumors was David Avocado Wolfe, a prominent wellness and conspiracy influencer, who quickly reshared Outlaw’s video on Telegram in a flurry of posts with suggestions on fighting ticks. He also re-shared a different video implying unknown powers are at work, featuring a woman who stares deadpan into camera as text under her reads, “Pfizer’s dropping a new Lyme vaccine next year… And magically, this spring and summer are going to be the worst tick season ever. You’ve seen this playbook.” Throughout April, posts on X making claims about boxes of ticks or casting suspicion on the forthcoming vaccine continued to go viral, with phrasing like “SHOCKING TIMING EXPOSED” and “feds bioengineering ticks to poison us with Lyme disease.” 

A previous Lyme disease vaccine, LYMErix, was pulled off the market in 2002, doomed partly by suspicions from Lyme patient groups that it caused adverse effects, and partly by a weak CDC recommendation that didn’t fully protect it from liability. After a raft of lawsuits were filed against its maker, GlaxoSmithKline, it discontinued the drug. No human Lyme vaccine has existed since.

Ever since, Lyme cases have continued to grow, spurred in part by climate change and other environmental factors that have brought people into closer contact with ticks, which can carry the bacteria which causes the disease. Tick-borne alpha-gal is also on the rise, with its first reported death in November 2025, when a New Jersey pilot who was apparently unaware that he’d been bitten by a tick and had developed the allergy died after eating a cookout hamburger. 

Because Lyme is a frightening and debilitating illness, conspiracy theories about it reliably catch attention. In 2024, Tucker Carlson produced a program claiming that “government bioweapons labs” that were “injecting ticks with exotic illnesses” in the 1960s led to widespread Lyme disease today, a show that has been viewed nearly 8 million times on X alone. In response, Politifact pointed to evidence that not only has the Lyme disease bacterium existed for some 60,000 years, it would make a poor weapon considering its slow spread and low fatality rate.  

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as recently as January 2024 that he believes that Lyme disease likely came from a “military bioweapon.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary made a similar claim on a podcast in November; both men have said the disease came from federal research facilities on Plum Island, New York. That idea was advanced in a 2019 book by science writer Kris Newby; the Washington Post debunked some of the book’s claims, including by disputing that a key Newby source was in fact a bioweapons researcher, as he is described. An epidemiologist who reviewed the book faulted it for “hysteria and fear-mongering,” while doing “little to help those afflicted by the disease it preys upon.”  

The legacy of these bioweapons claims lives on. After at least two previous attempts, this year Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the co-chair of the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, succeeded in including a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act directing the Government Accountability Office to, as his office put it, “investigate whether the U.S. military weaponized ticks with Lyme disease.” 

With suspicion pressing on Lyme from all sides—from the president’s cabinet and the halls of Congress, to natural health influencers and back again—it’s possible that Pfizer and Valneva’s vaccine will be doomed to death by distrust before it even hits the market.  

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practice from 1998 to 2003, when the LYMErix vaccine was considered. 

We “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

While LYMErix was, Offitt says, “about 75% effective…it was damned by a soft recommendation from the ACIP” which held only that it “should be considered” for people who live in tick-endemic areas or spend lots of time outdoors. Offit had favored a broader recommendation, one which would have seen the shot covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. While patient reports of autoimmune issues were never conclusively proven, after only three years, LYMErix was pulled from the market.  

“It was subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous litigation” Offit says, as its manufacturer “tried to defend the vaccine until it was too expensive” to continue, he adds. 

In the intervening years, Offit adds, both “vigorous patient advocacy” and a “whole paramedical community” has grown up around Lyme disease and so-called chronic Lyme disease, in which people believe they have a long-term active infection. While persistent effects from Lyme disease, called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, exist, chronic Lyme is not recognized as a medical diagnosis.

Offit thinks more research is needed to demonstrate the new Lyme vaccine’s promise, but is worried about the environment in which it could be released. 

The suspicion bubbling up around the unreleased vaccine, Offit says, precisely calls to mind what has happened to vaccines targeting the coronavirus. “MRNA Covid vaccines have suffered from these conspiracies” about both the virus’ origins and alleged safety issues, he says. “It was very easy to get that bad information out there. So we suffer.”

Outlaw, who works as a herbalist, holistic doctor, and nutritionist, closed her viral video spreading her claims about tick boxes with a call to reach out to her for help: “Comment TICKS and I will send you what we do in our practice to support and protect naturally.”

To those who responded, Outlaw provided a “tick exposure and prevention guide” via DM, centered around a supplement brand called Cellcore, according to a video from by Mallory de Mille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast who often covers wellness scams, misinformation, and purported health trends on social media.

Outlaw describes herself as a “Board-Certified Doctor of Holistic Health,” and boasts of other credentials, including a master’s degree in applied clinical nutrition from the New York Chiropractic College and a certification in health coaching from the Biblical Health Institute. But she is not a physician. What she calls her “doctor’s degree” on LinkedIn came from Quantum University, a holistic medicine school whose two-year doctorate program is not accredited by the U.S. Department of Education. Quantum’s website has a disclaimer stating that its degrees “are NOT equivalent or comparable to” neither a MD or “a Doctor in Naturopathy Degree (ND),” nor do they “entitle graduates to any state, provincial, or federal licensure.”

“Lyme disease takes a huge toll on people in this country and their wellbeing,” infectious disease researcher Laurel Bristow says, with health influencers hawking baseless products adding to the problem. “There’s no evidence that anything they’re selling will reduce your risk of acquiring Lyme disease from a tick bite.”

Like Offit, Bristow—who hosts of Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health—wants to see more research before passing judgment on the new vaccine. But she is also worried about the “pernicious” conspiracy theories it has already engendered: “We don’t want to cast aspersions on a vaccine before we really know what’s happening.” 

Even if the new Lyme vaccine is eventually approved by the FDA, Bristow points out another issue: there is no working “mechanism to review who should be recommended for it.” That step, which helps determine whether a vaccine is covered by insurance and by the federal injury compensation program, is conducted by ACIP. But the panel is caught in an ongoing legal battle as RFK Jr. tries to unilaterally overhaul it and stock it with anti-vaccine fellow travelers. 

Bristow hopes that time and more information about the new vaccine could raise public trust before it might hit the market. “It won’t be available to work for this tick season,” she says. “So hopefully in the intervening time we can have a little more data and feel a little more confident, and by the next tick season we’ll have a good option.” 

Dr. Paul Offit is less optimistic about what might happen in the intervening months, because, as he puts it, we “live in a time where conspiracy sells.”

“I’m not sure what gets us through this,” he adds, with a note of exhaustion. “We’re at a time now—and RFK Jr. is a ringleader of this as a major conspiracy theorist—where people create their own truths, including scientific truths.” 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Since the start of his second term last year, President Donald Trump has sought to weaken the federal foundations underpinning American science, slashing or stalling research funding, firing or pushing out thousands of scientists, canceling grants for ideological reasons and shuttering research facilities across the country.

But even against that bleak backdrop, the administration’s firing of all 22 current members of the National Science Board last week stands out as “one of the darkest moments” of the past year and a half, said Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist and biogeographer at the University of Maine. 

“It was incredibly chilling, and my stomach just dropped to my feet when I saw that the entire board had been fired,” Gill said. “Because now this last bastion of accountability and transparency and scientific expertise has been dismantled overnight.” 

“It’s not a surprise,” notes one scientist, given the Trump administration’s “continuous onslaught of attacks on science.” 

The National Science Board plays a key role in overseeing the National Science Foundation, a major research funder in fields such as chemistry, engineering, biology, the environment, computing, and technology, which supports academic inquiry and helps train the next generation of scientists. 

The NSB and the NSF were designed to be “driven by our best and brightest scientific experts who are really representing a consensus of where science should go in this country,” Gill said. “It’s not at the whims of whatever president steps into office.”

Created by Congress in 1950 as an independent body of scientific advisors, the board is appointed by the president in staggered six-year terms and chosen for their distinguished service and eminence in their disciplines. Last Friday, members received an email saying their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” The NSF website now reads “pending new appointments” instead of listing members’ names.

“This board is so important for being able to advise Congress as well as the president on issues that are so important to the country,” said Geraldine Richmond, presidential chair in science and professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon and a former member of the NSB. Richmond was first appointed to the board by President Barack Obama and later by Trump during his first term.

In the wake of the board’s sudden dismissal, experts fear that its members will be replaced with people chosen for their political loyalty rather than their scientific qualifications and who will be focused on short-sighted partisan concerns rather than the greater societal good. 

Because of the board’s importance in the ecosystem that fosters American innovation, observers worry the decision will contribute to a loss of trust in public science and cause long-term damage to American competitiveness in critical research areas and the pipeline for educating and retaining new scientists.  

“As concerning as this is, it’s not a surprise because of what this administration has been doing now” since January 2025, said Carlos Javier Martinez, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who previously worked for the National Science Foundation. “It’s a continuous onslaught of attacks on science.” 

In a statement to Inside Climate News, a White House official implied the decision to fire the board stemmed from a 2021 US Supreme Court case related to the appointment of administrative patent judges. 

This ruling “raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board,” the official said. “We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended. The National Science Foundation’s work continues uninterrupted.”

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF has been its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.” 

“Like many of the legal claims they’ve made so far, it’s more of a smoke screen than a really plausible legal argument,” said Lauren Kurtz, an attorney and the executive director at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The Supreme Court ruling cited by the White House is “factually, legally very different” from the process governing appointments to the NSB, she said. “I think trying to apply it in this case is disingenuous.” 

The statute governing the National Science Board was updated in 2022, Kurtz pointed out. Martinez agreed with Kurtz’s assessment of the White House’s argument. “It doesn’t hold water,” he said. 

“They’ve basically taken a wrecking ball to this [board], and we don’t know exactly how they plan to rebuild it, but if history is any indication, they will want to put in very administration-loyal, probably unqualified people,” Kurtz said.

“Without that body, really, the agency is now fully at the behest of the White House,” Martinez said.

In Gill’s view, the NSF is already being guided by industry priorities, especially Silicon Valley’s behemoth tech companies, which have tried to win over the second Trump administration with donations and public flattery. 

“Having a scientific enterprise that focuses primarily on the needs of industry just means that we’re losing curiosity-driven science,” she said. That emphasis also shortchanges research, like her own, that focuses on areas industry is typically uninterested in or even hostile to, such as climate change, biodiversity and pollution monitoring. 

The “beautiful thing” about the NSF, Gill said, was its “recognition that science without an immediate benefit or application was worth pursuing.” 

“We studied electricity for hundreds of years before it had any practical purpose. We don’t know what we’re going to be missing out on in the decades and centuries to come because we have hamstrung our ability to do exploratory research,” she said. “You never know what is going to lead to the next breakthrough.”

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