Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News

Drudge Retort

Menu

Subscriptions

Drudge Retort RSS feed RSS Feed

Links

Recent Comments

Recent comments from all news stories on this site. Users must follow the site's moderation policy. Personal attacks, profanity, abusive conduct and expressions of prejudice are not allowed. If you want to retrieve a comment of yours that was recently deleted, visit your user page and click the Moderation link.

From the sub-summary...

... The new CDC Director is failing us. ...

The problem is further up the management chain of HHS ...

Politics, not medical information, now seems to be running the HHS.

US refusals of crucial newborn vitamin spike, raising risk of dangerous bleeding
www.reuters.com

... The percentage of parents and caregivers in the United States refusing a standard vitamin K shot for infants at birth has accelerated sharply this year, an exclusive data analysis for Reuters found, putting more newborns at risk of life-threatening bleeding episodes.

The data confirms what a dozen pediatricians, neonatologists and pediatric critical care specialists told Reuters is a top concern: rising refusals of a life-protective shot and a growing wave of mistrust toward vaccines and other newborn interventions. ...

For decades, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stoked that mistrust, sowing doubt about vaccines and other established medicines. The acceleration in vitamin K refusals this year aligns with his January announcement dropping recommendations for the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, and five other standard childhood vaccines, from routine use.

The rate of newborns not receiving the vitamin K shot within a day of birth in hospitals jumped more than 57% from January through June, a review of health records for more than 1 million births nationwide by health data and analytics company Truveta revealed.

While vitamin K refusals have been on the rise for years, the Truveta analysis shows that in the first half of 2026, the rate of non-receipt was 2.5 times higher than the average rate from 2019 to 2024. It was 1.4 times higher than in 2025.

Babies are born with very low levels of vitamin K, which helps blood to clot, and are unprotected up until about six months of age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which still recommends the shot. Without the injection, they are 81 times more likely in those first six months to have life-threatening bleeding in the brain or gut, the CDC says.

One out of five infants who experience serious bleeding will die. Without the shot, such bleeding occurs in one out of 59, opens new tab births.

"It's really terrifying. It's like we're going backwards," Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, pediatric physician scientist at Lurie Children's Hospital, Chicago, said of growing refusals. "We're trying really hard to keep little babies alive." ...



More ...

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
www.wired.com

... Flock's surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates. ...

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver's "associates" from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description. ...

The suggested prompts sit in a cache of more than 450 files that WIRED found on Flock's own website, served by its login pages to anyone who loaded them. The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. ...


More: But more issues were in play than "Army transformation." Hegseth's tenure has been disastrous on multiple scores. Instead of giving sound advice to the commander in chief and ensuring that America remains secure while the president fights a deeply unwise war of choice, he has been pursuing his political grievances about DEI and other pet peeves against the U.S. military. Hegseth seems to have a special animus toward the Army, an institution he claims "spit me out." He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, and he has pushed out other senior Army officers; at this point, the Army has no Senate-confirmed chief of staff or secretary. (George's replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far does not have the necessary votes to be confirmed.)

Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth's irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

In a time of war, however, Hegseth's shortcomings may prove deadly. Leave aside his early stumbles, including the mishandling of sensitive information. Leave aside, even, that Hegseth dissembled about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that had succeeded in disrupting the logistical support for American forces in the theater and led to the kind of deprivations that were suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. Hegseth's incompetence, and his commitment to staying in Trump's good graces, helped launch the war itself in the first place.

Drudge Retort

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy