At 38 weeks pregnant with her second child, Hannah Robb has no time to waste on red tape. Yet she’s lost hours in her struggle to figure out whether and…

When she succeeded Anthony Fauci as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Jeanne Marrazzo felt that she’d landed “probably the most important infectious-disease job in…

For parents, especially of young children, the question “What’s for dinner?” has high stakes. The answer can determine whether you’ll get to bed early or spend the night struggling to…

Good politicians are rarely modest. The job requires an uncanny ability to sell each bit of incremental progress as a success in and of itself. That’s especially true for someone…

For nearly a decade, the immunologist and biochemist William Parker has tried, with little success, to persuade other scientists to take seriously his theory that acetaminophen—better known by the brand…

Two and a half years ago, Ashish Jha was the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, a job that meant getting as much of the country as possible on board with…

Some Republican senators, it seems, have begun to fret that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not being entirely honest when he sought their votes to confirm him as secretary of…

This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency’s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as…

Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts…

In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move!” with a wide-ranging plan to curb childhood obesity. The campaign took aim at processed foods, flagged concerns about sugary drinks, and called…