the wrong drug, four paralyzed

Four people checked into Ascension Saint Thomas in Nashville for a routine joint replacement. Each got an epidural, the shot into the spine that numbs the lower body for surgery.

The pharmacy had filled those syringes with concentrated potassium phosphate instead of the numbing medicine. Sitting at the spinal cord, that much potassium shuts the nerves down. Two of the four are now paralyzed, and a 74-year-old woman is on a ventilator.

The hospital CEO says he is deeply sorry. Sorry does not walk you out of the ICU.

Dr. David Morens, a senior adviser to Anthony Fauci through the pandemic, pled guilty this week to conspiring to conceal federal records. He routed his coronavirus emails through a personal account to keep them off the government system, where the public could have requested them.

Federal officials have to preserve those records, and the FOIA law lets anyone ask to see them. Morens worked around both, and he faces up to five years in prison.

Fauci himself cannot be charged for any of it. On his last day in office, Biden pardoned him for the pandemic years, before prosecutors could file a thing.

I did not expect a hormone to move votes, but a new randomized trial says it can. Researchers gave 136 young men either testosterone gel or a placebo. The next day, they measured each man's politics.

The men who called themselves weak Democrats shifted right. Their attachment to the party fell 12%. Their warmth toward Republican candidates rose 45%. The strong partisans, left and right, did not move.

Three groups had reason to expect some kind of recourse after the COVID mandates: the soldiers forced out, the workers fired, and the people injured by the shot. Almost none got it.

The troops got the clearest offer. Last year Trump signed an order to bring back the roughly 8,700 service members discharged for refusing the shot, with back pay. By mid-2025, only 13 had come back.

The workers who sued lost. A 2024 court ruling said the shot does not stop the virus from spreading, and for a moment it looked like fired workers might have a case. But in July 2025 a larger panel of the same court threw that reasoning out and ruled the mandates legal after all. The opening had closed.

The injured have the fewest options of all. Their only route is a federal program called the CICP, and it rarely pays: there is no set list of injuries it covers, and if it turns you down, your appeal goes right back to the same office that said no. It has approved 62 of more than 11,000 claims. Fewer than 1 in 100.

An 8-year-old boy in Canada got a routine plasma transfusion. Weeks later, a bite of salmon sent him into anaphylaxis within ten minutes, and peanuts did the same. He had never been allergic to anything. His blood was the difference: the donor was allergic to fish, nuts, and shellfish, and the antibodies that run an allergic reaction had crossed over with the donation. For a while the boy carried someone else's allergies. Then they wore off. Five months later the antibodies were gone, and he was back to eating peanuts.

A man has built more than 1,000 tiny wooden houses for the wild squirrels in his yard, and wired a few with cameras just to watch them settle in. The footage is pure joy: squirrels hauling in snacks, poking their heads out the front door, and piling together to nap through the cold. No grand plan behind it. Just one guy making sure his neighborhood squirrels have the coziest winter of their lives.