High air pollution alert issued for London
City Hall issued the warning for Thursday after Imperial College London forecasters detected an increase in air pollution from mainland Europe.
Predicted light winds combined with local sources of pollution in London would contribute to high pollution levels, the scientists said.
Londoners are advised to switch vehicle engines off when idling and to refrain from burning wood or garden waste.
"This is particularly important in order to protect those who are most vulnerable," said Mete Coban, the deputy mayor of environment and energy.
Coban said London's toxic air was "responsible for around 4,000 premature deaths in the capital each year".
"Which is why the mayor has done everything in his power to tackle it," he added.
He urged Londoners to "look after themselves" during the pollution alert.
City Hall issues alerts to Londoners, schools and local boroughs when moderate, high or very high air pollution is forecast.
High air pollution alerts are also displayed at all bus stop countdown signs, as well as on the Underground.
An air quality report published last year said high pollution episodes were now a "rare occurrence" in London.
It said between 2018 and 2023, 19 high pollution alerts were issued and 217 moderate pollution alerts, "enabling Londoners to increase their awareness of high pollution episodes and take precautionary action on these days".
Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to hello.bbclondon@bbc.co.uk
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Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What is a 'firewave'? Experts issue weather warning for UK cities this weekend
Experts have warned people in densely populated areas to be alert this weekend People in major UK cities including London have been urged to "stay alert" this weekend amid the threat of so-called "firewaves", as the fourth heatwave of the summer creates the perfect conditions for blazes to get out of control. Firewaves is a term used by researchers at Imperial College London (ICL) to describe a period of time when many wildfires break out in a city at the same time. Professor Guillermo Rein, lead researcher at ICL, said prolonged dry spells can lead to grass, plants and vegetation losing a lot of moisture, making even small sparks able to cause huge fires that spread quickly. Asked about the threat facing London this weekend amid the ongoing heatwave, Prof Rein told Yahoo News: "Stay alert, but keep calm and carry on. Be careful with anything that could start a fire in vegetation. Awareness and prevention are key." He warned that multiple, urban wildfires igniting at the same time could "overwhelm the fire services and force evacuations in just a few hours". The team at ICL pointed to 19 July 2022, which saw a series of unprecedented wildfires in London, which overwhelmed the London Fire Brigade (LFB) as it experienced its busiest day since the Second World War. The warning comes amid forecasts of extreme heat this weekend, with London especially at risk due to its vast green spaces next to residential areas. The LFB has dealt with three separate heath fires in the capital recently, while a wildfire warning was issued for most of Scotland for the 10th time this year following a large blaze on Arthur's Seat on Sunday. It told Yahoo News it considered the risk of wildfires in London at the moment as "severe". What is a 'firewave'? Firewaves refer to clusters of multiple wildfires erupting at once in urban environments, triggered by extended periods of hot, dry weather. They can start after several days without rain, when dry vegetation essentially becomes a highly flammable fuel. Human activities, such as accidental sparks or arson, often ignite them, but the underlying driver is atmospheric conditions that suck moisture from the land, known as vapour pressure deficit (VPD). When VPD is high, plants begin to struggle to get moisture to their leaves and begin to wilt, rapidly increasing how flammable they are. In ICL's research, they looked at how much water the LFB pumped during wildfire events in London and classed the most severe outliers as firewaves. They found that between 2009 and 2022, four firewaves occurred in London, one in 2018 and four in 2022. Over the summer of 2022, 40 hectares of grassland were destroyed, 37 buildings were damaged, five cars were destroyed and 88 homes were evacuated. Dr Douglas Kelley, land surface modeller at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, told Yahoo News: "Research by Imperial College London shows that just 10 days without rain can leave grass and plants, especially dead or brown vegetation left over from this year's droughts, ready to burn." What cities are at risk? Any big city with parks, green spaces and abundant vegetation could be hit, according to Prof Rein. Dr Kelley said that such places - people and nature meet - are known as the "urban–wildland interface". "We've seen these fires across England in recent years, and the blaze on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh this week shows the risk is UK-wide," he said. "Cities around the world face similar dangers: this year's fires near Los Angeles and in Chile show how serious it can be." In the UK, London is particularly vulnerable to firewaves, given the large number of parks and green belts bordering densely populated areas, creating ideal pathways for fire to spread. Dr Kelley explained: 'When it's hot and dry, everyone needs to be extra careful outdoors. Most wildfires in the UK are started by people, often accidentally. 'Disposable barbecues in parks can ignite grass. Litter – especially glass bottles – can focus sunlight and spark fires. Cigarettes are a common cause. Staying alert and avoiding risky activities can make a big difference to you and other people nearby Other major cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and Edinburgh face similar threats, especially where urban expansion meets flammable vegetation. Health risks aside from the dangers of fire itself include smoke inhalation, while ecological damage can harm local plant and animal life. Prof Rein added: 'The potential for fires to spread into homes is very real.' Will firewaves and wildfires become more likely? Firewaves will become more likely in the UK as climate change intensifies heatwaves and dry spells, Dr Kelley warned. He said that UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology research, alongside the Met Office, shows fires in 2022 'were made at least six times more likely by human-caused climate change'. He added: 'As temperatures rise, wildfires will pose a growing risk to people, property and nature, even in the UK. Scientists predict a surge in such events, with risks 'much greater now than a decade ago,' according to Professor Rein. Kelley said that countries like Australia, which have a long experience with wildfires, can help authorities in the UK prepare for similar outbreaks here. He said public campaigns can make people know when fire bans are in place, while the UK could learn more from other countries. "In Europe, the US, Canada and Australia, fire services also share resources across regions during major outbreaks," he said. "Similar planning and cooperation here, alongside preparation, prevention, public awareness and land management, will help reduce the risks."
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media ahead of the CDC shooting
In the weeks and months before the Aug. 8 shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, posts tying Covid vaccines to mental illness accrued millions of views online. Previously more tightly moderated, some of the world's largest social media platforms now operate with far fewer guardrails, allowing vaccine misinformation to flourish. On X, for example, verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers openly claimed in recent weeks that Covid vaccines act like 'chemical lobotomies,' which is false. On Facebook, health influencers with broad reach alleged that Covid vaccines cause severe brain damage or other severe side effects such as cancer, despite no scientific basis for those claims. And on TikTok, videos repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism drew hundreds of thousands of views this year, spreading doubt to wide audiences. The posts are just one part of a now-chaotic information ecosystem that internet users navigate when they look for information about vaccines. In that environment, incomplete or out-of-context information is often snipped, packaged to fit predisposed narratives and then rapidly amplified across text, short-form video or audio content. In theory, interest in vaccines and the spread of related misinformation should have tapered off as the pandemic subsided, said Samuel Woolley, a tech and misinformation researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. But that hasn't happened, he said, in part because of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the mainstreaming of many of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine ideas. 'It's arguably gotten worse,' Woolley said. The quality of information around vaccines came into the spotlight after the CDC headquarters shooting. The gunman, Patrick White, who shot nearly 200 rounds at the building and killed a security guard, blamed a Covid vaccine for his mental health issues, including depression. It's not known what the shooter's media diet was or whether he was aware of online conversations sowing doubt in Covid vaccines. The rhetoric was easy to find, though: Conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine pundits command huge audiences online, and Kennedy himself has shared vaccine misinformation in office. HHS didn't respond to questions about Kennedy's past comments. In a statement, Communications Director Andrew Nixon said Kennedy 'has unequivocally condemned the horrific attack and remains fully committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of CDC employees.' White's previous statements align with growing online skepticism toward vaccines and the belief that they have a slew of unacknowledged side effects. A law enforcement official told NBC News that White, 30, had made suicidal statements in the past and recently attributed his health issues to the vaccine he received. And a neighbor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that White 'was very unsettled, and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people.' The newspaper also reported, citing police incident reports, that the shooter said something similar to police last year, when he was threatening to harm himself and officers went to his home. Online, vaccine skeptics have been met with less pushback from social media companies for sharing their beliefs than before or during the peak of the Covid pandemic. Under owner Elon Musk, X has stopped enforcing previous policies trying to control Covid vaccine misinformation. Musk himself said in 2023 that he had an adverse reaction to a Covid vaccine booster, but he doesn't appear to have elaborated on his symptoms or how long they lasted. His representatives didn't respond to a request for comment. In February, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, ended its independent fact-checking program in the United States and announced a 'community notes' system, in which users can vote on fact-checks written by other users. By rolling back content moderation even for dodgy health claims, tech companies are harking back to an earlier, pre-pandemic era when they saw themselves as mostly neutral players in information wars. They briefly abandoned that idea of neutrality early in the coronavirus pandemic. 'The really manipulative, clearly malicious stuff needed to be taken down. Today that's not really happening,' Woolley said. TikTok, which bans misleading information about vaccines in its community guidelines, removed three videos that falsely said vaccines cause autism after NBC News asked about them. The company didn't respond to questions about why its systems didn't catch the posts earlier. A spokesperson for Facebook, which also says it prohibits vaccine misinformation in its community guidelines, had no immediate comment. X, which doesn't prohibit misinformation about vaccines or any other topic, didn't respond to a request for comment on the posts on its platform. Kari Bundy, an anti-vaccine health influencer with 212,000 followers on Facebook, wrote in a post after Friday's shooting that she understood where the gunman was coming from even while she condemned the shooting. 'His unhinged behavior mirrors the anguish of those who, after being injured, are gaslit and dismissed, driving some to desperate, unconscionable acts,' she wrote on Facebook. She declined an interview request. Experts say there's no clear evidence that vaccines cause depression. And the CDC doesn't list depression among the side effects for Covid vaccines. But for more than a year, anti-vaccine activists have argued on social media that there is a link. The narrative gained traction in February after prominent anti-vaccine figures seized on a preprint paper from Yale University researchers examining potential vaccine side effects, including depression. Preprint papers haven't been peer-reviewed or published in medical journals, which is the gold standard for reliable scientific research. The preliminary paper didn't show cause-and-effect or a correlation between vaccination and depression, but it quickly caught the attention of high-profile figures such as Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan, who pointed to it as evidence of the hazards of Covid shots. The preprint paper 'feeds into a narrative that's been around for years, that the Covid vaccine is spilling out these spike proteins that are poisoning people's bodies, and that happens to coincide with a conspiratorial political framework that's been around for a while,' said Dr. Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. That narrative, though, is not correct. The paper identified lingering amounts of spike protein — a component of the coronavirus that helps it invade cells — in some people's blood samples. But its authors have said vaccines themselves aren't likely to be the cause. The spike-protein mRNA they contain degrades after a few days and is not itself infectious. Fears that vaccines are dangerous and that doctors are covering up the side effects have also drawn interest on Capitol Hill. In July, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., held a hearing with testimony from people who said vaccines injured them or their loved ones, and clips from the hearing spread on Facebook and other platforms. Representatives for Johnson didn't respond to a request for comment on the CDC gunman. CDC Director Susan Monarez pointed to the harms of misinformation at an agency all-hands meeting Tuesday that addressed the shooting, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. 'We know that misinformation can be dangerous. Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust. We need to rebuild that trust together,' she said. Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said he's not aware of evidence that depression is a side effect of vaccination. 'Depression is very common, and the vaccine is common, and so it's not clear … whether there may be a causal association,' he said. 'The questions about either mental health or post-vaccine syndrome, those deserve to be studied. More data is better, and data should lead the way as opposed to speculation,' he said. Kennedy once called the Covid vaccine 'the deadliest vaccine ever made,' despite data showing it's safe, though he doesn't appear to have linked Covid shots specifically to depression. Kennedy has, on multiple occasions, tried to draw a connection between depression and a different vaccine, the one designed to protect against the human papillomavirus, or HPV. In a post on X in 2019 and in a 2020 podcast episode with anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, Kennedy asserted without evidence that the HPV vaccine, which can prevent 90% of cervical cancers, was responsible for depression among teenagers in the United States. Kennedy has also helped organize litigation over the HPV vaccine, but a federal judge ruled against the plaintiffs in March, saying their evidence was 'lacking'; the plaintiffs are appealing. The CDC says the HPV vaccine is safe and effective. It lists common side effects as arm pain, fever, headache, nausea and muscle or joint pain. While Covid vaccines have saved many lives, they and all other medical treatments have some risk of side effects. A small number of people, disproportionately young men, develop a form of heart inflammation known as myocarditis after having gotten the shot, although Covid itself is likelier to cause heart problems, including myocarditis. In a 2021 study, the CDC reported fewer than 41 cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses among boys and men ages 12 to 29. In a 2022 paper from CDC researchers published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, young people who developed myocarditis after Covid vaccinations often reported depression, with 46% of myocarditis patients surveyed saying they had it. A study published in the journal npj Vaccines in July, whose release coincided with a spike in online searches for 'vaccine depression,' found a similar rate of depression among young people with post-vaccination myocarditis. It's not known whether the CDC shooter had myocarditis. A different study last year looked at mental illnesses among Covid patients. The paper, which British researchers published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that depression and other mental illnesses were elevated for up to a year in people with severe Covid who hadn't gotten a Covid vaccine. And in the Yale preprint paper, posted on an online platform where researchers can share and receive feedback about unpublished work, researchers outlined what they called a 'post-vaccination syndrome,' a collection of various symptoms that they said resembled long Covid. The report looked at 64 people — 42 with the proposed syndrome and 22 without — and found that participants with the syndrome reported depression at higher rates than other vaccinated people. The aim of the report wasn't to find out whether Covid vaccines were linked to depression, nor did it establish such a link. Instead, it examined how people's immune systems reacted to the shots. One of the paper's lead authors, Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor of immunobiology, cautioned in The New York Times that the report was 'still a work in progress.' Two of the co-authors, but not Iwasaki, belong to an advocacy organization for people who believe they were injured by Covid vaccines. The group is involved in litigation demanding compensation for vaccine injuries and challenging federal officials for labeling their claims as 'misinformation.' One author, Brianne Dressen, is suing AstraZeneca over her participation in its Covid vaccine trial, claiming the company failed to appropriately compensate her after she developed nerve damage that she attributes to the vaccine. AstraZeneca has said it isn't liable, citing an act that protects pharmaceutical companies from financial risk during public health emergencies. Gaffney, of Harvard Medical School, said some of the preprint paper's authors are 'very serious scientists and people held in high esteem,' but he called the symptoms branded as 'post-vaccine syndrome' in the paper 'disparate.' 'We should just think twice before we enshrine new diagnoses that are premised on a cause-and-effect relationship that may be tenuous,' he said. Vaccine opponents and skeptics have taken the research and run with it, stretching the limits of what experts say is accurate. After the Yale preprint paper was published, Rogan mentioned the research on his show. Rogan, the No. 1 podcaster in the country by some charts, generally referred to vaccine side effects in the segment and said the findings in the preprint paper — which he referred to as a 'study' without noting that it hadn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal — were evidence of a massive cover-up. 'Everyone's covering up, and people are lying about [it], and everyone's trying to obfuscate, and doctors are trying to sweep things under the rug because they don't want to be in trouble for mandating these things and telling people to get these things,' he said, referring to Covid vaccines. In 2023, Rogan interviewed an anti-vaccine doctor who said on the show that a Covid vaccine led to his own clinical depression and suicidal ideation. Representatives for Rogan didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also jumped on the Yale preprint paper, posting a video about it on X that drew more than 10 million views. Alex Berenson, an anti-vaccine writer, got more than 7 million views for a post on X in which he called the preprint report 'very, very worrisome.' And Musk shared a post about it on X, boosting the idea of 'vaccine injury.' Representatives for Jones and Musk didn't respond to requests for comment. In an email Tuesday, Berenson said he doesn't have a view on whether vaccines can cause depression, but he noted the link between the Covid vaccines and myocarditis and said that could be a potential mechanism that ultimately leads to depression. He said he stood by his X post in February and called the Yale preprint paper 'highly concerning.' He also said it would be foolish to blame vaccine skeptics for the CDC shooting. Similar ideas had been bubbling in anti-vaccine circles for a while before the Yale preprint report. At least two other posts on X alleging vaccines cause depression got more than 1 million views, both citing a study out of South Korea last year that suggested an increased risk of depression after Covid vaccination but a decreased risk of other psychiatric conditions. The study, which didn't prove causation, was based on data from South Korea's national health insurance system. The authors said Covid infections were also associated with depression and cognitive impairment. A large study published in July found that the pandemic generally had adverse effects on brain health. Woolley said people are more prone to gravitate toward conspiracy theories during emergencies like the Covid pandemic because they are scared. 'When crises happen — whether it's the Covid pandemic or an earthquake — we see spikes in the spread of misinformation and disinformation,' he said. For some people, pandemic lockdowns worsened an ongoing loneliness epidemic that has yet to subside, especially among young people. An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll from April found that nearly a third of U.S. adults under 30 are feeling lonelier and more anxious about the future than their elders. And a Gallup Poll from May found that young men were particularly vulnerable to loneliness. That loneliness is now paired with social media recommendation algorithms designed to push persuasive or addictive content, often regardless of whether it's accurate. 'Not only are you super scared, but the algorithms have a track record of pushing more and more extreme and conspiratorial content the deeper you go,' Woolley said. This article was originally published on
NBC News
3 hours ago
- NBC News
Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media ahead of the CDC shooting
In the weeks and months before the Aug. 8 shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, posts tying Covid vaccines to mental illness accrued millions of views online. Previously more tightly moderated, some of the world's largest social media platforms now operate with far fewer guardrails, allowing vaccine misinformation to flourish. On X, for example, verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers openly claimed in recent weeks that Covid vaccines act like 'chemical lobotomies,' which is false. On Facebook, health influencers with broad reach alleged that Covid vaccines cause severe brain damage or other severe side effects such as cancer, despite no scientific basis for those claims. And on TikTok, videos repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism drew hundreds of thousands of views this year, spreading doubt to wide audiences. The posts are just one part of a now-chaotic information ecosystem that internet users navigate when they look for information about vaccines. In that environment, incomplete or out-of-context information is often snipped, packaged to fit predisposed narratives and then rapidly amplified across text, short-form video or audio content. In theory, interest in vaccines and the spread of related misinformation should have tapered off as the pandemic subsided, said Samuel Woolley, a tech and misinformation researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. But that hasn't happened, he said, in part because of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the mainstreaming of many of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine ideas. 'It's arguably gotten worse,' Woolley said. The quality of information around vaccines came into the spotlight after the CDC headquarters shooting. The gunman, Patrick White, who shot nearly 200 rounds at the building and killed a security guard, blamed a Covid vaccine for his mental health issues, including depression. It's not known what the shooter's media diet was or whether he was aware of online conversations sowing doubt in Covid vaccines. The rhetoric was easy to find, though: Conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine pundits command huge audiences online, and Kennedy himself has shared vaccine misinformation in office. HHS didn't respond to questions about Kennedy's past comments. In a statement, Communications Director Andrew Nixon said Kennedy 'has unequivocally condemned the horrific attack and remains fully committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of CDC employees.' White's previous statements align with growing online skepticism toward vaccines and the belief that they have a slew of unacknowledged side effects. A law enforcement official told NBC News that White, 30, had made suicidal statements in the past and recently attributed his health issues to the vaccine he received. And a neighbor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that White 'was very unsettled, and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people.' The newspaper also reported, citing police incident reports, that the shooter said something similar to police last year, when he was threatening to harm himself and officers went to his home. Online, vaccine skeptics have been met with less pushback from social media companies for sharing their beliefs than before or during the peak of the Covid pandemic. Under owner Elon Musk, X has stopped enforcing previous policies trying to control Covid vaccine misinformation. Musk himself said in 2023 that he had an adverse reaction to a Covid vaccine booster, but he doesn't appear to have elaborated on his symptoms or how long they lasted. His representatives didn't respond to a request for comment. In February, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, ended its independent fact-checking program in the United States and announced a 'community notes' system, in which users can vote on fact-checks written by other users. By rolling back content moderation even for dodgy health claims, tech companies are harking back to an earlier, pre-pandemic era when they saw themselves as mostly neutral players in information wars. They briefly abandoned that idea of neutrality early in the coronavirus pandemic. 'The really manipulative, clearly malicious stuff needed to be taken down. Today that's not really happening,' Woolley said. TikTok, which bans misleading information about vaccines in its community guidelines, removed three videos that falsely said vaccines cause autism after NBC News asked about them. The company didn't respond to questions about why its systems didn't catch the posts earlier. A spokesperson for Facebook, which also says it prohibits vaccine misinformation in its community guidelines, had no immediate comment. X, which doesn't prohibit misinformation about vaccines or any other topic, didn't respond to a request for comment on the posts on its platform. Kari Bundy, an anti-vaccine health influencer with 212,000 followers on Facebook, wrote in a post after Friday's shooting that she understood where the gunman was coming from even while she condemned the shooting. 'His unhinged behavior mirrors the anguish of those who, after being injured, are gaslit and dismissed, driving some to desperate, unconscionable acts,' she wrote on Facebook. She declined an interview request. Experts say there's no clear evidence that vaccines cause depression. And the CDC doesn't list depression among the side effects for Covid vaccines. But for more than a year, anti-vaccine activists have argued on social media that there is a link. The narrative gained traction in February after prominent anti-vaccine figures seized on a preprint paper from Yale University researchers examining potential vaccine side effects, including depression. Preprint papers haven't been peer-reviewed or published in medical journals, which is the gold standard for reliable scientific research. The preliminary paper didn't show cause-and-effect or a correlation between vaccination and depression, but it quickly caught the attention of high-profile figures such as Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan, who pointed to it as evidence of the hazards of Covid shots. The preprint paper 'feeds into a narrative that's been around for years, that the Covid vaccine is spilling out these spike proteins that are poisoning people's bodies, and that happens to coincide with a conspiratorial political framework that's been around for a while,' said Dr. Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. That narrative, though, is not correct. The paper identified lingering amounts of spike protein — a component of the coronavirus that helps it invade cells — in some people's blood samples. But its authors have said vaccines themselves aren't likely to be the cause. The spike-protein mRNA they contain degrades after a few days and is not itself infectious. Fears that vaccines are dangerous and that doctors are covering up the side effects have also drawn interest on Capitol Hill. In July, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., held a hearing with testimony from people who said vaccines injured them or their loved ones, and clips from the hearing spread on Facebook and other platforms. Representatives for Johnson didn't respond to a request for comment on the CDC gunman. CDC Director Susan Monarez pointed to the harms of misinformation at an agency all-hands meeting Tuesday that addressed the shooting, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. 'We know that misinformation can be dangerous. Not only to health, but to those that trust us and those we want to trust. We need to rebuild that trust together,' she said. Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said he's not aware of evidence that depression is a side effect of vaccination. 'Depression is very common, and the vaccine is common, and so it's not clear … whether there may be a causal association,' he said. 'The questions about either mental health or post-vaccine syndrome, those deserve to be studied. More data is better, and data should lead the way as opposed to speculation,' he said. Kennedy once called the Covid vaccine 'the deadliest vaccine ever made,' despite data showing it's safe, though he doesn't appear to have linked Covid shots specifically to depression. Kennedy has, on multiple occasions, tried to draw a connection between depression and a different vaccine, the one designed to protect against the human papillomavirus, or HPV. In a post on X in 2019 and in a 2020 podcast episode with anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, Kennedy asserted without evidence that the HPV vaccine, which can prevent 90% of cervical cancers, was responsible for depression among teenagers in the United States. Kennedy has also helped organize litigation over the HPV vaccine, but a federal judge ruled against the plaintiffs in March, saying their evidence was 'lacking'; the plaintiffs are appealing. The CDC says the HPV vaccine is safe and effective. It lists common side effects as arm pain, fever, headache, nausea and muscle or joint pain. While Covid vaccines have saved many lives, they and all other medical treatments have some risk of side effects. A small number of people, disproportionately young men, develop a form of heart inflammation known as myocarditis after having gotten the shot, although Covid itself is likelier to cause heart problems, including myocarditis. In a 2021 study, the CDC reported fewer than 41 cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses among boys and men ages 12 to 29. In a 2022 paper from CDC researchers published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, young people who developed myocarditis after Covid vaccinations often reported depression, with 46% of myocarditis patients surveyed saying they had it. A study published in the journal npj Vaccines in July, whose release coincided with a spike in online searches for 'vaccine depression,' found a similar rate of depression among young people with post-vaccination myocarditis. It's not known whether the CDC shooter had myocarditis. A different study last year looked at mental illnesses among Covid patients. The paper, which British researchers published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that depression and other mental illnesses were elevated for up to a year in people with severe Covid who hadn't gotten a Covid vaccine. And in the Yale preprint paper, posted on an online platform where researchers can share and receive feedback about unpublished work, researchers outlined what they called a 'post-vaccination syndrome,' a collection of various symptoms that they said resembled long Covid. The report looked at 64 people — 42 with the proposed syndrome and 22 without — and found that participants with the syndrome reported depression at higher rates than other vaccinated people. The aim of the report wasn't to find out whether Covid vaccines were linked to depression, nor did it establish such a link. Instead, it examined how people's immune systems reacted to the shots. One of the paper's lead authors, Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor of immunobiology, cautioned in The New York Times that the report was 'still a work in progress.' Two of the co-authors, but not Iwasaki, belong to an advocacy organization for people who believe they were injured by Covid vaccines. The group is involved in litigation demanding compensation for vaccine injuries and challenging federal officials for labeling their claims as 'misinformation.' One author, Brianne Dressen, is suing AstraZeneca over her participation in its Covid vaccine trial, claiming the company failed to appropriately compensate her after she developed nerve damage that she attributes to the vaccine. AstraZeneca has said it isn't liable, citing an act that protects pharmaceutical companies from financial risk during public health emergencies. Gaffney, of Harvard Medical School, said some of the preprint paper's authors are 'very serious scientists and people held in high esteem,' but he called the symptoms branded as 'post-vaccine syndrome' in the paper 'disparate.' 'We should just think twice before we enshrine new diagnoses that are premised on a cause-and-effect relationship that may be tenuous,' he said. Vaccine opponents and skeptics have taken the research and run with it, stretching the limits of what experts say is accurate. After the Yale preprint paper was published, Rogan mentioned the research on his show. Rogan, the No. 1 podcaster in the country by some charts, generally referred to vaccine side effects in the segment and said the findings in the preprint paper — which he referred to as a 'study' without noting that it hadn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal — were evidence of a massive cover-up. 'Everyone's covering up, and people are lying about [it], and everyone's trying to obfuscate, and doctors are trying to sweep things under the rug because they don't want to be in trouble for mandating these things and telling people to get these things,' he said, referring to Covid vaccines. In 2023, Rogan interviewed an anti-vaccine doctor who said on the show that a Covid vaccine led to his own clinical depression and suicidal ideation. Representatives for Rogan didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also jumped on the Yale preprint paper, posting a video about it on X that drew more than 10 million views. Alex Berenson, an anti-vaccine writer, got more than 7 million views for a post on X in which he called the preprint report 'very, very worrisome.' And Musk shared a post about it on X, boosting the idea of 'vaccine injury.' Representatives for Jones and Musk didn't respond to requests for comment. In an email Tuesday, Berenson said he doesn't have a view on whether vaccines can cause depression, but he noted the link between the Covid vaccines and myocarditis and said that could be a potential mechanism that ultimately leads to depression. He said he stood by his X post in February and called the Yale preprint paper 'highly concerning.' He also said it would be foolish to blame vaccine skeptics for the CDC shooting. Similar ideas had been bubbling in anti-vaccine circles for a while before the Yale preprint report. At least two other posts on X alleging vaccines cause depression got more than 1 million views, both citing a study out of South Korea last year that suggested an increased risk of depression after Covid vaccination but a decreased risk of other psychiatric conditions. The study, which didn't prove causation, was based on data from South Korea's national health insurance system. The authors said Covid infections were also associated with depression and cognitive impairment. A large study published in July found that the pandemic generally had adverse effects on brain health. Woolley said people are more prone to gravitate toward conspiracy theories during emergencies like the Covid pandemic because they are scared. 'When crises happen — whether it's the Covid pandemic or an earthquake — we see spikes in the spread of misinformation and disinformation,' he said. For some people, pandemic lockdowns worsened an ongoing loneliness epidemic that has yet to subside, especially among young people. An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll from April found that nearly a third of U.S. adults under 30 are feeling lonelier and more anxious about the future than their elders. And a Gallup Poll from May found that young men were particularly vulnerable to loneliness. That loneliness is now paired with social media recommendation algorithms designed to push persuasive or addictive content, often regardless of whether it's accurate. 'Not only are you super scared, but the algorithms have a track record of pushing more and more extreme and conspiratorial content the deeper you go,' Woolley said.
