Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jennifer L. Steele, Professor of Education, American University

For the past half-century, the jobs that have commanded the greatest earnings have increasingly concentrated on knowledge work, especially in science and technology.

Now with the spread of generative artificial intelligence, that may no longer be true. Employers are beginning to report their intent to replace certain white-collar jobs with AI. This raises questions over whether the economy will need as many creative and analytic workers, such as computer programmers, or support as many entry-level knowledge economy jobs.

This shift matters not just for workers but for K-12 teachers, who are accustomed to preparing students for white-collar work. Families, too, are concerned about the skills their children will need in an economy infused with generative AI.

As a professor of education policy who has studied AI’s effect on jobs and a former K-12 teacher, I think the answer for teachers and families lies in understanding what AI cannot – and perhaps will not – be able to do.

Prior waves of automation replaced routine and manual jobs, boosting the earnings advantage of cognitively demanding work. But generative AI is different. It excels at pattern-matching in ways that allow it to simulate human coding, writing, drawing and data analysis, leaving the lower rungs of these occupations vulnerable to automation.

On the other hand, because its output mimics patterns in existing data, generative AI has a harder time handling complicated reasoning tasks, much less complex problems whose answers depend on many unknowns. Moreover, it has no understanding of how humans think and feel.

This means that the “soft skills” – attributes that allow people to interact well with others and to be attuned their own emotional states – are likely to be ascendant. That’s because they are integral to solving complex problems and working with people. Though soft skills such as conscientiousness and agreeableness are considered to be personality traits, research suggests these are emotional tools that can be taught.

Teaching emotional awareness

The good news is that soft skills can be taught in tandem with traditional subjects such as math and reading – those areas for which teachers are held accountable – using techniques teachers already know.

For example, teachers often ask students to submit “exit tickets” as they depart the classroom at the end of a lesson. These are brief, written reflections or questions about the concepts students just learned.

Exit tickets can also be used to help students burnish their emotional and social skills along with their academic learning. In practice, teachers can give prompts that focus on moments of intellectual bravery, emotional regulation or interpersonal understanding, such as:

• Write about a time when you helped someone today.
• Tell me about someone who was kind to you today. How were they kind?
• Describe a time this week when you learned something that seemed very hard. How did you do it?

The point of the task is not just to boost students’ mood or engagement, though these are great byproducts. The goal is to help students realize that their emotional responses to external circumstances fall within their control. Enhanced awareness of their own emotions predicts children’s ability to manage frustration, to perceive and anticipate the emotions of others and to work smoothly with other people. All of these are vital workplace skills that will likely become more valuable with the rise of generative AI.

Teaching problem-solving

Teachers can also have students practice solving messy problems whose answers are not known. For example, as elementary students learn to calculate perimeters, areas or volumes, they can work in groups to find the measurements of objects around the school, including large or oddly shaped items. Teachers can prompt students to reflect not just on the correctness of their answers but on how they framed and approached each problem.

Real-world problem-solving, also known as authentic assessment, can be taught in any discipline, with examples that include:

• Testing the soil slopes and moisture levels on school grounds and proposing landscaping solutions.
• Creating and pilot-testing video campaigns for social causes.
• Reimagining how history might have played out if leaders had made different choices, and considering policy implications for today.

Teaching children to unpack complexity helps them understand the difference between seeking textbook answers versus testing possibilities when the best option is unknown. Solving novel, complex problems will continue to befuddle AI, not only because there are many steps and unknowns, but also because AI lacks our spatial and emotional understanding of the world. Even in the long term, countless variables that humans instinctively grasp will be difficult for computers to intuit.

Protecting slow learning

The technology complaint I hear most often from teachers is that students are having generative AI do their work for them. This happens not because students are deceptive or evil but because humans are self-regulating creatures. We take shortcuts on tasks that seem dull or too daunting in order to prioritize tasks that feel more rewarding.

But when students are building new skills, delegating work to AI is a huge mistake. By making slow things fast, AI undermines learning, because effort is needed to learn hard things.

For this reason, I think teachers must protect the classroom as a place where basic skills are learned slowly, alongside other students. For many lessons, this will mean harking back to the days before computers, in which students wrote assignments by hand or presented their work orally, learning to anticipate and respond to different viewpoints. If students are permitted to use digital automation tools, they should be prompted to reflect on how they used them, what they learned from them and which skills they weren’t able to practice – such as spelling, long division or bibliography formatting – when they delegated work to the tool.

The soft skill to rule them all

The truth is no one knows exactly what will happen to workers in an AI-enabled economy. People disagree about the skills AI will complement or replace. But the skills that underpin modern technology, such as math and reading, will likely continue to matter, as will the intra- and interpersonal skills that make us distinctly human.

Perhaps the most important skill schools can teach children today is the self-awareness to prioritize learning over shortcuts, and to refrain from delegating work to machines until they know how to do it themselves. It will also become even more important to be able to work with others in order to unpack hard problems.

An AI-enabled society will not be a society in which complex problems simply disappear. Even as the labor market reorders itself, I believe opportunities will abound for those who can work well with others to tackle the great challenges that lie ahead.

Jennifer L. Steele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Kids need soft skills in the age of AI, but what does this mean for schools? – https://theconversation.com/kids-need-soft-skills-in-the-age-of-ai-but-what-does-this-mean-for-schools-261518

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Prachi Gala, Associate Professor of Marketing, Kennesaw State University

Faculty hiring freezes. Department budget cuts. Declining public trust. Across the United States, higher education is navigating one of its most challenging periods in decades.

Yet, quietly, something else is happening: More universities are adding chief marketing officers, or CMOs, to their top management teams.

From flagship universities to small regional colleges, public universities are increasingly hiring high-level marketing executives to oversee branding, enrollment campaigns and public communications.

Why is this happening now? And is it paying off?

As a marketing professor who researches leadership structures, I recently co-authored one of the first major studies on CMOs in higher education, along with my colleagues Aisha Ghimire and Cong Feng. In the paper, which is under review at the European Journal of Marketing, we examined thousands of data points from 167 public universities from 2010 to 2021. Our goal was to see whether having a chief marketing officer actually affected performance.

Attracting more students, if not more donations

We found that having a chief marketing officer is linked to a significant boost in enrollment. On average, student enrollment rose by 1.6% more at schools that had chief marketing officers than at those that didn’t.

That may not sound like much, but in a competitive environment where many schools are struggling to maintain their numbers, even small gains can mean millions of dollars in tuition revenue. In this context, CMOs appear to help universities better understand prospective students, fine-tune recruitment messages and coordinate outreach across multiple channels – from social media to targeted advertising.

However, when it comes to endowment growth – the other big financial lever for universities – we found no overall positive effect. In fact, in some cases, having a CMO was linked to worse performance. For example, universities whose chief marketing officers held MBAs saw their endowments grow more slowly, or even shrink, over time. The same was true of universities that brought in CMOs from outside the institution.

This doesn’t mean these executives were bad at their jobs. Instead, it suggests that traditional corporate marketing experience doesn’t always translate neatly into the relationship-building that fuels giving in higher education.

Messaging matters more in a turbulent market

If higher education were coasting along, the rise of CMOs might seem like a luxury. But the timing tells a different story.

Since 2010, U.S. colleges and universities have faced declining enrollment, particularly among undergraduates. Public universities alone saw enrollment drop 4% in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends – enrollment has never fully recovered – and many states have slashed public funding for higher education. Adding to the pressure, experts expect to see fewer exchange students studying at U.S. universities in the near future.

In this environment, the ability to explain the value of higher education – and a particular institution – has never been more important. Colleges and universities hire CMOs to do exactly that: define and communicate the mission, brand and unique benefits of the university to the public.

Public universities, unlike elite private institutions such as Harvard or Princeton, cannot rely solely on prestige to attract applicants and donors. They compete not only with each other but with private colleges, for-profit institutions and online programs. For them, marketing is a matter of survival.

Inside the new higher ed marketing playbook

When most people think of university marketing, they imagine glossy brochures or billboards during college football season. While those still exist, much of the work is now highly targeted and data-driven.

A CMO might oversee digital ad campaigns aimed at specific students, or lead market research to identify what prospective students want from a degree. They may also handle crisis communications, alumni messaging and internal storytelling to boost morale and cohesion.

At some universities, marketing teams operate almost like internal agencies, serving multiple colleges, research centers and outreach programs. This level of coordination can be especially valuable in large, decentralized institutions where departments historically created their own messaging in isolation.

The rise of CMOs in higher education is not without controversy. Critics argue that growing executive teams — while faculty and other instructors face cuts – signals misplaced priorities. Some faculty worry that marketing language can oversimplify complex academic missions or shift a school’s focus toward revenue generation at the expense of scholarship.

The road ahead: Matching leaders to missions

Our research underscores that CMOs are most effective in specific domains, such as enrollment growth. They are not a one-size-fits-all solution for every challenge a university faces. And certain hiring decisions – such as prioritizing corporate experience over deep institutional knowledge – we believe, may have unintended consequences for fundraising.

This suggests universities need to be clear about why they’re hiring chief marketing officers and how they’ll integrate them into leadership. Without alignment between the CMO’s expertise and the institution’s strategic goals, the role risks becoming symbolic rather than meaningful.

The trend toward hiring CMOs is likely to continue, especially among public universities competing for a shrinking pool of students and constrained state and federal funding. But our findings suggest that simply adding a marketing executive is not enough. Success depends on matching the right leader to the institution’s needs and supporting them with resources, cross-campus cooperation and a clear mandate.

For some schools, that may mean seeking CMOs with deep experience in higher education advancement rather than corporate branding. For others, it may involve building stronger bridges between marketing and enrollment management, academic affairs and fundraising efforts.

The rise of CMOs isn’t a silver bullet for higher education’s enrollment and funding challenges. But it’s a sign that universities are rethinking how they present themselves to the world – and in today’s competitive, skeptical environment, that might be one of the most important strategic conversations they can have.

Prachi Gala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why universities are hiring more chief marketing officers – even as budgets shrink – https://theconversation.com/why-universities-are-hiring-more-chief-marketing-officers-even-as-budgets-shrink-262007

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Louis Tay, Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Purdue University

Many employers are demanding more from workers these days, pushing them to log as many hours as possible.

Google, for example, told all its employees that they should expect to spend 60 or more hours in the office every week. Some tech companies are demanding 12-hour days, six days a week from their new hires.

More job applicants in health care, engineering and consulting have been told to expect long hours than previously demanded due to a weak job market.

On the other hand, companies such as Cisco, Booz Allen Hamilton and Intuit have earned a reputation of supporting a strong work-life balance, according to Glassdoor employee ratings.

To promote work-life balance, they offer flexible work options, give workers tips on setting boundaries and provide benefits to promote mental and physical well-being, including mindfulness and meditation training and personal coaching outside of work.

As a psychologist who studies workplace performance and well-being, I’ve seen abundant evidence that overworking employees can actually make them less productive. Instead, research shows that when employees have the time and space to lead a fulfilling life outside work, such as being free to spend time with their families or pursue creative hobbies, it improves their performance on the job.

Falling prey to the ‘focusing illusion’

For example, a team of researchers reviewed 70 studies looking at how managers support workers’ family lives. They found that when supervisors show consideration for workers’ personal roles as a family member, including providing help to workers and modeling work-family balance, those employees are more loyal and helpful on the job and are also less likely to think about quitting.

Another study found that workers who could take on creative projects outside of work became more creative at work, regardless of their own personalities. This was true even for workers who didn’t consider themselves to be very creative to start with, which suggests it was the workplace culture that really made a difference.

When employers become obsessed with their workers’ productivity, they can get hung up on tracking immediate goals such as the number of emails sent or sales calls made. But they tend to neglect other vital aspects of employees’ lives that, perhaps somewhat ironically, sustain long-term productivity.

Daniel Kahneman, the late psychologist whose research team won a Nobel Prize in economics, called this common misconception the “focusing illusion.”

In this case, many employers underestimate the hidden costs of making people work more hours than they can muster while maintaining some semblance of work-life balance.

Among them are mental health problems, burnout and high turnover rates. In other words, overly demanding policies can ultimately hinder the performance employers want to see.

Taking it from Simone Biles

Many top performers recognize the value of work while also valuing the time spent away from it.

“At the end of the day we’re human too,” said Simone Biles, who is widely considered the best gymnast on record. “We have to protect our mind and body, rather than just go out there and do what the world wants us to do.”

Elite athletes like Biles require time away from the spotlight to recuperate and hone their skills.

Others who are at the top of their professions turn to hobbies to recharge their batteries. Albert Einstein’s passion for playing the violin and piano was not merely a diversion from physics – it was instrumental to the famous and widely beloved scientist’s groundbreaking scientific insights.

Einstein’s second wife, Elsa Einstein, observed that he took short breaks to play music when he was thinking about his scientific theories.

Taking a break

I’ve reviewed hundreds of studies that show leisure time isn’t a luxury − it fulfills key psychological needs.

Taking longer and more frequent breaks from your job than your workaholic boss might like can help you get more rest, recover from work-related stress and increase your sense of mastery and autonomy.

That’s because when employees find fulfillment outside of work they tend to become better at their jobs, making their employers more likely to thrive.

That’s what a team of researchers found when they studied the workforce at a large city hospital in the U.S. Employees who thought their bosses supported their family life were happier with their jobs, more loyal and less likely to quit.

Unsurprisingly, the happier, more supported workers also gave their supervisors higher ratings.

Researchers who studied the daily leisure activities of 100 Dutch teachers found that when the educators could take some of their time off to relax and engage in hobbies outside work, they felt better and had an easier time coping with the demands of their job the next day.

Another study of German emergency service workers found that not having enough fun over the weekend, such as socializing with friends and relatives, can undermine job performance the following week.

Finding the hidden costs of overwork

The mental health consequences of overwork, spending too many hours on the job or getting mentally or physically exhausted by your work are significant and measurable.

According to the World Health Organization, working more than 55 hours per week is associated with a 35% higher risk of having a stroke and a 17% higher risk of developing heart disease.

Working too many hours can also contribute to burnout, a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term work stress. The World Health Organization officially recognizes burnout as a work-related health hazard.

A Gallup analysis conducted in March 2025 found that even employees who are engaged at work, meaning that they are highly committed, connected and enthusiastic about what they do for a living, are twice as likely to burn out if they log more than 45 hours a week on the job.

Burnout can be very costly for employers, ranging anywhere from US$4,000 to $20,000 per employee each year. These numbers are calculated from the average hourly salaries of employees and based on the impact of burnout on aspects such as missed workdays and reduced productivity at work. That means a company with 1,000 workers could lose around $4 million every year due to burnout.

Ultimately, employers that overwork their workers have high turnover rates.

One study found that the onset of mandatory overtime for South Korean nurses made more of them decide to quit their jobs.

Similarly, a national study of over 17,000 U.S.-based nurses found that when they worked longer hours, turnover increased. This pattern is evident in many other professions besides health care, such as finance and transportation.

Seeing turnover increase

Conservative estimates of the cost of turnover for employers ranges from 1.5 to two times an employee’s annual salary. This includes the costs of hiring, onboarding and training new employees. Critically, there are also hidden costs that are harder to estimate, such as losing the departed employee’s institutional knowledge and unique connections.

Over time, making workers work extra hours can undercut an employer’s performance and threaten its viability.

Abundant evidence indicates that supporting employees’ aspirations for happier and more meaningful lives within the workplace and beyond leaves workers and their employers alike better off.

Louis Tay is affiliated with ExpiWell, a mobile-first tech startup that enables researchers to capture momentary experiences of people.

– ref. When workers’ lives outside work are more fulfilling, it benefits employers too – https://theconversation.com/when-workers-lives-outside-work-are-more-fulfilling-it-benefits-employers-too-260772

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Joshua Kellogg, Assistant Professor of Natural Product Chemistry, Penn State

Imagine you purchase a bag of gummies labeled nootropic – a term used to describe substances that claim to enhance mental ability and function, or “smart drugs.” However, within hours of consuming them, your heart starts racing, you’re nauseated and vomiting. Then you begin convulsing and have a seizure, resulting in a trip to the hospital.

You certainly did not expect to have such a severe reaction to an over-the-counter edible product, which is available online and in herbal and vape shops nationwide. What happened?

So-called “microdosing” of mushrooms has been on the rise over the past few years, accompanying a shift in local policy in some areas and increasing research into its potential benefits for mood and mental health. Microdosing involves the ingestion of small quantities of psychoactive mushrooms, less than a regular dose and not in sufficient quantities to induce a “trip” or psychedelic experience, but to boost mood, creativity, concentration or productivity.

Psychedelic mushrooms are illegal at the federal level, restricted as a “Schedule 1” substance by the Food and Drug Administration, though some states and local municipalities have begun the process of decriminalizing the possession of these mushrooms.

This greater acceptance of mushrooms and psychedelics has led to a growing market for edible products containing non-hallucinogenic mushroom species that are appearing on the shelf at grocery stores, vape shops, even gas stations, with claims that these products improve mental function.

To meet demand, manufacturers are also turning to other types of mushrooms – including both psychoactive and non-psychedelic – some of which are potentially more toxic. But key pieces of information are often missing for consumers to make informed decisions about which products to consume.

I am a natural product scientist at Pennsylvania State University, where my lab specializes in understanding the molecules found in plants, mushrooms and other natural resources and how they can benefit or harm human health. Our team actively researches these small molecules to uncover how they can address infectious and chronic diseases, but also monitors them for toxic or adverse effects on human health.

While nootropic products have potential to boost health, there can be little transparency surrounding many commercial mushroom products, which can have dangerous consequences.

Chemistry and toxicology of psychoactive mushrooms

The main psychoactive components of traditional “magic” mushrooms, found in the genus Psilocybe, are psilocybin and psilocin. These two small molecules are alkaloids that activate receptors in the brain to trigger the main psychoactive effects of magic mushrooms.

Both psilocybin and psilocin have a high therapeutic index – meaning they are generally nontoxic in humans because the amount that must be ingested to be fatal or dangerous is more than 500 times the dose at which it has been shown to be therapeutically effective. Therefore, psilocybin-containing mushrooms are generally considered to have a low potential for acute toxicity in humans, to the point where it is believed to be nearly impossible to achieve a toxic dose from oral consumption.

Demand breeds diversification in mushroom sourcing

With the growth in popularity of psychedelic mushrooms, companies have been looking for ways to meet consumer demand. And in some cases, this has meant finding mushrooms that do not contain psilocybin and are therefore not restricted by the FDA. The result has been an increase in products that come without legal entanglements, which means there are products that can contain other types of mushrooms, including lions mane, chaga, reishi, maitake and a genus of mushrooms called Amanita, which can be hallucinogenic.

Amanita mushrooms are the quintessential white-flecked, red-capped toadstools – the stereotypical image of a mushroom. These fungi contain very different compounds compared to the Psilocybe mushrooms, such as muscarine and ibotenic acid. These compounds function differently in the brain and, while also capable of producing psychedelic experiences, are generally considered to be more toxic.

Nootropic and other mushroom products are often found as edibles, including chocolates and gummies. However, there is little enforcement surrounding the ingredient labeling of such dietary supplements; products that have a proprietary blend of ingredients generally do not have to report individual ingredients to the species level. This protects trade secrets regarding unique blends of ingredients, but it can also obscure the actual composition of some edible nootropic and microdosing products. And this can have dangerous consequences.

Increasing adverse effects

The explosion of nootropic mushroom products has led to a wide variety of products on the market that potentially contain wildly differing levels of mushrooms, many times containing blends of multiple mushroom species. And with little reporting guidelines in effect, it can be hard to know exactly what you’re taking.

One case study in Virginia involved five people who were hospitalized after they ingested gummies from different nootropic brands that were labeled to contain muscarine, muscimol and ibotenic acid, all compounds found in Amanita mushrooms.

A follow-up analysis of locally available gummy brands that contained “mushroom nootropic” ingredients revealed the presence of psilocybin, but also caffeine, the stimulant ephedrine and mitragynin, a potential painkiller found in Southeast Asian plant products like kratom. None of these ingredients were listed on the product label. Therefore, the cocktail of mushrooms and substances that these people were exposed to was not necessarily reflected on the label at the time of purchase.

The increase in use of other, potentially toxic, mushrooms in over-the-counter products has been reflected in reported poisoning cases in the United States. In 2016, out of more than 6,400 mushroom-related poisoning cases in the U.S., only 45 were Amanita mushrooms.

In the past few years since certain states began decriminalizing psilocybin, the U.S. has seen an increase in calls and reports to poison control centers of people feeling nauseous and experiencing vomiting, seizures, cardiovascular symptoms and other adverse effects after ingesting edible mushroom products such as chocolates and gummies. This prompted a multistate investigation beginning in 2023 that uncovered over 180 cases in 34 states of people who had ingested a particular brand of mushroom-based edibles, Diamond Shruumz.

A 2024 recall required that stores remove these products from their shelves. And in late 2024, the FDA put out a letter to warn consumers and manufacturers of the dangers associated with Amanita mushrooms, saying they “do not meet the Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS, standard and that Amanita mushrooms are unapproved food additives.” Despite this warning, such products are still available from producers.

Even when a product is labeled with the relevant ingredients, mushrooms are notoriously easy to misidentify when collected. Numerous mushroom species have similar shapes, colors and habits.

But, despite their visual similarities, these different mushrooms can have drastically different chemistry and toxicity. This even plagues foragers of culinary mushrooms, with hundreds of emergency department visits due to fungal misidentification every year in the U.S.

There is little current regulation or oversight for species identification in dietary supplements or over-the-counter mushroom edible products, leaving consumers at the mercy of producers to accurately list all raw products and ingredients on the product label.

Joshua Kellogg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The growing fad of ‘microdosing’ mushrooms is leading to an uptick in poison control center calls and emergency room visits – https://theconversation.com/the-growing-fad-of-microdosing-mushrooms-is-leading-to-an-uptick-in-poison-control-center-calls-and-emergency-room-visits-252866

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Anna Kirkland, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

For almost 40 years, people who suspect they’ve been harmed by a vaccine have been able to turn to a little-known system called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – often simply called the vaccine court.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a critic of the vaccine court, calling it “biased” against compensating people, slow and unfair. He has said that he wants to “revolutionize” or “fix” this system.

I’m a scholar of law, health and medicine. I investigated the history, politics and debates about the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in my book “Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury.”

Although vaccines are extensively tested and monitored, and are both overwhelmingly safe for the vast majority of people and extremely cost-effective, some people will experience a harmful reaction to a vaccine. The vaccine court establishes a way to figure out who those people are and to provide justice to them.

Having studied the vaccine court for 15 years, I agree that it could use some fixing. But changing it dramatically will be difficult and potentially damaging to public health.

Deciphering vaccine injuries

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is essentially a process that enables doctors, lawyers, patients, parents and government officials to determine who deserves compensation for a legitimate vaccine injury.

It was established in 1986 by an act of Congress to solve a specific social problem: possible vaccine injuries to children from the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. That vaccine, which was discontinued in the U.S. in the 1990s, could cause alarming side effects like prolonged crying and convulsions. Parents sued vaccine manufacturers, and some stopped producing vaccines.

Congress was worried that lawsuits would collapse the country’s vaccine supply, allowing diseases to make a comeback. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 created the vaccine court process and shielded vaccine manufacturers from these lawsuits.

Here’s how it works: A person who feels they have experienced a vaccine-related injury files a claim to be heard by a legal official called a special master in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The Health and Human Services secretary is named as the defendant and is represented by Department of Justice attorneys.

Doctors who work for HHS evaluate the medical records and make a recommendation about whether they think the vaccine caused the person’s medical problem. Some agreed-upon vaccine injuries are listed for automatic compensation, while other outcomes that are scientifically contested go through a hearing to determine if the vaccine caused the problem.

Awards come from a trust fund, built up through a 75-cent excise tax on each dose of covered vaccine sold. Petitioners’ attorneys who specialize in vaccine injury claims are paid by the trust fund, whether they win or lose.

Some updates are needed

Much has changed in the decades since Congress wrote the law, but Congress has not enacted updates to keep up.

For instance, the law supplies only eight special masters to hear all the cases, but the caseload has risen dramatically as more vaccines have been covered by the law. It set a damages cap of US$250,000 in 1986 but did not account for inflation. The statute of limitations for an injury is three years, but in my research, I found many people file too late and miss their chance.

When the law was written, it only covered vaccines recommended for children. In 2023, the program expanded to include vaccines for pregnant women. Vaccines just for adults, like shingles, are not covered. COVID-19 vaccine claims go to another system for emergency countermeasures vaccines that has been widely criticized. These vaccines could be added to the program, as lawyers who bring claims there have advocated.

These reform ideas are “friendly amendments” with bipartisan support. Kennedy has mentioned some of them, too.

A complex system is hard to revolutionize

Kennedy hasn’t publicly stated enough details about his plan for the vaccine court to reveal the changes he intends to make. The first and least disruptive course of action would be to ask Congress to pass the bipartisan reforms noted above.

But some of his comments suggest he may seek to dismantle it, not fix it. None of his options are straightforward, however, and consequences are hard to predict.

Straight up changing the vaccine court’s structure would probably be the most difficult path. It requires Congress to amend the 1986 law that set it up and President Donald Trump to sign the legislation. Passing the bill to dismantle it requires the same process. Either direction involves all the difficulties of getting a contentious bill through Congress. Even the “friendly amendments” are hard – a 2021 bill to fix the vaccine court was introduced but failed to advance.

However, there are several less direct possibilities.

Adding autism to the injuries list

Kennedy has long supported discredited claims about harms from vaccines, but the vaccine court has been a bulwark against claims that lack mainstream scientific support. For example, the vaccine court held a yearslong court process from 2002 to 2010 and found that autism was not a vaccine injury. The autism trials drew on 50 expert reports, 939 medical articles and 28 experts testifying on the record. The special masters deciding the cases found that none of the causation hypotheses put forward to connect autism and vaccines were reliable as medical or scientific theories.

Much of Kennedy’s ire is directed at the special masters, who he claims “prioritize the solvency” of the system “over their duty to compensate victims.” But the special masters do not work for him. Rather, they are appointed by a majority of the judges in the Court of Federal Claims for four-year terms – and those judges themselves have 15-year terms. Kennedy cannot legally remove any of them in the middle of their service to install new judges who share his views.

Given that, he may seek to put conditions like autism on the list of presumed vaccine injuries, in effect overturning the special masters’ decisions. Revising the list of recognized injuries to add ones without medical evidence is within Kennedy’s powers, but it would still be difficult. It requires a long administrative process with feedback from an advisory committee and the public. Such revisions have historically been controversial, and are usually linked to major scientific reviews of their validity.

Public health and medical groups are already mobilized against Kennedy’s vaccine policy moves. If he failed to follow legally required procedures while adding new injuries to the list, he could be sued to stop the changes.

Targeting vaccine manufacturers

Kennedy could also lean on his newly reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to withdraw recommendations for certain vaccines, which would also remove them from eligibility in the vaccine compensation court. Lawsuits against manufacturers could then go straight to regular courts. On Aug. 14, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services may have taken a step in this direction by announcing the revival of a childhood vaccine safety task force in response to a lawsuit by anti-vaccine activists.

Kennedy has also supported legislation that would allow claims currently heard in vaccine court to go to regular courts. These drastic reforms could essentially dismantle the vaccine court.

People claiming vaccine injuries could hope to win damages through personal injury lawsuits in the civil justice system instead of vaccine court, perhaps by convincing a jury or getting a settlement. These types of settlements were what prompted the creation of the vaccine court in the first place. But these lawsuits could be hard to win. There is a higher bar for scientific evidence in regular courts than in vaccine court, and plaintiffs would have to sue large corporations rather than file a government claim.

Raising the idea of reforming the vaccine court has provoked strong reactions across the many groups with a stake in the program. It is a complex system with multiple constituents, and Kennedy’s approaches so far pull in different directions. The push to revolutionize it will test the strength of its complex design, but the vaccine court may yet hold up.

Anna Kirkland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. RFK Jr.’s plans to overhaul ‘vaccine court’ system would face legal and scientific challenges – https://theconversation.com/rfk-jr-s-plans-to-overhaul-vaccine-court-system-would-face-legal-and-scientific-challenges-261451

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Samira Mehta, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples have a constitutional right to use contraception. Griswold v. Connecticut, decided in 1965, made it illegal for states to outlaw birth control for spouses – a right that would not be extended to single people until 1972.

Griswold granted married couples this right on the grounds of privacy. Though the Constitution does not specifically name an explicit right to privacy, justices argued that it could be inferred from several amendments – an idea cited in later rulings on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

According to the Griswold ruling, the right of privacy within marriage was “older than the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school system.”

“Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred,” the majority opinion reads – it represents a coming together for a “noble” purpose.

In short, the Supreme Court framed marital sex as natural, intimate and, perhaps most importantly, sacred. These characteristics, they argued, allowed it to exist beyond the gaze of the law.

Here’s the thing, though: Historians know that marriage hasn’t always been a private affair. Nor has it always been treated as sacred – not under the law, at any rate. As a scholar completing a book on the history of religion and contraception, I argue that the attitudes toward marriage and contraception reflected in the Griswold decision were deeply rooted in Protestant thought.

Private and public

Throughout European history, royal couples getting married often had witnesses leading them to their bedrooms and remaining there – or waiting right outside. The marriage was not considered legally binding until it was consummated. At a time when royal weddings were often intended to shore up alliances, knowing that the marriage had been consummated ensured that any political agreements were binding and at least suggested that heirs would be legitimate.

Among the more “common folks,” today’s standard of marital privacy could not be achieved even within the family, simply because of space. In medieval and early modern Britain, whose legal system largely grounds American law, it was common for whole households to sleep or even live in just one room, including guests and apprentices. The reality of multipurpose, shared space was also the case in the American Colonies, on the frontier, and in the living quarters of enslaved people.

For much of its history, then, marriage was not the legalization of a private intimacy, but a public act made for a variety of political and economic reasons.

And while marriage was often understood as sacred, interpretations varied. Catholicism did consider marriage a sacrament but was not the most holy way to live – a status reserved for celibate priests and nuns.

At other times, marriage was not respected. Marriages between enslaved people, even when sanctioned by churches, held no weight in American law.

So why did the U.S. Supreme Court eventually assert that the state should not peer into the marital bedchamber?

Scholars such as Janet Jakobsen have argued that, during the Protestant Reformation, one of the ways that Protestants differentiated themselves from Catholics was by elevating marriage to the most sacred form of human sexuality.

Reformers such as Martin Luther criticized clerical celibacy, and were married. But the Protestant move toward married clergy was also about other kinds of freedom, according to Jakobsen. Religious and sexual freedom were intertwined: Marriage itself, not the church, became the institution where a couple could freely regulate their sexuality.

Praise for the pill

By the time the Supreme Court argued that marriage was, by nature, private and sacred, there was a long Protestant history of making that case.

But there was an even more recent Protestant history of making that argument specifically about birth control.

As new contraceptive options emerged in the 20th century, from the diaphragm to birth control pills, Christian leaders wrestled with what to think. The Catholic Church remained steadfastly opposed to contraception, although some Catholic theologians began to argue in favor of loosening the ban. Many Protestant denominations, meanwhile, slowly came to accept it – and then to endorse it.

Christians who came to support birth control framed it as a moral good: a tool that would allow married couples to have satisfying sex lives, while protecting women from the health risks of frequent pregnancies. Richard Fagley, the executive secretary of the the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, was one of the architects of this new theological perspective. He argued in 1960 that medical knowledge, including contraception, was “a liberating gift from God, to be used to the glory of God, in accordance with his will for men.”

By the time the pill came on the market in the 1960s, liberal Protestants, as well as many conservatives, were applying ideas about “Christian duty” to a new theology of “responsible parenthood.”

The best kind of family, they argued, was a father with a steady job and a homemaker mother. Limiting family size could help make that financially possible – and decrease divorce, as well.

The National Council of Churches, an organization representing many Protestant and some Orthodox churches, wrote in a statement approved by most of its members that they acknowledged the value of sex in marriage with or without procreation, because it was central to the “mutual love and companionship” of the marriage bond.

That said, they still emphasized parenthood as “a divinely ordained purpose of marriage.” Parenthood was, in the council’s eyes, a “participation in God’s continuing creation, which calls for awe, gratitude, and a sense of high responsibility.”

When the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, the majority opinion noted, “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Justice Clarence Thomas, however, wrote a concurring opinion calling for the court to revisit other decisions with similar reasoning, including the right to same-sex marriage and Griswold itself.

It seems important to look back on 1965, at the many voices that shaped the Griswold case, including secular feminists, medical doctors and Christian clergy. The decision’s supporters believed it would make women’s lives better, but also families’ lives – precisely by giving them privacy and autonomy.

Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on May 24, 2022.

Samira Mehta receives funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.

– ref. Protestant ideas shaped Americans’ support for birth control – and the Supreme Court ruling protecting a husband and wife’s right to contraception – https://theconversation.com/protestant-ideas-shaped-americans-support-for-birth-control-and-the-supreme-court-ruling-protecting-a-husband-and-wifes-right-to-contraception-249424