The gap of time between how long Americans live and how much of that time is spent in good health only grew wider in the last two decades, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.
The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—found the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest gap of any of the 183 countries included in the study. The second largest gap was Australia's, at 12.1 years, followed by New Zealand at 11.8 years and the UK at 11.3 years.
America also stood out for having the largest burden of noncommunicable diseases in the world, as calculated by the years lived with disease or disability per 100,000 people.
© Getty | Blend Images - JGI/Tom Grill
The gap of time between how long Americans live and how much of that time is spent in good health only grew wider in the last two decades, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.
The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—found the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest gap of any of the 183 countries included in the study. The second largest gap was Australia's, at 12.1 years, followed by New Zealand at 11.8 years and the UK at 11.3 years.
America also stood out for having the largest burden of noncommunicable diseases in the world, as calculated by the years lived with disease or disability per 100,000 people.
© Getty | Blend Images - JGI/Tom Grill
On Friday, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would begin a nationwide testing program for the presence of the H5N1 flu virus, also known as the bird flu. Testing will focus on pre-pasteurized milk at dairy processing facilities (pasteurization inactivates the virus), but the order that's launching the program will require anybody involved with milk production before then to provide samples to the USDA on request. That includes "any entity responsible for a dairy farm, bulk milk transporter, bulk milk transfer station, or dairy processing facility."
The ultimate goal is to identify individual herds where the virus is circulating and use the agency's existing powers to do contact tracing and restrict the movement of cattle, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the virus from US herds.
At the time of publication, the CDC had identified 58 cases of humans infected by the H5N1 flu virus, over half of them in California. All but two have come about due to contact with agriculture, either cattle (35 cases) or poultry (21). The virus's genetic material has appeared in the milk supply and, although pasteurization should eliminate any intact infectious virus, raw milk is notable for not undergoing pasteurization, which has led to at least one recall when the virus made its way into raw milk. And we know the virus can spread to other species if they drink milk from infected cows.
© Credit: mikedabell
For the past month, Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith has had a remarkable number of questions, which he’s posed in a new interview show titled, appropriately, “Shane Smith Has Questions.”
The show, which airs on YouTube and on Vice’s cable TV channel, is clearly meant to be a return to form for both Smith and the company after its bankruptcy, sale to a hedge fund, the layoff of hundreds of employees, and what Smith has recently described as a regrettable, years-long foray into wokeism.
If Smith has questions, so might viewers, including about his aims and standards of fact-checking.
“Now, more than ever, the truth is unclear,” Smith proclaims in an intro sequence. “What’s real, what’s fake, and who’s manipulating the narratives that have us questioning our facts.” As the podcast’s somewhat garbled YouTube description puts it, the show is “dedicated to getting to the bottom of prominent instances of misinformation and disinformation while revealing the fascinating fundamental truths (if there are any?) of the most interesting and convoluted social and political issues of our time.”
But in the course of supposedly investigating disinformation, Smith has also promoted it, along with conspiracy theories, questionable sources, and right-wing narratives that are depicted as objective fact.
As The Intercept recently noted, the show has advanced several anti-immigration tropes, titling one video “This is how illegals are sneaking into the USA.” (The word “illegals” was later replaced with “people.”) Another recent show discussed how “droves” of Chinese nationals are coming to the US; the sole interviewee was Todd Bensman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank.
Then there are the conspiracy theories: In an episode on the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump, Shane promoted the idea there was something suspicious. “Who’s trying to kill Trump and why?” the show’s title pontificated. Although he took no position on such theories, Smith gave generous air time to the notion that the Deep State or a possible second shooter could have been involved. He also speculated that mysterious forces could have played a role in what he termed “a coverup” of the real sequence of events.
“The more these people talk, the more suspicious it seems,” said one Smith guest, retired Canadian military sniper and YouTuber Dallas Alexander. He speculated to Smith that there had been a “second shooter” targeting Trump, an assertion with no evidence but that was presented with equal weight as other claims.
The show also, inevitably, features suspicion-mongering about Covid vaccines. During a conversation with Twitch streamer Destiny, Smith indicated he feels “duped” by mainstream advice on Covid vaccines and now believes them to have undisclosed side effects that were also covered up by the government.
If Smith has questions, so might anyone viewing the show: about what its aims are, its standards for fact-checking, and why it consistently adopts anti-immigration narratives, despite Smith being a Canadian immigrant himself. (A public relations professional who’s recently spoken on Vice’s behalf did not respond to a request for comment, and an email address for the company’s press office no longer works.)
A number of disclosures are necessary here: I was a reporter at Vice News from October 2019 to February 2024, when the majority of staff were laid off. I’m also one of a small group of remote staffers who filed an unsuccessful National Labor Relations Board complaint arguing Vice should have given us the same 90-day layoff notices as our New York-based colleagues.
Before and during my employment, my colleagues at Vice racked up acclaim and awards for their work on immigration, corporate corruption, and the far right, including a 2017 Peabody for Vice News Tonight’s reporting on the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. When I worked there, Smith was understood to no longer be directly involved in day-to-day operations, having been replaced as CEO in 2018 following a number of unflattering stories about a culture of sexual harassment. At the time, Smith and another co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, apologized in a statement to the New York Times for having failed “to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.” (Vice also settled a class action suit in 2019 alleging it underpaid women.) Smith was replaced as CEO by Nancy Dubuc and assumed the title of executive chairman.
But his involvement continued in ways that weren’t always obvious to the newsroom. Vice employees learned from Smith’s divorce filings in 2022 that he was being paid a $1.6 million annual salary, with another $1,400 a month in what were termed “perquisites.” In 2023, New York magazine reported that Smith had a “secret” multimillion-dollar deal with the company.
Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense.
Whatever its terms, he wasn’t completely absent. I have never met or spoken with him, but during my time at Vice, he once popped up in a Zoom meeting, generating a quiet round of confusion before he quickly disconnected. During the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the company launched an interview show called “Shelter in Place” that Smith conducted from his Pacific Palisades mansion, hollering questions over video at guests that included Edward Snowden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and George Floyd’s brother Philonise. (During their conversation, Smith professed wholehearted support for the Black Lives Matter movement.)
After Vice filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2023 and conducted massive layoffs nine months later, Smith was again named as Vice’s CEO in June 2024. At the time, the company also announced that he would return as the newsroom’s editor in chief and host a new “video podcast” set to be titled Vice News: The Truth?, which would feature talk show host and HBO fixture Bill Maher as a recurring guest. On Instagram, Smith promised that he “and the OG @billmaher” would “get deep into the ’24 election cycle.”
In October, when Smith finally launched his new show, it was under the “Shane Smith Has Questions” title. The third episode consisted of a Maher interview—and was promoted on a flashy Times Square billboard, which says that “Questions” is produced by Vice and Maher’s company Club Random Studios. Maher has yet to return to “Questions,” but Smith did appear separately on Maher’s own Club Random podcast, where he took the opportunity to depict Vice’s heyday as an unfortunate detour, specifically regretting how the company grew tiresomely critical of people like Elon Musk, solely because, as Smith put it, “he’s rich.”
“We at Vice—and I publicly apologize, Elon—used to shit on him,” Smith told Maher. “And I’d be like, ‘Why are you shitting on the guy? He’s great.’”
Sometimes, Smith’s wealth and celebrity—along what seems to be a rightward turn—create excellent interview opportunities. In the “Shane Smith Has Questions” episode on the Trump assassination attempt, he interviewed Kurt Schiller, the former head of Donald Trump’s security detail, introducing him as “my friend.” For an episode on protecting Trump, there’s arguably no better source.
But Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense: In the assassination episode, he also interviewed a triad of YouTubers whose main qualification seems to be that they have declared themselves to be weapons experts, as well as Gerald Posner, a journalist and author who left the Daily Beast in 2010 after he was found to have plagiarized. (Posner used his appearance to suggest that there were unanswered questions about the Trump shooting, drawing a parallel to JFK’s assassination, which he authored a book about in 2003. But Posner’s book concludes that Oswald likely acted alone and that broader conspiracies are unfounded.)
A November episode interviewing Destiny, the Twitch streamer, featured the two men, neither of whom have any medical training, trying to parse the difference between myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation; both are rare side effects of Covid vaccines mostly seen in young men.
During that episode, Smith indicated there would be a forthcoming podcast wholly devoted to Covid and vaccines. Unsurprisingly, he voiced questions about those too.
“I was a pro-vaxxer,” he told Destiny, describing himself as having been “part of the fuckin’ media” that was pushing vaccinations. Now, Smith said, he has concerns about side effects and suggested he has “friends who have had heart attacks” because they had “a certain kind of genetic disorder” that he said was exacerbated by vaccines.
“We were lied to. We’re now finding out that a lot of that was covered up,” Smith went on. “That’s government testimony, that’s Fauci’s testimony, that’s the Senate, that’s the surgeon general.” (It’s unclear what Smith was referring to, but neither Anthony Fauci nor the surgeon general have indicated that they’ve come to believe Covid vaccines are in any way unsafe.)
“I feel duped,” Smith added.
When the promised Covid episode appeared a week later, it was wholly devoted to an interview with Brianne Dressen, a Utah mother who has claimed that she was injured and became disabled during 2020 trials for the AstraZeneca vaccine. (The company’s vaccine was one of the earliest on the market worldwide, but was phased out in most countries when newer mRNA vaccines were introduced. It was discontinued in May 2024 due to low demand.)
Smith can’t seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it.
After her experience, Dressen sued AstraZeneca for breach of contract, a lawsuit that is ongoing. She also became the founder of React19, a group which says it advocates for patients injured by Covid vaccines. Many of the group’s purported experts have ties with the anti-vaccine movement or previously advocated for pseudomedical Covid treatments. React19 has featured video interviews with Dr. Pierre Kory, who promoted ivermectin as a Covid treatment for years, despite a huge body of evidence that it is ineffective. (Kory eventually lost his board certification with the American Board of Internal Medicine, which his ivermectin-promoting group attributed to his advocacy for “early treatments” and “repurposed medications.”) Another person offering “patient education” at React19 is Josh Guetzkow, an assistant criminology professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who has no apparent medical training; he maintains a Substack devoted to his objections and self-styled reporting into what he believes are the dangers of Covid vaccines.
Dressen has been interviewed by Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization. The organization’s media arm, The Defender, has positively covered her lawsuit, suggesting it could make it possible to sue vaccine manufacturers in civil court. (Since 1989, a federal compensation program has steered people who believe they were injured by such shots to a specialized court with judges expert in vaccine law.)
React19 clearly has political aims that go beyond vaccines. Along with the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, React19 submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, in which the plaintiffs claimed that the federal government had pressured social media companies to censor conservative views. (React19 argued it had been censored from discussing vaccine side effects.)
On Smith’s program, however, all of that context is missing; Dressen is simply depicted as a former preschool teacher turned patient advocate, whose eyes were opened to the dangers of vaccines. In her comments to Smith, Dressen merges her own experience with the eventually discontinued AztraZeneca shot with people she claims were injured by later mRNA vaccines and even non-Covid vaccines, claiming there are also risks to HPV and flu shots. While there are rare but real chances of serious side effects from any vaccine, the broad takeaway from Smith’s show is to suggest a vast cover-up, a body of evidence kept hidden from the public about the shots’ purported dangers; in other words, he puts forth a classic conspiracy theory.
This is a viewpoint with which Smith clearly agrees. “We’re limping towards honesty,” Smith told Dressen, seemingly referring to the public conversation about Covid vaccines. “Because people like yourself are forcing us to look honestly and factually at what actually happened.”
The credulity and threadbare context in the Dressen episode showcases some of the strangest features of “Shane Smith Has Questions.” Smith can’t quite seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it, whether to position himself as a fact-seeking journalist or a reflexive skeptic of the establishment. In his meandering remarks on the show, he reflects a belief that some right-leaning conspiracy theories have been proven true, an overall sense of personal disaffection with liberal ideas, and a desire, above all, to ingratiate himself with a new audience.
Indeed, as Semafor recently reported, Smith’s producers have made overtures to conservative podcasters and what the story called “manosphere personalities,” seeking to have them on the show by convincing them Smith was never as “woke” as Vice appeared to be. “According to his producers,” explains Semafor’s Max Tani, “Smith’s previous relationships with corporate media figures during Vice’s heyday—Disney was a major investor—made him sacrifice his male fans to chase an imaginary audience, in their telling.” Thus far, Tani reported, the figures they’ve approached have responded coolly.
Whether Smith’s new conservative turn is a business strategy or a sincere philosophical pivot isn’t something that can be answered from the outside.
But watching Smith’s new show, it does seem like the media mogul has questions: wandering, digressive, and some of them already answered if he looked outside his guests. But, it must be admitted, they are questions nonetheless. As Smith voices them in every new episode, he surely provokes questions from his new audience, whoever they may be.
In 2016, Jarrod Fidden, an Australian entrepreneur living in Ireland, announced that he’d launched a dating app for conspiracy theorists—or, as he put it at the time, for those who engage with “socially inconvenient truths.” The app was written up in dozens of news outlets in multiple languages as a funny curiosity. Fidden himself was described the same way: a jaunty, voluble character who liked to tell reporters how he and his wife had “woken up” together a few years before to the sinister, hidden hands shaping the world, generating the idea for the site.
Elon Musk’s version of X has proven especially helpful for the science-denying account.
While Awake Dating soon vanished from the headlines, the man behind the app seems to have moved on to more impactful pursuits. Less than a decade later, Wide Awake Media, a Twitter account that Fidden appears to operate, has become a major voice for climate denialism. Its more than 500,000 followers on X include former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone; Craig Kelly, a former member of Australian Parliament and an overt climate change denialist; former General Mike Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a QAnon promoter; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of early Covid lockdown measures and a professor of health policy at Stanford, whom Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health in his second term.
Wide Awake Media is a huge player in a small but exceedingly noisy echo chamber of climate denial accounts on X, which parrot each other’s paranoid assertions that climate change is a “hoax” and that green energy proposals are a pretext to impose global control. With the help of Twitter’s monetized verification system, Wide Awake has grown an exceedingly large audience, mostly on the right; Elon Musk himself recently replied to the account, further raising its visibility.
The fact that a single conspiracy entrepreneur has been able to gain such a large foothold in Twitter’s information ecosystem is concerning to experts who research climate denialism and its dissemination.
Jennie King is the director of climate research and policy for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that studies how extremism and disinformation spread online. “The Wide Awake story is indicative of various online trends,” she says, “including the diversity of actors who are piggybacking on the climate crisis as a way to generate both clout and revenue.”
In its current form, Wide Awake Media began as a Telegram channel promoting primarily anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content before joining Twitter in 2022 and becoming more active after Musk’s purchase of the site. (The Telegram channel remains, but is less frequently updated.) At the same time, the account also shifted to focus largely on climate denialism.
The Twitter account is verified, meaning its operator pays for a subscription, and in return has its visibility and replies boosted by the site’s algorithm. A verified account also means Wide Awake Media can make money from popular content.
In 2023, the account saw a huge boom in traffic; between April and November of that year, King says, “they had gone from having 322 followers to 250,000 followers. This morning they’re at 577,000. So in the course of 18 months, that is a 1.7 thousand fold increase.”
The account focuses on several themes, King says, that reliably drive grievance-based engagement, including perceived government overreach during early days of Covid and its tension with “individual liberties,” and “fundamental changes to infrastructure and our lived environment,” like proposals for so-called 15-minute cities.
“There was a diverse community of people with grievances around these themes,” she explains. “Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new, in this case climate action.”
The transition was especially pronounced in 2023, King says. At that time, with the worst days of Covid infections over, you couldn’t “generate the same engagement with pandemic-related content,” she explains. “So you need to expand the business model and think about how you’re going to maintain your relevance, visibility, traction, and profit drivers.”
Acting in a “mutually reinforcing” echo chamber with other online climate deniers is a huge part of Wide Awake’s strategy, King says. “It’s a tiny minority of accounts, probably less than 50 in the Anglosphere, who are really driving this ecosystem. They are constantly citing each other, appearing in each other’s channels, using each other to provide a veneer of credibility, and doing what disinfo needs to in order to survive: create the impression of critical mass.”
Wide Awake Media also uses Twitter to promote an online store selling T-shirts with conspiratorial slogans—another way the operator has monetized their presence on the platform. (It also periodically promotes donations through fundraising platforms.) As Media Matters noted in a September 2023 analysis, the account’s “seemingly scrappy operation offering little original content besides t-shirts, proves that becoming a climate denial influencer is easier than ever.”
A previous email for Fidden is no longer operational, and whoever is behind the Twitter account didn’t respond to several requests for comment—except to post a screenshot of one email I sent, warning that a “hit piece” was imminent. But there are strong indications Fidden is the person behind the Wide Awake Media Twitter account. For one, Wide Awake Media LLC was the name of the company he founded to promote Awake Dating. A previous website, wideawakemedia.ie, which advertised Awake Dating, began redirecting to an identical US-based site, wideawakemedia.us, in 2018. Both the Irish and US sites linked to the Wide Awake Media Twitter account as methods of contact. So does the vendor that sells Wide Awake Media’s T-shirts, suggesting one common operator behind the Irish site, the US site, and the T-shirt seller.
(The Twitter account has claimed to be a “one man operation” based in the UK, uses British spelling, and engages heavily with conspiracy theories about Australian politics, where Fidden is from, and local issues affecting the UK and Ireland.)
“Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new…climate action.”
In the transition from conspiracist dating to climate denial, Fidden seems to have lost at least one ally. Daniel John Sullivan, a Seattle-based software engineer, was previously identified as Awake Dating’s CTO. On one of several blogs he maintains, Sullivan has called Fidden a “shit head” and “a grifter.” In a brief email exchange, Sullivan emphatically stated that he’s no longer involved with Fidden or any of his projects.
Wide Awake Media could be viewed as what the Pew Research Center, in a recent report, called a “news influencer”—a poster with no journalism background or news outlet affiliation, that nonetheless helps shape how their audience reads and interprets current events.
Musk’s version of X has proved especially helpful for Wide Awake Media as it expands its audience and promotes paranoia, given that under him, the company has dismantled its trust and safety teams and fundamentally ceded the fight against disinformation. That can, King says, “create a culture of permissibility within a platform.”
“People know they’re likely to be able to act with impunity,” she adds. By removing the safeguards, “You create an enabling environment where certain accounts are suddenly able to accumulate enormous followings overnight.”
Of course, individual climate disinformation peddlers are always joined by the much more powerful industry lobbyists. At this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP29, oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered “the delegations of almost every country,” the Guardian reported. But responses to the climate denialism industry, and the individuals who spread it, are also starting to take shape. Brazil, the United Nations, and UNESCO recently announced a project to respond to climate disinformation. Their Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, the groups have said, “expand the scope and breadth of research into climate disinformation and its impacts.” (Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has also announced support for the move.)
Meanwhile, King says, climate disinformation is likely to continue to be a major area of focus for conspiracy peddlers, because of the grim reality that climate change and its harmful impacts are increasingly impossible to ignore.
“Judging from what we know about the climate crisis, and how its effects are becoming more directly experienced by the general public, this topic is going to have a long shelf life,” she says.
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