Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) turned heads this week after saying on a radio show that he had intentionally tried to get his children infected with chickenpox and that he did not support the state’s mandatory chickenpox vaccine.

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During his State of the State address last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a brief, if bold, promise.

“California’s consumers should be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data,” said Newsom, who went on to add that his team was working up a proposal for what he called a “data dividend.”

The term was simple, self-explanatory and puzzling.

A law that would compensate consumers for the use of their data by tech monoliths such as Google and Facebook, who make billions off this information, is so novel it would be a national and indeed global first.

But as appealing as a data dividend might sound, data privacy experts say it is far more easily announced than implemented.

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Ethan Lindenberger, frustrated by years of arguments about his mother’s anti-vaccination stance, staged a quiet defection on Reddit.

The Norwalk, Ohio, teenager needed advice, he said, on how to inoculate himself against both infectious disease and his family’s dogma. At 18, he was old enough, Lindenberger explained. He wanted to get vaccinated. But he didn’t know how.

“Because of their beliefs I’ve never been vaccinated for anything, God knows how I’m still alive,” Lindenberger wrote days before Thanksgiving.

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Employees at a drug company accused of bribing doctors rapped and danced around a person dressed as a bottle of the highly addictive fentanyl spray in a video meant to motivate sales reps into getting patients on higher doses.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren has tried to put a nagging controversy behind her by apologizing privately to a leader of the Cherokee Nation for her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry last year, a move that had angered some tribal leaders and ignited a significant political backlash.

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An alt-right activist who met with two Republican congressmen to discuss “DNA” and “genetics” posted on Facebook that he believes Muslims are “genetically different in their propensity for violence or rape” and linked to stories about how African-Americans “possessed a ‘violence’ gene.”

Chuck Johnson met with Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland and Phil Roe of Tennessee on Thursday. After a Huffington Post reporter tweeted a photoof Johnson with the two congressmen, and the photo attracted media attention because of Johnson’s far-right views, Roe released a statementsaying he and Harris had met with Johnson because he was representing a company advocating for “increasing the number of sequenced genomes for research.”

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An advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration split evenly on Thursday over whether the agency should approve the first oral medication to treat Type 1 diabetes.

The committee voted 8-8, leaving it up to the agency to decide by the end of March whether the drug, sotagliflozin, should reach the market.

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Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence.

In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist’s remarks were “unsubstantiated and reckless”.

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Police stations from Massachusetts to Mumbai have received similar alerts from Facebook over the last 18 months as part of what is most likely the world’s largest suicide threat screening and alert program. The social network ramped up the effort after several people live-streamed their suicides on Facebook Live in early 2017. It now utilizes both algorithms and user reports to flag possible suicide threats.

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NIPT’s entry into the mainstream has raised some questions as busy health-care providers scramble to figure out how to offer it en masse to a public with varying understanding of genetic testing and little access to genetic counselors.

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