More than four years after a Florida condominium collapse killed 98 people, federal investigators have yet to make a final determination of the cause — but they do have some leading theories.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the agency handling the probe, said this week it hopes to conclude the investigation in 2026.

“We intend for our investigation of this failure to have a lasting impact, save future lives and ensure this never happens again,” NIST investigator Judith Mitrani-Reiser said in the agency’s latest report.

Most residents were asleep in the 12-story Champlain Towers South when the beachfront condo building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed into a huge pile of rubble at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021. As the investigation continued, a Miami judge approved a more than $1 billion settlement for personal injury and wrongful death claims from the disaster.

Meanwhile, a new luxury condominium is going up at the Champlain Towers site, a few miles north of Miami.

What caused the collapse?

NIST has zeroed in on what it calls three “higher-likelihood” scenarios, all related to construction flaws that date to the beginning of the 40-year-old structure.

“These conditions existed from the time construction was complete, 40 years before the partial collapse,” said Glen Bell, co-lead investigator on NIST’s National Construction Safety Team.

One possibility is the failure of a connection between a building column and the pool deck slab that never met building code standards. Another is that steel reinforcement “was not placed where it should have been,” which meant the column and pool deck were far too weak.

And a third theory is that work done later around the pool — when heavy planters, sand and pavers were added — increased the weight load on a deck “that was already functionally and structurally inadequate.”

The NIST report also notes that support columns in the building’s basement parking garage had been exposed to frequent flooding, which causes corrosion in steel reinforcements and concrete deterioration.

Are there other theories?

Investigators did not find evidence of voids in the ground under the building, known as “karst.” Using satellite data, the NIST team found there was no sinking or settling underneath Champlain Towers, which would indicate existence of karst.

In addition, investigators found the limestone upon which the condo was built was “sufficient to carry the building loads” and that testing of the concrete supporting Champlain Towers had “adequate material strength.”

One challenge for investigators was the lack of any available records from the original building construction and not many from its earlier years.

How are other condo buildings handling new rules?

After Surfside, state legislators enacted a law in 2022 requiring condo associations to have sufficient reserves to cover major repairs. Some residents were caught off guard by hefty fees imposed to cover years of deferred maintenance expenses required to bring their buildings into compliance with the law’s standards.

Gov. Ron DeSantis this week signed new legislation allowing some condo associations to fund their reserves through a loan or line of credit. It also gives residents more flexibility to pause payments into reserve funds while they prioritize needed repairs. It extends the deadline for condo associations to complete structural integrity studies and exempts some smaller buildings from those studies.

“Now it’s time to make the change,” state Sen. Ed Hooper said. “Elderly people are losing their condos because they could not afford to make the increase in their monthly HOA fees. That’s just wrong.”

What is being built on the site?

It’s a luxury condo building, dubbed the Delmore, with 37 “mansions in the sky” and a starting price of $15 million. The site was purchased at auction by Dubai-based DAMAC International for $120 million.

According to the company, there will be amenities such as a see-through swimming pool, an indoor pool, an outdoor kitchen, a fitness center and a meditation garden.

The new condo is expected to be completed by 2029.

Will there be a memorial to the victims?

A design for a memorial to the 98 victims and that honors their families was approved earlier this year by Surfside officials and a family committee. But the city’s planning and zoning board objected to its appearance and recommended that alternatives be considered.

The existing proposal envisions a tall “wall of water” and exhibition of materials from the collapsed building. Surfside officials say they want to keep the project on track but will consider additional input, especially from the family committee.

“I understand the urgency. But this memorial is going to be here long beyond anyone in this room,” said planning board chair Lindsay Lecour at an April city commission meeting.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Friday that age verification “porn ID” laws are an appropriate way to regulate content for minors without infringing on the First Amendment rights of adults.

The ruling, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, has major implications for the accessibility of any online speech the government could decide is harmful to children.

Laws that potentially curb civil liberties are subject to rigorous legal standards. Two lower courts had applied different standards to the Texas law, and the Supreme Court decided that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ lower standard was correct in this case. Strict scrutiny, the standard applied by the Texas district court, requires that a law must be narrowly tailored, further a compelling government interest and be the least restrictive option. The 5th Circuit used a lower standard, known as rational basis, to evaluate the law, essentially saying it has no potential to jeopardize freedom of speech.

The Free Speech Coalition joined several adult content companies and an anonymous creator to challenge Texas’ law. The organization has filed cases in different states challenging web-based age verification statutes over the past couple years. According to the organization’s tracker, 24 states have passed age verification laws targeting sexual content online since 2022.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the law should be evaluated based on intermediate scrutiny, the standard in between, because it only “incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.” Laws must further an important government interest and do so by “means substantially related to that interest.” Texas’ law survives this test, Thomas wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

Thomas dismissed the argument  about the risks of age verification in an online environment, contending that websites or third-party services “have every incentive to assure users of their privacy.” He also held that accessing pornography has always come with a stigma, sidestepping the way digital information on users is collected, bought and sold in today’s world.

He noted that under intermediate scrutiny, the law doesn’t have to address all aspects of the overarching problem of blocking children from seeing inappropriate material online. Representatives of the pornography industry had argued that Texas’s law exempted the places on the internet youth are most likely to encounter content considered obscene for them: social media and search engines.

“This is a major victory for children, parents, and the ability of states to protect minors from the damaging effects of online pornography,” Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “Companies have no right to expose children to pornography and must institute reasonable age verification measures.”

In her dissent, Justice Kagan argued that Texas’ law regulated content and thus should be subject to strict scrutiny. She asked whether the age verification process outlined was the least restrictive way to keep access for adults while also preventing children from seeing sexual material online.

She emphasized the risks to privacy that the Free Speech Coalition and digital civil rights groups raised in their arguments.

“It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits—respecting speech many find repulsive—to a website operator, and then to…who knows?” she wrote. “The operator might sell the information; the operator might be hacked or subpoenaed.”

Kagan also drew a distinction between online age verification and flashing an ID momentarily in person: “The internet context can only increase the fear.”

By saying the law does not have to meet strict scrutiny, the opinion paves the legal way for increased site-based age verification on the web. The privacy concerns accompanying the uploading of verifiable identification to sensitive websites are not seen as overly burdensome to adults.

Consequently, the court ruled restrictions on protected free speech for adults can be applied in the name of protecting children.

In 2023, Texas passed a law requiring websites with at least one-third sexual content — characterized as “material harmful to minors” — to verify the age of users using government identification or other reliable techniques. The law was initially blocked by a district judge, but then the preliminary injunction was overruled by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The law has been in effect while the Supreme Court considered the case.

Many digital civil rights groups have raised the alarm over privacy risks of web-based age verification. Texas, like the majority of states, does not have a state-recognized digital identification system. Websites would need to contract with a third- party company that handles photos of physical IDs or runs face-scans to determine the age of users. The risk is compounded as a user typically must verify their age every time they try to view a page. Device-based age verification, where pieces of technology like phones or computers are age-locked, generally only requires identification once.

“The government should not have the right to demand that we sacrifice our privacy and security to use the internet,” said Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry trade group who sued Texas over its age verification law. “This law has failed to keep minors away from sexual content yet continues to have a massive chilling effect on adults. The outcome is disastrous for Texans and for anyone who cares about freedom of speech and privacy online.”

The decision doesn’t mean all forms of age verification are now legal online, said Vera Eidelman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, who joined as co-counsel on the case. Rather, “with this decision, the court has carved out an unprincipled pornography exception to the First Amendment.”

These laws have severely reduced traffic to pornography sites that have complied with age verification mandates, but they haven’t stymied consumption of sexual material. They are more likely to drive users to less-moderated sites that host illegal material like child sexual abuse material. Adult content creators, many who are women and LGBTQ+, depend on traffic referrals from free “tube” sites like Pornhub to funnel into paid channels. The impacts of these laws will trickle down to people who make legal, constitutionally protected content for adults.

Critics of age verification laws worry how state governments will determine what kinds of content qualify as “harmful to minors,” especially as censorship of LGBTQ+ media rises under the mantle of being inappropriate for children — or outright consider the existence of queer people to be pornographic. The ability to easily access information about reproductive health or dissenting political opinions could be targeted by laws championing children down the line.

And in a world where data leaks are an everyday occurance, there could be serious reputational harm caused to people whose personal information could be linked to viewing porn — or specific types of porn, like LGBTQ+ content, even though age verification vendors aren’t supposed to track that. (Many companies track and share data even if they claim not to.)

The past three weeks have been auspicious for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the nation’s most important panel of vaccine experts: All 17 voting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which ones must be covered through insurance and provided free of charge to children on Medicaid, were abruptly fired. The small, ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy appointed two days later met this week for the first time, amid lots of empty chairs in a conference room in Atlanta. They had come to talk about the safety of vaccines: to raise concerns about the data, to float hypotheses of harm, to issue findings.

The resulting spectacle was set against a backdrop of accelerating action from the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy terminated more than $1 billion in U.S. funding for Gavi, a global-health initiative that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy used to chair, was just hired as a special government employee. (She presented at the ACIP meeting yesterday.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underscored the safety of thimerosal, an ingredient in a small proportion of the nation’s flu vaccines, had been taken down, a committee member said, because the document “was not authorized by the office of the secretary.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told me in an email that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefing packets.)

What’s clear enough is that, 61 years after ACIP’s founding, America’s vaccination policy is about to be recooked. Now we’ve had a glimpse inside the kitchen.

The meeting started with complaints. “Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,” said Martin Kulldorff, a rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted COVID contrarian who is now ACIP’s chair. (Kuldorff was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial proposal from the fall of 2020 to isolate seniors and other vulnerable people while reopening the rest of society.) In suggesting that he and Kennedy’s other appointees are opposed to vaccination, Kulldorff said, journalists were misleading the public, weakening trust in public health, and fanning “the flames of vaccine hesitancy.”

This was, in fact, the most pugnacious comment of the two-day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of fearmongering gentility. Robert Malone, a doctor and an infectious-diseases researcher who has embraced the “anti-vaccine” label and published a conspiracy-theory-laden book that details government psyops against the American people, was unfailingly polite in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thanking CDC staff for their hard work and lucid presentations. With his thick white beard, calm affect, and soldierly diction—Malone ended many of his comments by saying, “Over” into the microphone—he presented less as a firebrand than as, say, the commanding officer of a submarine.

When Malone alluded to the worry, for example, that spike proteins from the mRNA-based COVID vaccines linger in the body following injection, he did so in respectful, even deferential, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from greater study of possible “delayed effects” of immune-system activation. The CDC’s traditional approach—its “world-leading, rigorous” one, he clarified—might be improved by examining this question. A subject-matter expert responded that the CDC has been keeping tabs on real-world safety data on those vaccines for nearly five years, and has not detected any signs of long-term harm.

Later, Malone implied that COVID or its treatments might have, through some unspecified, bank-shot mechanism, left the U.S. population more susceptible to other illnesses. There was a “paradoxical, sudden decrease” in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noted, followed by a trend of worsening harm. A CDC staffer pointed out that the decrease in flu during those years was not, in fact, a paradox; well-documented shifts in people’s health behavior had temporarily reduced the load of many respiratory illnesses during that same period. But Malone pressed on: “Some members of the scientific community have concern that they’re coming out of the COVID pandemic—exposure to the virus, exposure to various countermeasures—there may be a pattern of broad-based, uh, energy,” he said, his eyes darting up for a moment as he said the word, “that might contribute to increased severity of influenza disease.” He encouraged the agency to “be sensitive to that hypothesis.”

Throughout these and other questions from the committee members, the CDC’s subject-matter experts did their best to explain their work and respond to scattershot technical and conceptual concerns. “The CDC staff is still attempting to operate as an evidence-based organization,” Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and attended this one as a nonvoting liaison to the committee from the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. “There was some tension in terms of the capacity of the committee to ask and understand the appropriate methodological questions. The CDC was trying to hold it down.”

That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. “The new ACIP is an independent body composed of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions, and make decisions based on scientific integrity,” the HHS spokesperson told me. “Bottom line: this process reflects open scientific inquiry and robust debate, not a pre-scripted narrative.” The most vocal questioner among the new recruits—and the one who seemed least beholden to a script—was the MIT business-school professor Retsef Levi, a lesser-known committee appointee who sat across the table from Malone. A scruffy former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer with a ponytail that reached halfway down his back, Levi’s academic background is in data modeling, risk management, and organizational logistics. He approached the proceedings with a swaggering incredulity, challenging the staffers’ efforts and pointing out the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a pinned post on his X profile, Levi writes that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death”—a position entirely at odds with copious data presented at the meeting.)

Shortly before the committee’s vote to recommend a new, FDA-approved monoclonal antibody for preventing RSV in infants, Levi noted that he’d spent some time reviewing the relevant clinical-trial data for the drug and another like it, and found some worrying patterns in the statistics surrounding infant deaths. “Should we not be concerned that maybe there are some potential safety signals?” he asked. But these very data had already been reviewed, at great length, in multiple settings: by the FDA, in the course of drug approval, and by the dozens of members of ACIP’s relevant work group for RSV, which had, per the committee’s standard practice, conducted its own staged analysis of the new treatment before the meeting and reached consensus that its benefits outweighed its risks. Levi was uncowed by any reference to this prior work. “I’m a scientist, but I’m also a father of six kids,” he told the group; speaking as a father, he said, he personally would be concerned about the risk of harm from this new antibody for RSV.

In the end, Levi voted against recommending the antibody, as did Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and holds a Ph.D. in public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. That 5–2 vote aside, the most contentious issue on the meeting’s schedule concerned the flu shots in America that contain thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement for the past few decades. Despite extensive study, vaccines with thimerosal have not been found to be associated with any known harm in human patients, yet an unspecified vote regarding their use was slipped into the meeting’s agenda in the absence of any work-group study or presentation from the CDC’s staff scientists. What facts there were came almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who used to run Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that at least one citation from her posted slides had been invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS did not address a request for comment on this issue in its response to me.)

The only one of Kennedy’s appointees who had ever previously served on the committee—the pediatrician Cody Meissner—seemed perplexed, even pained, by the proceedings. “I’m not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,” he said when Redwood finished. He went on to sum up his concerns: “ACIP makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.” Alas, Meissner’s warnings were for nought. Throughout the meeting, he came off as the committee’s last remaining, classic “expert”—a vaccine scientist clinging to ACIP’s old ways—but his frequent protestations were often bulldozed over or ignored. In the end, his was the only vote against the resolutions on thimerosal.

Throughout the two-day meeting, Kuldorff kept returning to a favorite phrase: evidence-based medicine. “Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday morning; “The purpose of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday afternoon; “What is important is using evidence-based medicine,” he said again when the meeting reached its end. All told, I heard him say evidence-based at least 10 times during the meeting. (To be fair, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this phrase.) But the committee was erratic in its posture toward the evidence from the very start; it cast doubt on CDC analyses and substituted lay advice and intuition for ACIP’s normal methods of assessing and producing expert consensus. “Decisons were made based on feelings and preferences rather than evidence,” Morris told me after the meeting. “That’s a dangerous way to make public-health policy.”