Jay Bhattacharya is lying to America about the benefits and extreme effectiveness of the COVID vaccine to continue pushing pseudoscience and conspiracies. (1/2🧵) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/h...

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

Go blue!!! 💛💙

"The struggle of figuring out the right analysis approach, wrestling with an unexpected result, or trying to turn a messy set of findings into a coherent story is not an obstacle to learning. It _is_ the learning". Required reading for AI in the lab: blekhman.substack.com/p/you-need-t...

Omics. Regulation. AI. Explore how integrative genomics and machine learning are redefining cardiovascular research at the Omics, Regulation, & AI for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine virtual symposium, April 28–29. 👉Register now: https://bit.ly/41wDRyt #CardioGenomics #VirtualSymposium #ASHG

Postdoc survival tip: If you're wondering where your time goes in a week, try using an app like Toggl Track to assess your time use. I started pretending I had billable hours, and it helped me focus on efficiently tackling specific tasks instead of getting halfway through several tasks at once.

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

"as Americans, we really need to remember that having a British accent does not give you extra credibility" Dammit @ggronvall.bsky.social ! 🤣 ht @angierasmussen.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...

Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series" earlier today and I just wanted to run through some of the main claims he made - you'll be unsurprised to learn that almost all of them are false. Here's his summary slide - let's start there. 🧵👇

NIH/NSF funding is, for all intents and purposes, frozen again. This somehow almost feels worse than last year. They are running out the clock on biomedical science and all PIs can do is scramble to finish projects before our resources dry up. www.science.org/content/arti...

If you've used my qqman package in the past, you might take a look at gwasplot: High Performance GWAS Plotting and Annotation. I haven't updated qqman in years and don't plan to. github.com/weinstocklab... #Rstats

Wish I could send this to whoever reviewed my grant and told me there was no evidence we needed prediction and prevention of CVD in the young (<40) www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10....

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

An examination of the association between oral antibiotic use over eight years and the gut #microbiome in Swedish individuals found evidence that antibiotics can have long-lasting impacts on the gut microbiome. go.nature.com/40sw4kU#microbiome#medsky 🧪

Here's our R package for interacting with WGS derived GWAS summary statistics with many rare variants (from e.g. UKB or AofUs). It uses duckdb underneath so it's fast. Includes some helpful tie ins to Open Targets / Encode Screen / Ensembl APIs for annotation. weinstocklab.github.io/gwasplot/ind...

It was a momentous day — one student that I co-supervise presented her first poster and another submitted her first, first author paper. These days as a mentor make the trials of academia worthwile! ❤️

Brent Pedersen, Mitchell Vollger and I have "posted" our preprint of the manuscript describing bedder, a complement to the functionality of bedtools. The "preprint server" we have chosen is google docs because it was rejected by biorxiv. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

🚨 New paper! Very excited to have been part of this collaborative work looking at the effect of antibiotics on the gut microbiota even years after prescription. Amazing effort led by Gabriel @tovefall.bsky.social and many others published today in Nature Medicine! 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We might hope for clinical testing to be more standardized than consumer services, but if 7 different companies can’t even begin to reach the same conclusion from the same stool sample, we might have problems trusting microbiome data to inform anything health-related. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Moved to Claude today!

"HS under Kennedy has made a habit of throwing good money after bad science." That "good money" is our tax payer $$, thrown at unethical studies. He pushes ideology over evidence. The cover of the most recent issue of The Lancet says it all. 🧪 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #ImpeachRFKJr

This week's cover @thelancet.com

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

A day in the life of Brooke Wolford, a statistical geneticist at NTNU (Norway). It's proof that science is both technical and deeply human at the same time. 🧬☕️🐕

👀 Just when I think it can't get worse...

FDA's decision not to accept Moderna's flu vaccine filing has sent shock waves through pharma. "When there’s uncertainty about the path to approval & the reliability of the process, that really has pretty serious consequences,” one player told @jasonmast.bsky.social. www.statnews.com/2026/02/12/f...

I would ask people to call or message their senators about this and specifically that Vinay Prasad needs to be out at FDA. Even the Wall Street Journal has said as much. There is push back. Companies won’t fund clinical trials if they can’t trust the FDA.

Read @bakerdphd.bsky.social’s piece on the need for institutions and their associations to stand up to this kind of behaviour, and then re-read the UNC story.

Very excited to be a certified Carpentries Instructor thanks to Carpentry@UiO! @carpentries.carpentries.org

Wish it was easier to calculate PGS in trusted research environments (TRE) like DNAnexus or the All of Us workbench? Us to! We've been hard at work on a new version of pgsc_calc to make it more scalable in those TREs! Introducing pgsc_calc v3.0.0-alpha.1: pgsc-calc.readthedocs.io/en/v3-alpha.1/

New NIH funding strategy has been formalized. I really do hope scientists understand what this means for the future of science (funding) - it's not subtle. www.niaid.nih.gov/about/unifie...

I'm at the Willard Hotel where I've been denied entry and kicked out of the Reclaiming Science event with NIH director Bhattacharya & other top agency leaders. @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social and I registered for the event months ago yet were told capacity was full, even as they let in dozens of others.

The latest article by NTNU PhD candidate Vera Vik Bjarkø, MD led by Bjørn Olav Åsvold is online now! It was fun to contribute to this GxE exploration with a team from the HUNT Center of Molecular and Clinical Epidemiology & Dept of Public Health and Nursing.

How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year? My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive. www.science.org/content/arti...

A self-described "little farm girl" in the Jim Crow Era, Gladys West's complex and pioneering work for the U.S. Navy helped to improve billions of lives — and keep us from getting lost. n.pr/3YVSGJK

Cost of being female lead/corresponding author in biomedical sciences: "[T]he median amount of time spent under review is 7.4%–14.6% longer for female-authored articles than for male-authored articles" even in disciplines where women well-represented. #AcademicSky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

“The speed, the scope and the severity of the attacks on science are beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” says @gretchentg.bsky.social. My @nature.com story on the human toll of the 2nd Trump presidency. Thx to @dochfroehlich.bsky.social, @briannosek.bsky.social, @katharinehayhoe.com & others.

Call on your house representatives to support a FY2026 budget bill that would preserve funding for NIH at the Senate Appropriations Committee approved level of $48.7B and adopt Senate language prohibiting a cap on indirect costs and limiting multi-year funded grants to levels consistent with FY2024

History is a great teacher. In this piece our own @heidiledford.bsky.social looks at what we can learn from what happened in Japan when vaccine support was withdrawn and how the government is now working to reverse the effects 🧪 #MedSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

FYI the NIH is proposing revisions to the NIH Genome Data Sharing Policy: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... This needs careful consideration. Responses are requested by mid-March and it goes without saying that many submissions from the global genomics community are strongly encouraged.

Why do some individuals defy their polygenic score? In the largest study of its kind (402k UKB individuals; 7 continuous traits + 3 diseases), we asked: If your phenotype deviates from common-variant polygenic score prediction, what's driving that difference? www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Here's my latest contribution to the @nytimes "Lost Science" series. Brenna Henn's sweeping study of African genetics has been frozen. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Ypmm1A

TIL Google docs enables markdown formatting! Happy New Year!

Global north researchers running a global south field site rife with medically unethical and statistically abysmal research practices, all to manufacture support for their pet theory and undermine global vaccine access & health security…the research colonialism is genuinely staggering.

“NIH is in crisis, grants are being terminated, labs are closing….but they found $1.6 million for an unsolicited proposal to study whether we should delay a vaccine we’ve been safely giving for 40 years, in a country where infants are at high risk of infection” www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

Cannot say I'm pleased at wasting the ink on a full page advertisement that popped up on the last page of a PDF I printed from European Heart Journal.

The #NIH IRP Summer (paid!) Internship Program for 2026 has opened its application portal. This opportunity is open to US Citizens who are college students (including rising first-years), postbaccalaureate, and graduate students, including medical and dental. The deadline is 2026/02/18!

Oh just my hometown in the national news for bigoted book banning efforts.

Everytime I read something like this it makes me so angry. The fact that a society has been letting this happen for so long and so often that there are now regularly people who live through a second mass shooting before even finishing their education is the most shocking indictment of US politics

Normalization of glucose in people with prediabetes, i.e. achieving remission, is linked to halving of major cardiovascular adverse events over ensuing decades www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...