Thus, today's election is not really the end of an authoritarian regime. Rather, it is the first step in a much longer unwinding process. It is massive and absolutely necessary first step — one that anyone who believes in democracy should celebrate. But it's more a beginning than an end.

This is some pretty amazing AI slop, with a fake live news broadcast narrated by an AI talking head. (lots of funny details in the screenshot below - don't miss the cicada on top of the CDC logo 🤣)

“Marathon” in the sense that it promised much, delivered peanuts, and was followed by snickers.

BTW, libertarianism has no solution for this: We vaccinate to get herd immunity which benefits those who aren't able to get vaccinated or can't benefit from it. Rather than adapt their philosophy to reality, they instead try to eliminate the reality that doesn't fit, claiming vaccines don't work.

That’s not true.

Members of Team Covid USA hoping for an exciting surge from BA.3.2 are going to have to wait...months at least. Team T-Cell continues to dominate the landscape, with USA covid surveillance metrics at omicron-era lows. We love to see it! 1/

Yeah, so as I had feared, RFK Jr. went and did it. New charter for ACIP is out today. Quote from @drdemetre.bsky.social “The new charter shifts ACIP into an organization focused more on risk and has provided a platform for organizations that have historically been opponents of vaccination”.

A must read piece that quote our scientific work on genomics surveillance by CNN, on 'how Kids may be more likely to get the new variant of Covid-19, scientists say. Here’s what to know about BA.3.2' - edition.cnn.com/2026/04/02/h...

Something you may find it interesting to wrap your head around (honestly I don't understand it): 20-40s are also *over-represented* in BA.3.2 detections in LU, NL, IE. And 18-64s are *over-represented* in FR. 1/

Does vaping cause cancer? More importantly, do we care if it does? My new piece about a new paper and the ensuing media storm: gidmk.substack.com/p/does-vapin...

Good article, careful about what we know and don't know about BA.3.2. @jakescottmd.bsky.social said he would “be cautious about the leap from ‘more commonly sequenced in children’ to ‘preferentially infects children’ in any clinically meaningful sense”

Mike Hoerger is at it again this week, misrepresenting the US CDC and claiming 1 in 27 people in Mississippi and 1 in 24 people in Tennessee currently have covid. 1/

Any one else get an invite to this? Weird feeling to be personally targeted by a misinformation campaign sponsored by the US government. Ping @sanjanah.bsky.social

As I walked past a Supermarket while out on my constitutional, I thought I would make this.

China now tops US in gross domestic expenditure on R&D. www.science.org/content/arti...

@ryanhisner.bsky.social convinced me. It's the Orf7-8 deletion. This is GW.5.1.1 which had a similar deletion compared to HV.1.1, which circulated at the same time.

I had a hypothesis, and decided to test it. Here's the hypothesis. Kids just a few years old have probably been exposed to COVID, but the only lineage circulating has been JN.1-derivatives, so they are going to be more resistant to JN.1 than anything else. 1/

May be of interest for students in the US: "Modeling the Invisible: Competition on Forecasting Viral Spread with Limited Data" Wednesday June 3-Saturday June 6, 2026 Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia sites.google.com/iu.edu/model...

Age-dependent hospitalizations for Covid-19 in Germany during the peak of BA.3.2 (Dec 2025) are also biased towards children, but not as much as in Scotland. Below you can see hospitalizations in ages 0-4 and 5-14 peaked higher in the last wave (all ages normalized to their 2024 averages). 1/

This is *by definition* racist. Any journalist who can't write that Trump made racist remarks about Somali-Americans (which is certainly newsworthy and certainly true), is not a journalist.

Covid variant BA.3.2 is growing in the US and I'm seeing stories in media, and speculation on SM, especially around a change in the fraction of severe covid cases that are children. It's worth close monitoring, but so far there's no evidence of anything unusual happening in the US. short thread 1/

The transmission chain of the meningitis outbreak at the University of Kent (UK) appears to have been broken. No new cases seem to have been reported since March 23rd, with a total of 21 confirmed cases and two deaths. When a government lets public health work, outbreaks can be halted.

BA.3.2 is starting to pick up speed. We officially added it to our variant list; I assume CDC will add it to Nowcast at the next update. It's probably about 10% or more. I'm starting to be surprised there aren't more sequences.

Netherlands, Scotland, Germany, Denmark which have all recently gone through their covid BA.3.2 variant waves are now all showing record-low (omicron era) levels of covid RNA in wastewater, and they're still dropping. 1/

"We are curious to see what happens if we cut all basic science funding"

This is cool: Sunbirds suck nectar from flowers via their tongue rolled into a tube. (Maybe the most amazing bit is that we didn't know that until now!) www.science.org/content/arti...

Data consistent with a fairly substantial decrease in hospitalizations for the 2025-2026 (~110k-220k) winter Covid wave vs 2024-2025 (~220k-320k). From www.cdc.gov/covid/php/su... Consistent with findings in other countries too.

Some first-rate science writing: For this story, @jdrakephd.bsky.social carefully read our recent paper and then we spent a very fun 90 minutes or so talking on zoom. His article that gets right to the heart of our model, explains it clearly, and then explores why it will matter in the future.

HOLY SHIT

I'm trying to keep an eye on the age distribution of hospital admissions in the US as BA.3.2 starts to grow there. So far in New York (BA.3.2 seems to have started early there but still only ~10% in early March) I don't see anything unusual. 1/

This blog from @kkjetelina.bsky.social is worth a read. Where we are now, what's changed and what hasn't, what we still don't know. And most worrying negative change... Covid-19 six years later yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-s...

Adding to the discussion around the Covid-19 BA.3.2 wave in Scotland: Scotland has recorded its lowest weekly average aggregate Covid-19 RNA concentration in wastewater since September 2020. The extremely low wastewater RNA seems to be a trend, seen also in... 1/

Let me speculate a bit about what this means epidemiologically. Here is a (non-exhaustive!) list of possibilities: 1/

I've been skeptical about this hypothesis, but I went looking for evidence anyway... and wow, it appears to be right! Emergency hospital admissions for Covid-19 in Scotland, by age, show a wave in paediatric admissions, not other ages. BA.3.2 was dominant in Scotland by start of Feb 2026. 1/

This isn't enough. This is the one case where a higher tax would be more popular. The *explicit* goal should be to get rid of billionaires. Funding things that people want is the icing on the cake, but we would ultimately like revenue from this tax to shrivel to insignificance.

My latest:

In addition to being great factual reporting, this does a really good job of disambiguating all the things that get hustled in under the header of "AI," and the various sociotechnical and historical points at which that term has been used to mean those different things.

This is (I think) a Greater Blue-Eared Starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus) & the amazing chrome job is their super-power. They've evolved to manipulate light in VERY specific ways, attracting mates, intimidating rivals. Let's look at the nanostructures that bring this bling into being.

Germany's Covid-19 RNA average concentration in wastewater literally went off the bottom of the chart this week, they had to extend the y-axis downwards. Current levels are 5X lower than the 2025 Spring low. robert-koch-institut.github.io/Abwassersurv...

No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade

Unbelievably, he's at it again, exploiting the SAME mistake for click-bait doom-mongering misinfo. Once could be an accident, but now we know he's deliberately exploiting a data glitch and misrepresenting the CDC's own analysis. 1/

Recommend!

tapping the sign again

Should the next vaccine update be adapted to BA.3.2 this year or is LP.8.1. still sufficient?

why MS has been very successful in vaccinating kids

This is a good thread on much of what we know about the BA.3.2 covid variant and where it's going. But I will point out that the expectation below (BA.3.2 has high escape & low fitness) is strongly supported by the virology... ...BUT is completely at odds with epidemiological observations! 1/

The Iran war has the least public support of any US war since polling existed. Widely opposed before any impact on gas prices. It sucks that lying like this is such a successful path to online clout. Proponents don’t seem to realize it, but it cultivates a cynical despair that helps the fascists.

Fantastic new clues here about both the DHS marketing contract scandal and the 10 jet purchases scandal. Surprise: They may be related! Both possibly engineered by one Dr. William A. Walters III. Here's a thread linking to what we know about Walters. 1/ www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Sometimes scientific error-checking is hard. Sometimes studies contradict themselves multiple times in three short paragraphs and you have to wonder how they got published in the first place

We finally have a cure for FIP, but it’s not FDA approved. In fact it’s technically not legal, FDA will look the other way if we are using it for FIP. Now we have vets using it for enteric corona or FCGS. Not only risking resistance, but enforcement. By @scottweese.bsky.social #Vetmedsky