The thing that is making me hopeful in this past week is summed up nicely in this concluding para by @gregsargent.bsky.social in the linked piece. Core ideals, such as free speech, still hold great power in our culture. We're floundering, but not completely lost. newrepublic.com/article/2008...

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

I've said this before, but I feel pretty strongly that the building of concentration camps - and now, the inevitable disappearance of 1,800 people from those camps - is the biggest story in American public health right now that isn't being treated like one

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

When Trump, RFK Jr, & their MAHA allies scream about this “new paper” as proof Tylenol causes autism: It’s tossed-out courtroom testimony, now dressed up for PubMed. Legitimizing bad science with dangerous policy allows fear to spread instead of facts, and puts the public at risk. 🧵

This is EXACTLY how RFK Jr built his career: turning civil litigation against “chemicals” into a pseudoscience cash grab. What’s shocking is seeing people who claim to do scicomm sanitize this well-known tactic, ESPECIALLY as our federal health agencies have been hijacked by science deniers. 5/

It’s ACTUALLY the lawsuit pipeline: 1️⃣ Get paid to testify as an “expert” 2️⃣ Publish weak observational science under an academic title 3️⃣ Use the paper to get credibility for court or policy 4/

And THAT is the “study” the Trump administration is using as “proof” Tylenol causes autism. He’s part of a group of physicians with zero toxicology or biochemistry expertise who brand themselves as “environmental exposure experts” and even get academic positions under that heading. 3/

He repackaged it for journal publication to give it the appearance of legitimacy. Even though the strongest studies— between siblings—showed no relationship between autism & Tylenol use in pregnancy. He cherry-picked studies & gave parental memory [recall] more weight than quantitative data. 2/

Weird some scicomm accounts gave the new “Tylenol in pregnancy & autism” review some weight. They don’t know the lead author, Baccarelli, had the exact claims thrown out of federal court for having ZERO scientific merit, when he was a paid “expert witness” in lawsuits against Tylenol makers. 1/

This is bonkers. FDA is going to change leucovorin's label based on a lit review with data on 40 patients w/ cerebral folate deficiency and comparisons to "known natural history." www.statnews.com/2025/09/22/f...

Trump’s attack on vaccines yesterday — delivered from the White House — “was the most dangerously irresponsible press conference in the realm of public health in American history” @pauloffit.bsky.social told us. More on Trump’s false claims with @lenasun.bsky.social

Can Tanya Harding's Ex-Husband Save Figure Skating?

-Perkins Coie (+ other firm that didn't back down). -Harvard (after momentary false start) -"Lower" fed judiciary. (Not Roger Taney "supreme" court.) -Local grand juries. -Govs like Pritzker and Newsom -WSJ and NYT, when sued. -Millions of protestors -Now Jimmy Kimmel. Our tapestry of resistance.

Setting aside the bad science, the message here is that pregnant women should suffer--and risk harming their fetus with untreated fever--to reduce their chance of having a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which makes clear his disdain for women *and* people with ASD. www.bbc.com/news/article...

A picture is worth 1000 words: At what I think was one of the most extreme, kooky, anti-science press conferences in history, you see Trump & RFK Jr’s henchmen—3 medically trained men doing their anti-vaxx bidding, Drs Bhattacharya, Makary, & Oz The damage these MDs are doing is incalculable

... immediately stop taking the NYT editorial board and opinion section seriously; and increase our scepticism towards ordinary reporting. Ask ourselves: Why this story? Why now? Who benefits? Next, we have to replace the influence of the "Grey Lady" in our midsts; it is just one flawed outlet now

And yes, the stupid Bhattacharya piece also pushes the false lab leak narrative, because of course it does. If you are interested, I wrote an investigative book about the origin of the pandemic, the controversy and how this narrative was seeded in the public mind. 🔽 bsky.app/profile/phil...

I´d wish for the NYT for a revolution within; but my suspicion is that the power of journalists has long been subdued by the power of outrage columnists and editors. So as audience, we gotta cut our ties with NYT while paying for good reporters to go independent. More importantly, we need to 22/

So what can we do about it? Well, there is no hope for the NYT under current leadership; they have failed to warn people about the dire threat to democracy, mostly providing normalization and misleading mollification while their own reporters uncovered some of the worst MAGA scandals. 21/

The whole thing is normalized as just a disagreement of political approaches to NIH reform, rather than the destruction of US science supremacy, public health and any checks and balances science & truth provides on an autocratic movement. It is absurd, disgusting and entirely par for the NYT. 20/

..at the start of the thread: A rightwing extremist destroying the NIH from within is whitewashed as a critical reformer with some very human flaws. The unprecedented assault on science by MAGA fascists and Trump administration is legitimized as long overdue and the fault of science itself. 19/

... becoming therby one of the most important tools of rightwing media manipulators to align incoherent activist energy into pushing narratives and pseudo-events, normalize rightwing extremism, swaying elites and gaslighting its leftwing audience. That´s what we see with the Bhattacharya article..

..suffers from getting off the rails and getting lost in incoherence. Bullshit narratives by themselves fall apart as quickly as they are created. Unless the NYT uses its vast manpower, "sanewashing "and "rationalization" services to make these bullshit narratives more coherent and appealing. 16/

In a way, the NYT is a critical part of the rightwing bullshit machinery because it elevates fever-swamp garbage into coherent-sounding, "reasonable people can agree to disagree" narratives for elites to coalesce around. Not just giving any emotional outrage a pseudo-polite paintjob, but ... 17/

After adapting a rightwing narrative and framing, ardent bothsidism and sanewashing comes the worst of all: Legitimizing and enshrining pseudoreality for rightwing actors to gleefully build further upon. The rightwing propaganda machine traverses in improv-theater style bullshit creation, but.. 15

Even worse, the NYT will constantly elevate, justify and rationalize the absurd lies, actions or incoherent statements from Republicans and specifically Trump; a practice known these days as "sanewashing" What this does to public discourse is to normalize the extreme and mislead readers profoundly

Let me illustrate: Once a rightwing narrative is cooked up in their propaganda machine "many people are talking about it, so we have to cover it"- NYT dinosaurs will take the bait. The because of faux-neutrality, the NYT will do a punch of services; e.g. quoting bad faith liars unchallenged 14/

Because of their dinosaur leadership, faux-neutrality false balance reporting, owner class editorial bent and left-leaning influence, the NYT has become extremely vulnerable to media manipulators on the right. If they get a rightwing narrative seeded, the NYT will propagandize for them 13/

... is still the essence of most of the coverage of the NYTs, but because of the right-of-center audience was getting sucked away into their new rightwing propaganda network, all the influencing the NYT could still do is on the left-of center. And this is where it gets really dark. 12/

As a response, the NYT business leaders adapted (as we already outlined) by doing content that boosts these new metrics; so clicks, sharing, comments, outrage. The opinion section got powered to trigger the libs, the science and newsdesks became an afterthought. Politics & influence peddling 11/

Back to NYT The changes above left the leadership dinosaurs at NYT isn a peculiar spot, because the only people that still valued NYT´s past journalistic legacy, accuracy and authority were the left-leaning liberals the owner class despise so much; while new metrics of success were attention 10/

With technological disruption of our information age, one system was gaining influence over public discourse while the other was losing it Information flows now less through the hands of newspaper gatekeepers; everybody became a broadcaster; we drown in noise while activism creates amplification 9/

While the establishment media has been enriching themselves by using elite access and attention to play influence games in service of vested business interest, the rightwing has built an alternative anti-science propaganda machine, in many ways more fitting for the participatory social media age 8/

We would a proper NYT investigation conducted by its senior journalists, only to be "balanced" by an opposing NYT opinion piece that would both undercut the essence of the reporting while gaining much more attention. Why is that, you might ask? Well, now let´s get to the real problem of the NYT 7/

COVID-19 was of course where the opinion section and the reporting section by the NYT clashed the strongest. And unfortunately, while good reporting is hard, time-consuming, cost intensive; opinions are cheap, easy to get, and fuel outrage, clicks, subscriptions and revenue. 6/

Second, the op-ed desk. Oh boy The NYT opinion section has no editorial standards when it comes to evidence, accuracy, contextuality, or public relevance Instead, it is best characterized as a branding endeavor for the NYT to virtue-signal, and worse, a mouthpiece for owner class interests 5/

The owner and publisher of NYT, A.G Sulzberger, is even worse. A fourth-generation nepo baby that feels entitled to use the supposedly independent newspaper to exert influence at the behest of his personal belief and class interest. 4/

First, the leadership. The executive editor Joe Kahn has created an environment where he encourages and rewards bullshit stories that will outrage liberals; because his understanding of journalistic neutrality is that both sides have to be treated as the same irrespective of equivalence. 3/

First, it is important to understand that the NYT is not a "monolith", but rather a corporate entity with a strong legacy that has still a lot of good journalists doing what they are supposed do. Collect evidence. Interview people. Report. But then there is the leadership. And the op-ed section 2/

Probably the most disgusting piece of anti-science garbage in service of whitewashing Bhattacharya and legitimizing attacks on NIH to date in the NYT op-ed section. And there have been many. Since the NYT keeps doing this drivel, I will say a few things about the NYT's modus operandi... 1/

Here is a plot in terms of PROJECTS rather than dollars. I am using projects rather than awards so that projects that received supplements do not get double-counted. While the FY25 curve is improving, it seems that the number of funded projects will drop by 3000-4000 compared with FY24.

So please don’t both sides the critique of the truly terrible NY Times piece this morning. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said once: you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. The piece is garbage.

Schulman’s errors show in his list of NIH issues. He mixes ideological concerns with issues NIH was acting to address; minor issues with science-culture war complaints. And he doesn’t even MENTION the major issue: Too many applicants, or, not enough funding. That too seems an ideological choice.

he also follows up his complaint that we haven‘t yet cured cancer — tell that to the many the cancer patients whose lives have been extended, or have been cured, by NIH science — with a complaint that health care costs too much. Without weighing in on content, I’ll say: that’s a policy issue.

I can‘t speak to this, but I can judge the content of the article, and it is flimsy and misleading. “After all these years we don’t have a cure for cancer.” 😮 That statement is so wrong in so many ways. I hope this essay does not lead too many people off track.

As anyone who writes critically about medical research like this should take pains to note, “cancer” is a diverse set of different diseases with different genetic bases and different treatments. (Alzheimer’s likely is like this too.) And he’s wrong: NIH has developed cures for some cancers.

And then Schulman ends the list with this. He’s telling the world he doesn’t understand science without saying he doesn’t understand science. “we still don't have the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's” How naive. How uninformed this is. These diseases are blindingly complex! Progress has been huge.

I grew up in working-class Scranton PA, went on to do a PhD, worked at MIT with AI types, was NIH funded at universities, and have seen NIH from the inside. I know how the US innovation system works. Schulman, the author, doesn’t know what he’s talking about: he doesn’t understand US science.

I said that in this thread