An important and powerful decision: "Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the 'pall of orthodoxy' that the First Amendment will not tolerate." www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

Some things never change... www.theexamination.org/articles/ame...

"The Trump administration is moving religious freedom to the forefront of its health policies, ... likely affect[ing] reproductive health, LGBTQ+healthcare, and vaccine policy." via HHS restructuring and a DOJ report, via @melodyschreiber.com @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

to the Trump DOJ, if an ally of the administration breaks the law and the administration decides not to do anything to stop them, they can also prevent anyone else from making sure the law is enforced, regardless of the law’s explicit language. An open invitation to corruption.

NEW from Important Context: All eyes have been on the Trump slush fund settlement, but a week earlier, the DOJ settled a Biden-era censorship lawsuit brought by anti-vax writer Alex Berenson, which was on appeal from a federal court dismissal. According to Berenson, it included a 6-figure payout.

Science is built on a foundation of hundreds of papers. If the removal of a single paper from that foundation completely upsets your hypothesis, it often means you’re sciencing incorrectly. He has so little evidence for his claims that he has to cling to this paper and fight tooth and nail.

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

I fear the lesson still has not been learned, but there needs to be strong and consistent pushback from the leadership of every R1 university against this. No minimizing where this would take us.

Commentary: “My parents understood something that Ohio’s voucher advocates seem to have forgotten: a commitment to your own children’s education doesn’t require defunding someone else’s,” writes The Rev. Ben Huelskamp ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/06/02/i...

“[Rotavirus] vaccines were so effective that Dr. Hofto could recall treating only four or five children with rotavirus in the past decade. Now, she said she had treated about that many already this year, and none of them were vaccinated.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/w...

This is the destruction of federal funding for scientific research & universities as we know it. A total, comprehensive politicization of the process & an end run around Congress.

In normal times, the fact that government officials at HHS blatantly lied to the public and got caught would be a scandal of unusual size. Everyone involved in this disinformation scheme against the people of the United States should be held accountable.

The weakening infrastructure for responding to health emergencies

Here's how the corruption works: Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it Friday: FDA changes the policy

Only surprise is that this didn’t happen sooner, but more bad news out of HHS. news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-a...

"The president has developed a close relationship with tobacco companies including Altria and Reynolds American, which have donated millions of dollars to his political groups and projects, including his proposed White House ballroom." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

Wow

Not how this process is supposed to work… www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

nearly all of these MAHA influencers are being compensated by tobacco companies, and very few disclose it. in many cases, they are marketing to children. nicotine pouches harm child brain development.

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

The leadership at HHS has an agenda, and that is to deprive the United States of vaccines, most especially COVID19 vaccines. These people have no problem making claims about their belief that COVID19 vaccines are harmful without any data at all. Now they are hiding data showing the benefits.

tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world

This is the definition of the Merchants of Doubt strategy: Amplifying 3% of experts with fringe opinions to make it look like the debate is a 50/50 proposition.

Well, this is awful. www.404media.co/this-company... via @404media.co It relies on the "books.google.com" Author's Guild case as to why it can scrape & play other's presentations w/o consent [theoretically 'opt-out']. Further article here: cyberalberta.ca/zooming-out-...

Big legal/public health news. Punitive damages judgment still to come. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/t...

"It could take 20 years before birth defects from rubella become common again. Unvaccinated children have to grow old enough to become pregnant. The long lag time can give a false sense of security." www.propublica.org/article/rfk-...

I got irritated with reading another assertion that AI can outperform social scientists at our jobs. I find these arguments reveal both an intellectual laziness and a lack of appreciation for good writing, which is the heart of our work. I had thoughts. mirandayaver.substack.com/p/in-defense...

State of Florida's new mandate for public college Intro Sociology curriculum: "The following should not be included in any course content... "Discussions arguing a causal association between institutional sexism and unequal outcomes between men and women" Indoctrination, not education nor science

Yes, all this and more, including the wonton destruction of CDC's Office of Smoking and Health.

I fear this is being treated as background noise rather than the 5 alarm emergency it is. Absolutely terrifying. Kennedy Allies Target States to Overturn Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/h...

Spot on, from @petridishes.bsky.social: "For a while...we, as a nation, thought to ourselves: Life is too short for everyone to inspect their own food. Let the government handle this. But then along came the Trump administration to wonder: What if we didn’t?" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

ICE observers recording with phones are heroes, and are the reason we know the truth about the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In public health, we make observations by collecting and analyzing data. But RFK Jr. is taking the equivalent of our “phone”. Without data, he can lie with abandon.

So sad that Bill Foege saw the US formally withdraw from the WHO in his final days.

A public health icon and a national hero. William H. Foege, Key Figure in the Eradication of Smallpox, Dies at 89 www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

This is, quite literally, our collective duty.

📣 Join us for our next #TobaccoEndgame CRE #Webinar on FDA regulation and nicotine reduction! Prof Micah Berman will present 'Taking the Nicotine Out of Cigarettes: Lessons from the US FDA's Attempt'. 📆02 February ⏰1pm AEST 🔗 tobacco-endgame.centre.uq.edu.au/event/sessio... @micahberman.bsky.social

New annual tobacco prevention spending report from @tobaccofreekids.bsky.social. www.tobaccofreekids.org/what-we-do/u... #Ohio now ranked 43rd, spending $6 million on tobacco prevention & cessation annually. This is less than the tobacco industry spends on marketing in Ohio in a WEEK.

Read the details here. RFK’s Hep B vax “trial” in Guinea-Bissau is not just a Tuskegee-level ethical travesty. It’s also skewed to make the vax (which has been proven to save lives) look unsafe and ineffective. And it funnels money to RFK cronies. open.substack.com/pub/insideme...

👇🎯💯

“The goal of this administration is to basically make vaccines optional,” said @pauloffit.bsky.social. “And we’re paying the price.” www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

For her part Machado said on X that the guy who actually won the election — Edmundo González Urrutia — should be the leader

Oh wow — an article about where my family tree overlaps with @stevevladeck.bsky.social’s.

More on the continuing purges at #NIH. Now 13 out of 27 institute directors have been gotten rid of. This is not normal. @jonathanwosen.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/12/27/n...

ugh

It was all so obvious & uninteresting in its clear bad faith & bad intentions, & the willingness of so many senior folks in academia & society to tolerate the clear bad faith & bad intentions over the last 25 years has been incredibly depressing.

This has flown below the radar, but it’s a low-key outrage that Trump’s FDA has withdrawn the rule to regulate asbestos in talc products. It’s the opposite of making America healthy. www.notus.org/health-scien...

Extraordinary courage from Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim, 43-year-old father of two, who bravely risked his life to save his neighbors celebrating Hanukkah. Praying for his full & speedy recovery. And so deeply inspired by his example.

This executive order is a lot of bluster and doublespeak, but the reporting (here and elsewhere) needs to be better. EOs cannot preempt state laws; EOs can't create new grounds for lawsuits; the funding threats are almost certainly unlawful, etc., etc. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/t...

Do you know an amazing post-doc interested in FDA policy and maybe even with some Delphi experience? Send them our way - we're looking to hire on our new project ASAP! postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2025-1...