Each child death is an immense tragedy. Dr. Sean O’Leary highlights declining flu vaccination rates are contributing to the highest rate of child flu deaths in 15 years. “There are likely several contributors to this season’s severity, but A big one is that fewer children are getting flu shots.”

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise." Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms. Ethical violation as POLICY.

🧵1/N New study published in @jama.com on re-emergence of vaccine-eliminated infectious diseases under declining vaccination in the US. We model long-term risk and conditions for return to endemicity for measles, rubella, polio, & diphtheria. Collab w/ @Mathewkiang.com jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/h...

Sec. Kennedy, you're incorrect. This *is* an unusual year for measles. This year has already passed 8 out of the past 15 years' *annual* counts. And we are only 2.5 months into 2025. Rather than falsehoods, you should publicly state support for MMR. Today marks the first measles death in 10 years.

Surreal read of the day: a paper using USAID-funded and now terminated Demographic & Health Surveys to count the huge number of lives saved by the now frozen US PEPFAR program to fight HIV, co-authored by current US admin’s nominee to lead cuts in health research jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

NIH's proposal to cut the grants it pays for medical research will not just hurt elite coastal universities. Who else has a lot at stake? The states of Missouri and North Carolina. The University of Texas Cancer Center. Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

"If groups and individuals impacted by [Trump's] proposed closures follow the playbook used by those who thwarted Nixon’s attempt to shutter [the Office of Economic Opportunity], Trump and Musk probably will run into the same fate," writes LaRochelle in this @time.com OpEd. Learn more. ⤵️

Sharing this in case anyone has more info

I proudly support the University of Michigan's stated core values.

thank you @karagavin.bsky.social for this beautifully written piece that can help scientists like us explain what is really at stake and why so many of us do what we do and #GoBlue

An excellent resource on the economic impact of NIH funding in the U.S. with an interactive link for state specific information here: www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

According to the article, some of the trials abruptly put on hold:

Critical and moving story by @stephanienolen.bsky.social, children, teenagers, adults all over the world, left in the lurch, abandoned by the reckless abandonment of USAID clinical trials.

DATA RELEASE WHEN DATA FEELS SCARCE! Check out data.epi.org -a data repository with 78,000+ series on topics like employment, wages, poverty, and inequality. You can get many measures by gender, race and state! I've been working with our @epi.org team to build this and am so proud of the result

SCOOP: Many of the pages that went missing on Friday from the CDC website on Friday have reappeared — in response to intense media coverage, backlash from the scientific community and concern for the public’s health. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/h...

The entire archive of all CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 has been backed up on Internet Archive. Incredible work everyone. Science will never be silenced!

With a new R01, @emilytreleaven.bsky.social will leverage multi-generational data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study #CVFS to reveal the effects of persistent disadvantage on young children's health. #UmichResearch #EpiSky #HealthEquity psc.isr.umich.edu/news/multi-g...

Now online at Nature Human Behaviour: "Consumption Responses to an Unconditional Child Allowance in the U.S." We study how the 2021 CTC expansion affected family expenditures using observed (rather than reported) consumption data from 1.3 million establishments. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dynamite program with an incredible group of scholars each year. Please share and encourage students to apply. 2023 cohort will be coming to #PAA2024 @popassocamerica.bsky.social