This is not the sort of thing I'd expect a scientist at the FDA to say. Personally, I doubt that any of the Alt accounts are who they claim to be.

Tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol use in pregnancy probably doesn't give babies autism. Now unlocked for all to read gidmk.substack.com/p/tylenol-us...

Remember that cruciferous vegetables and cancer study I wrote about recently? Turns out it's even more borked than I said. Some excellent sleuthing here, the study probably needs to be retracted or extensively corrected.

Pro tip: every group of people includes at least one arrogant, ignorant tit. This applies even to senior academics.

I can't believe we spent 3+ years failing to convince people that yes a Harvard epidemiologist and a Hopkins medic and a Stanford economist can be totally full of shit. Such is the dangerous power of institutional prestige.

I regret to inform you I found *another* paper by (some of) these authors with similar errors... 🧵

Groundbreaking! @gidmk.bsky.social and @slate.com prove that you can cover an academic study by actually *reading* it, not just regurgitating every breathless bullet point from the press release... This is what science journalism should look like 👇 slate.com/technology/2...

Very "first they came for the Socialists" vibes, both in content and sentiment (Niemoller was ~not~ a good person). As if this wasn't literally what these people were calling for...

My new piece is on the painfully slow process of scientific error-correction and how it harms real people all the time. Also, why cinnamon probably isn't a useful treatment for diabetes. gidmk.substack.com/p/cinnamon-f...

👀👀👀

We’ve been living through 72 nonstop hours of this exact tweet

Charlie Kirk’s death is awful and abhorrent but it’s appalling that the President is calling for national mourning for a right wing propagandist and hasn’t said a word about Officer David Rose or the brave employees at the CDC

I extensively contributed to this fact check on RFK’s critiques and calls to retract a recent Annals of Internal Medicine paper by Danish researchers showing dose of vaccine aluminum adjuvants does not increase risk of any of 50 chronic diseases including autism www.factcheck.org/2025/09/rfk-...

As a firearm injury prevention researcher…. What?!?!

My new piece is on Tylenol/paracetamol/acetaminophen use in pregnancy and why our current best evidence shows that it probably doesn't cause autism despite what RFK Jr. is apparently saying. gidmk.substack.com/p/tylenol-us...

1/ 👉 Headlines are spreading about a new study (neurology.org/doi/10.1212/...) claiming that 7 artificial sweeteners are linked to accelerated cognitive decline. Most headlines use causal language and scary numbers. But the study is VERY problematic. 🧵

This sort of modelling is obviously quite uncertain, but overwhelmingly it shows that vaccines have a massive saving in economic terms. The COVID-19 vaccines may have been the best investment that humanity ever made!

Man, I should really stop opening cans of Pepsi Max by slamming them into my forehead

Interesting thread. I related point that I've been thinking about since 2020 is the difficulty of separating less harmful infections with improved clinical practices.

Our lab at Yale literally studies government suppression of outbreak reporting. Please: don't promote unverifiable reports from anonymous accounts. They're very likely to be false, and it boosts unreliable actors. (If this is happening, I suspect CDC sources know how to text a journalist just fine.)

"I eat bread" ~ my toddler as she licks peanut butter off my toast and then hands me back the soggy remains.

"Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing, study finds" Or does it? Let's take a look at this "study"... www.theguardian.com/food/2025/se...

This can't be true because academic papers are all peer-reviewed by experienced experts who would be able to easily identify these shenanigans and stop them in their tracks.

They learned wellfrom the tobacco company playbook!

Jay Bhattacharya is now one of the most powerful people in the scientific world and is still bitching about a court finding he wasn't censored. What a deeply sad man.

I regularly get messages from people who want me to try out their weird supplements and do some promotion for them. Hilarious. No one bothers to look up their marketing targets in this world.

Brianna Ladapo, in addition to calling herself “doctor” based only on her informal self-study of naturopathy and claiming to receive messages from angels, claims during her first pregnancy she accurately predicted multiple “plane crashes, serial murders, & mass casualty events before they happened.”

I find all of this longevity stuff wild. There are a small handful of things that you can do to extend your life. Mostly, it comes down to eating well, exercising regularly, not drinking alcohol, and not smoking. The rest is empty promises based on awful and sometimes fraudulent research.

"He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies."

A bizarre dogma has emerged among the anti-mRNA crowd that the only data we have on vaccines is from the original trial papers, rather than the HUGE volume of studies that came out subsequently...

Current best evidence suggests that school closures caused more learning loss than keeping schools open. But it also shows that such learning loss was transient mostly recovered by 2022. So what did we actually lose?

There's been a big fight over gender-affirming care after Gordon Guyatt and his team at McMaster released a statement contradicting their former funders' public policy. I wrote about the whole thing, and what "evidence-based medicine" really means. gidmk.substack.com/p/a-fight-ov...

It’s even worse than that. Dezi Freeman frequently posted about doing a “Nuremberg” to police (see here) This is /literally/ the same rhetoric of an accused killer at large.

Just to be clear, the most influential people in HHS right now are: a guy who bathes in sewage and wants us to drink raw milk - once a major source of child mortality, a brother/sister pair of wellness grifters who think all disease is diet, and a Thielite who doesn’t think FDA should test efficacy.

Eh???????? Same paper, wildly different interpretations of their results. Not great stuff.

I'm reading Jesse Singal's analysis of the whole Guyatt/SEGM thing and it's fascinating to see. Much of it completely misunderstands Guyatt's argument, but also some of it is really bizarre.

The recent Nature study on ultra-processed foods really shows to me how ridiculous the term "hyper-palatable" is. It's just...nonsense. Fearmongering. It really does not connect to a real experience of foods, whether processed or otherwise.

A new expression of concern was published on this randomized clinical trial of cinnamon for diabetes. The study itself has been cited, according to Google, 1,700 times. I first complained about it in 2023, so let me tell you the story of one of the most problematic papers I've come across 1/n

Fascinating piece on the issues with AI slop in the mathematical research world (spoiler: it's a massive problem). Ping @carlbergstrom.com open.substack.com/pub/bristoli...

Rich landowner living near 50Db windfarm: the noise is overwhelming, I can't stand it Media: OMG THAT'S AWFUL Poor people living near 60-80Db motorways (much more common): the noise is overwhelming, but we persevere Media: *crickets*

My piece this week is about Big Peanut and why peanuts probably can't extend your life. gidmk.substack.com/p/peanuts-pr...

If you pre-register 8 different primary outcomes, 11 secondary outcomes, and don't give any information on how you are going to statistically analyze any of them are you really pre-registering at all?

BIG PEANUT 🤣

It makes perfect sense that Jordan Peterson would suddenly develop a made up disease.

Always good when senior USSR officials lie about independent European scientific research and call for its retraction. Oh wait sorry, I meant US. www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Someone just sent me this study, and all I can say is that I don't understand why anyone would bother investigating this question. 1/n

My new piece looks at sleep and why most of the headlines linking sleep to any number of diseases are pretty useless from a health standpoint. gidmk.substack.com/p/most-advic...

I find headlines like this exhausting. Yes, having bad sleep is strongly correlated with bad health - we've known that for a long time. But the CAUSES of bad sleep are very closely tied into all the other things that make you unhealthy!

Me: what do you want for your birthday? Almost 2yo: cake! Cake!!