From the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. If you are pregnant, listen to your obstetrician for guidance on what's safe and recommended.

Why is the hepatitis B vaccine important to deliver at birth? The chance of developing chronic hep B differs based on the age at which a person is infected Chance of chronic hep B: Infants <1: 90% Kids 1-5: 30% Adults: 5% Chronic hep B can cause liver damage, cancer, & even death

Medical ethicist Arthur Kaplan, quoted in the NYT: “The announcement on autism was the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recyling old myths, lousy advice, outright lies & dangerous advice I have ever witnessed by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science”

Now with comments... Lots of comments (A long thread) 1/n

I cannot overstate how remarkable it is that under GOP rule, US federal health regulations have been captured by fringe crackpots who espouse views that the vast majority of the US public—and nearly 100% of health professionals—reject. Gift link:

wtf... this is so close to the Black Mirror ep where the ads came out of the character's mouth...

If you are 65+ and thinking about getting a coronavirus shot, this week might be your best opportunity. Right now, the FDA has approved updated vaccines for that age group. But it’s possible it could get much tougher to get those shots next week. 1/3

Did you know? Universal Infant Hepatitis B vaccination is a public health policy success story. The US initially tried a risk-based approach to Hepatitis B vaccination in the 1980s. But vaccination rates remained low. New cases continued to increase. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview....

Interesting thread on competing incentives for trainees at various levels in academic research labs, that changes the way I think about alignment of those incentives....

We are looking for a postdoc to study single-cell transcriptional heterogeneity in the human skin microbiome. We have a new protocol mostly developed, but need someone to see it through. Experience with protocol dev or RNAseq appreciated. Funded by a new grant from MIT-HEALS.

‘Booty’ and ‘butt’ are synonyms. ‘Call’ and ‘dial’ are synonyms. But, a ‘booty call’ and a ‘butt dial’ are VERY different things.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Adding: the attack on the CDC.

Any progress on e-readers that work well for reading scientific manuscripts as pdfs? Having a reading morning, find reading on a laptop too distracting/eyestraining, but hate printing papers. Surely this must have a better solution than what I compiled below from various sources ~1.5 yrs ago?

Good start to my workday! >1.5 yrs in review. Most I've ever learned / changed how I've thought about a project from the time we started writing, through the review process, to acceptance. (All trackable via bioRxiv versions!) Thread at some point?

This excess mortality figure from Aug 2020 always stuck w/ me. The tragically high #s in the NE reflecting early unfettered transmission, the slight lull after trying to “flatten the curve” & realization of the long road ahead w/ gradual movement across the country. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Literally the most informative word cloud I've ever seen, holy hell

Here is a word cloud of the words that were missing from the noncompetitive renewal awards but had been present in the parent award. 3/4

This is me, one of those 211. My A1 R01 renewal would have been funded otherwise, and I was even initially told they planned to fund it. Now very unlikely. No more chances with this one. We had so many good things going-how do we keep moving forward? A question many of us will be asking.

10 Great Public Health Achievements - US, 1900-1999: 👉Vaccination Motor-vehicle safety Safer workplaces Infect dis control Decline in deaths from heart disease & stroke Safer & healthier foods Healthier mothers & babies Family planning Fluoridation of water Recognition of tobacco as a health hazard

I care for children in the hospital on inpatient & consult services. Most weeks there are at least a few kids admitted with vaccine preventable diseases. Often in children who can’t get vaccinated themselves. 15 years in pediatrics and I’ve never seen a single one admitted with vaccine injury.

Imagine doing something that saved quite literally millions of lives That’s a summary of Operation Warp Speed, started under the first Trump Administration. And everyone involved including the president should be proud Vaccines don’t care how you vote

I am here to say vaccines are awesome because guess what Denmark is close to completely eliminating the two most dangerous HPV strains (serotype 16 and 18) and with the cervical cancer.I think that is bloody AMAZING!!!! bit.ly/4pbHxjT

No inside info on Novavax vs mRNA, but I did get my booster this past weekend (in MA - easy as pie) bc of concerns about availability later in the fall.

With today's SCOTUS decision, as an ambiguously-brown mixed-race dude, this interaction could have gone a lot differently. Will I ever leave home without ID again?

✨FellowSpotlight✨Dr. Danny Sack (1st yr) Why ID?: “Infections transcend organ systems, social structures, & geographic borders. Treating infections requires understanding their interplay & appropriate interventions for each. That's pretty cool.”

Wow! Covid vaccine development and delivery cost $79.4 billion, but the health and economic benefits of vaccination were valued between $4.83 trillion–$37.8 trillion. A return on investment of $59.8–$475 per dollar invested!! This is why vaccine equity matters! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Whoop! What a match by Carlitos

Doomscrolling pause to chat CRISPR libraries! Preprint describes our new, data-driven approach to combine on-target and off-target predictions much more intelligently for *selecting* guides, which we use to develop our newest Cas9 knockout library, Jacquere. Thread: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Not sure there's anything I've enjoyed more while doing it but missed less after I stopped than fantasy football. Anyway, vamos Carlitos!

The "one big trick" that every aspiring authoritarian in the 20th century has learned is that you don't have to get people to agree with everything you say, you just have to get them to mistrust anything that anyone other than you says. Widespread cynicism is corrosive to democracy.

When reporting on these kinds of claims, the media should ask:

over 2,000 US children died of covid and nearly all of them unvaccinated

I can

Ok its ‘feed it off an aux, speak, grunt no strength, the ladder start to clatter with fear fight down height, wire in a fire representing seven games, a government for hire and a combat site’.

Couldn’t click pre-order fast enough! I already have all my students read his Scientists’ Guide to Writing.

The fragmentation of public health (consortia of Northeast states; of Western states; Fla doing whatevertheeff) sounds chaotic, but the alternative of NOT providing a counterpoint at this point in human history seems worse.

Healey: Pharmacists in Massachusetts will be administering vaccines approved by the state public-health commissioner, not the CDC, starting tomorrow.

AXIOS: “.. Massachusetts is the first state to mandate insurance coverage of vaccines even if the federal government stops requiring it.” @axios.com www.axios.com/2025/09/04/m...

The amount of research resources that have ALREADY gone into studying this spurious claim is enough to make a new(ish) PI weep. Thread on a country that followed all (yes, all) 657,461 kids for >5 million kid-years of follow-up, & found slightly *less* autism among MMR recipients (not stat sig).

I don't know what to say to all of you who are tuning in live; even just reading posts rn is raising my blood pressure

I can't think of any intervention in medicine for which there is stronger evidence of LACK of effect, than hydroxychloroquine for COVID. I saw an estimate somewhere of >$1 billion spent to study this in one way or another.

also good to remember we don't want FDA to approve a drug just to meet a record. we want them to approve when benefits outweigh risks....

gift link to dr. susan monarez’s piece in the wall street journal this morning.

The fact that you can have all of these organizations calling for Kennedy's resignation (or the NYTimes op-ed by 9 former CDC directors) and it having so little discernible impact is a sign of how far the US has moved from valuing scientific advice and expertise and how big a challenge it faces...

🧵How to write and manage your first research budgets The point of funding is to convert it into quality research. A well-spent research budget should fund the idea it was raised on, plus revision experiments, plus preliminary data for the next grant. So you need to spend, while avoiding waste.

Speaking as a fellow alum, he was a legend in the Harvard ID fellowship long before he went to CDC.

What makes me extra mad is that in parallel to eroding population-level protections, they are also taking away individual choice by chipping away at vaccine access.