Those of us in public health don't just have to become better storytellers, we need go out into our communities and co-create a better future for all of us. The story of public health in the 21st century should be one embedded in communities that need us most. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Grimly shared by Sam the rural health advoCATe. "Innovation" cannot replace gaps caused by decades of systematic underfunding for the basics of rural health care. And $50B does not replace $130B in Medicaid cuts. #PowerOfRuralCats www.gpb.org/news/2026/03...

A great write-up on brand-new research I was involved in. We used a really different approach from the ones that we & many others have used previously to estimate how many Covid deaths there *really* were--almost 20% more than known. Our results broadly accord w others but add new demographic detail

I've organized & will moderate a webinar on the health & policy crisis of ICE detention centers April 30, 1-2pm ET, open to all Register/submit questions at: childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/blog/event/t... I'd be grateful if you could circulate this Thx to @joshuasweitz.bsky.social for support

In 1996 Clinton won 48% of rural counties. In 2024 Trump won 93%. "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" explains why & what's to be done to heal the divide. I interviewed lead author @smettler.bsky.social for @barnraiser.bsky.social 1/ barnraisingmedia.com/a-strategy-t...

If there’s no society, there’s no obligation to regulate pollution, guarantee food security or access to healthcare. There are only individuals tasked w/ optimizing themselves. Read why I think #MAHA isn’t about health. It’s healthism. My latest in Adverse Reaction. open.substack.com/pub/adverser...

When did public health stop asking who's pushing people in in the river? The upstream-downstream metaphor was always about corporate power. Somewhere along the way, "pushed" became "fell" - and that shift lets the 'manufacturers of illness' off the hook journals.plos.org/globalpublic...

This right here 👇. And this is (another reason) why we also need social science training in ph & med, nursing & allied disciplines to recognize these patterns of attack & advocate effectively

From Hardwick, Vermont to the streets of Minneapolis then back again. This is a story about a song that's giving a lot of people comfort, and some courage. www.rumblestripvermont.com/episodes/hol...

#Measles in an ICE facility is a public health failure. In my latest for @statnews.com, I argue this outbreak was avoidable and the result of policy choices that concentrate risk without basic prevention. V This is both a health and human rights failure. www.statnews.com/2026/02/04/m...

In my experience, few institutions are as vital to rural communities as their hospitals and schools. Relegating rural healthcare (and education) to AI and implying that healthcare institutions and workers are expendable sends a signal to rural residents that their lives and futures do not matter.1/2

as someone who worked in rural health policy, this is not a real thing. this is actually called giving up on rural america after your party broke everything and can’t put it back together. perfect time to exploit people with scams

Counterpoint: We could NOT slash Medicaid, stop pretending that the Rural Health Transformation Fund is anything more than a drop in the bucket relative to the safety net cuts, and actually support rural hospitals that are at risk of closure… and, you know, stop acting like utter imbeciles.

The tens of thousands of brave and patriotic Minnesotans shame every elite who bent the knee

The most important public health story right now in America is that the Trump administration is executing people in the streets, it is kidnapping people of all ages, including 2-year-olds, it is torturing them, & it is putting them in concentration camps where many have been killed or “disappeared”

Even in this day and age, it is easy to find examples of how the Global North continues to see Africa as a laboratory to experiment on

Love and solidarity to everyone in Minnesota today. Grateful for the example of moral clarity, political courage, and practical action you have offered us all at this moment.

But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes. What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one

A friend with Project HOME in Maine is asking for urgent help. With ICE descending on neighborhoods, people are afraid to go to work—cutting off income and putting families at immediate risk of eviction. This is a solidarity fund: 100% of donations go straight to rent.

Revisiting this paper for today's lecture of hospital closures and subsequent racial, ethnic, and class inequities in spatial access to acute hospitals pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... Did you know that ~95% of historically Black-serving hospitals closed between 1965-95?

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

So moved by the people of Minnesota who—drawing on LA, Portland, Chicago, DC etc—are writing a shining new chapter in the history of nonviolent resistance. The rest of us need to be taking notes—and helping them! www.standwithminnesota.com

Important reminder: The $50 billion rural health transformation fund is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that will dramatically erode rural communities' (and many others') health care access.

the rural fund was created as political cover for the much more massive rural healthcare cuts in the BBB. most of those cuts kick in after the midterms, but the impacts have already started. however, it’s unlikely that rural republicans will blame their own party for the cuts they all voted for

My colleague @adamsearing.bsky.social notes how Trump Admin will allow only 15% of the $50B in rural health funds in H.R. 1 to be used to reimburse rural hospitals despite being framed as a way to mitigate the draconian #Medicaid cuts harming rural hospitals: ccf.georgetown.edu/2025/10/21/t...

The full protocol of the study in Guinea Bissau provides no reassurance. If anything is spells out just how insanely unethical the planned study is. The PI who wrote the protocol tried to defend the indefensible by writing to me directly. I responded publicly. Read 👇 substack.com/@bktitanji/n...

My heart breaks for the people of my home state of Minnesota, especially in the Twin Cities. Not just the Renee Good shooting, but the ongoing violence and fear federal agents are instilling on the population. I hope the reign of terror ends soon.

A Texas rural health consultant said he has “a ton of concerns” about companies taking the money instead of it helping rural hospitals and residents. “I was blown away about how many for-profit companies reached out.”

There’s a big story everyone is missing—but this article hits on it. We aren’t just seeing public health dismantled bc we’ve been taken over by conspiracy theorists and lunatics. What we’re really seeing is the giant, predatory, underegulated wellness industry come to Washington.

When formal systems fail, mutual aid sustains rural life barnraisingmedia.com/networks-of-...

I really want ppl w/o Minneapolis connections to understand You might've heard that Mpls public schools went hybrid bc so many families are in hiding. Well, a coworker just told me that today, during his kid's hybrid class, a kid's apt building was raided onscreen *Everyone has stories like this*

From my new @TIME piece: we should tell the full story about trust and vaccines. Black communities are not outsiders to immunization history. Sharing an excerpt on Onesimus and what it teaches us about power and whose expertise counts. Link: time.com/7344423/dang...

We should expect more from government than being "not crazy" and not write columns praising them for meeting this pathetically low bar statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/08/t...

We need to apply a political economy lens to these policy decisions and their proponents. What actors are colluding to undermine evidence-based policy? What are their interests (creating a marketplace for alternatives, their own brand)? What strategies are they employing to advance these interests?

Sadly, environmental exploitation of rural, and nonwhite areas in particular, is neither new nor unusual. Structural urbanism and generations of under-representation. #PowerOfRuralCats

How do you think about the vaccine policy changes? #Science #Politics contributors EJ Sobo and Emily Brunson explain why & how vaccine decision making has changed through time. Hints: social disagreements about vaccines aren't new, and they are largely political. sciencepolitics.org/2026/01/07/v...

🧵This needs to be said. There were many in ID who during Covid agreed along with the current leaders of NIH & FDA in their naysaying, and collaborated with them (remember urgency of normal?) who are now being quoted in the press saying, “By golly we don’t agree now!” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

Pediatric ID Physician here. I‘ll never forget the young adult who lost her limbs to disseminated meningococcal ds, I‘ll never forget the healthy children who did not get the flu vaccine and were well one day, and dead the next. The HHS is the biggest threat to children’s health.

The doctors who broke from the consensus to prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine accessed a cash-pay economy with 500% revenue premiums. The organizations that fundraise on vaccine injury have professional staffs, 8-figure budgets, and executives earning more than most hospital administrators

This👇! Framing “it seems personal freedom has become an even greater value in people’s health decision making” completely ignores how this equation was/is built by self-interested actors. Push back w more science & information, will fail if we don’t build political strategy based on actors involved

Social science research can help us to understand why doubt and disinformation find a landing strip in some communities. Community-level research and interventions will not alone overcome the political economy of disinformation and doubt fueling these trends. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/o...

His advice is to look beyond the now: "If you have political will that is designed to destroy and they have the power to destroy, it is almost futile to try to push against the destruction. Instead, you have to get through the dark age by sort of deciding what the Renaissance is going to look like"

"I was particularly appalled by the testimonies of Inuit women that reported being subjected to IUD by Danish healthcare providers without their knowledge or consent some as young as 12 years old." UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2023 www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...

The worst part is studies like this further sow mistrust in the scientific process and impact uptake on vaccines and the acceptance of other proven health interventions. There are examples of this through history. As someone who studies vaccine hesitancy and health misinformation in Africa

What would be the real world impacts of the loss of federal funding for Housing First programs? We modeled it: an additional 44,590 ppl beyond anticipated growth due to economic factors. @jabarocas.bsky.social @kirkfetters.bsky.social @ucsfbhhi.bsky.social url: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Here are the people and institutions that gave me hope in 2025. 1/ www.thenation.com/article/soci...

given rising global populism — and tendency to demonize people with little power in society — worth reflecting that the hero in Australia's mass shooting was a Syrian refugee, and the key witness in the Brown University shooting was a homeless man

Read @boghuma.bsky.social’s piece on RFK Jr’s HBV vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau. bktitanji.substack.com/p/how-unethi...

Sam the rural health advoCATe endorses the myth-busting in this discussion. He would add that rural racial/ethic diversity has historic roots (eg Black persons in the rural South) that contribute to discrimination & under-funding of health care. #PowerOfRuralCats www.yahoo.com/news/article...