Tobacco use is leading cause of preventable disease, disability, & death in USA. Why did admin fire CDC's tobacco prevention & control experts? Illegal RIFs didn’t just eliminate jobs, they have silenced science. Critical data on tobacco use & its harms are NOT being published through MMWR. 1/2 🧵

A deal between the federal government and groups that sued the Trump administration over National Institutes of Health research grant proposals consigned to bureaucratic limbo because of anti-DEI policies is already bearing fruit. www.statnews.com/2025/12/30/n...

It is time once again for ABBA's weirdly depressing Happy New Year song. There is no more perfect way to start 2026. youtu.be/3Uo0JAUWijM?...

This was probably meant to be a late-night post: I spent eight months working on a stunt blog about a $200 sandwich. Or, no, I did an end-of-year post about my mental health and the federal funding crisis. I'm not sure which. Maybe you can figure it out. www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/epi...

EXCLUSIVE: @laurenweberhp.bsky.social & I have spent the last year collecting school+county-level vaccination data from across the US and found that only about 28% of counties now have herd immunity for kindergartners from measles—that leaves about 5.2mn kids unprotected. Gift link: wapo.st/49zDc43

Welp ... some breaking news on New Year's Eve: On a podcast, NIH Director Bhattacharya says the agency will likely not renew grants that were reinstated as part of a court decision earlier this year www.statnews.com/2025/12/31/n...

I'm back at Slate next week after mat leave, and will be looking at pitches again! Particularly interested in health and science opinion and analysis, and/or with a first person angle, as well as features (2,500+ words, deeply reported) that turn a big idea on its head. [email protected]

The NIH IC directors have near-total control of multi-billion dollar budgets and the grantmaking that is 80%+ of what those budgets support. That’s a lot of slush funds if the wrong IC director is installed. 2/

“It's not the kind of grant review you're thinking of, and I don't know if it's good or not” Another Josh Fessel banger trying to sort out the continuing changes in the rules of the game at NIH substack.com/home/post/p-... Cc @jeremymberg.bsky.social

55 years ago today, Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act giving American workers the right to a safe workplace. www.politico.com/story/2018/1...

On delayed application review, the NIH grant terminations lawsuit appears to be headed for a settlement. Both plaintiffs and defendants have submitted a joint document outlining their agreement. Judge Young must sign off on it before it takes effect. Here's what it says and what all this means 🧵

‪It has a name now 😜 Many thanks to Ken for agreeing to put his good name to my...artwork. The image is in the public domain (CC 0), but citations to the linked documents are warmly welcomed. ✅ zenodo.org/records/1808... ✅ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24452418/

I only learned this recently, and was shocked (though it helped to explain a lot of things).

This is an outstanding essay describing some of the important roles and influences of NIH program officers (from an insider perspective). Read! elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...

More news (not good) from NIH The renewal request from National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke Director Walter Koroshetz has been denied. I guess the NIH_leadership™ needed another position to fill with their time-tested recruitment process.

Creating a useful DAG is definitely not trivial. And it’s pretty easy to tell when it was an afterthought or checkbox. The struggle of creating a good DAG is one of the things that can can make a project great. But, I think that takes a good team willing to spend time discussing.

Funding Opportunity! We are now taking applications for our Early Career Research Awards. These awards provide support to recent PhD earners researching policy and employment issues. Those working in economics, sociology, public policy, political science, and related fields may apply. #Econsky

wapo.st/3LjmYCV gift

The team behind Climate.us aims to provide the same kind of reliable, fresh content that used to be available via Climate.gov. We hope you’ll support us. #ClimateForUs

This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.

Bad-faith actors have used a well-worn playbook to undermine public health interventions and institutions to advance their commercial, political, and personal interests. We need to be careful not to conflate "meeting people where they are" with ceding scientific ground to these actors and agendas.

"[RFK jr.] may as well have shot the bullets himself [...] and I hold him and his colleagues personally responsible for that violence and the death of that officer", says Daskalakis. Their rhetoric dehumanizing people who do public health created the environment that led to the attack, he says.

Daskalakis says that for him the lasting memory of 2025 will be the attack on the CDC on August 8, during which the police officer David Rose was killed. "That was one of my moments where I was like, we've crossed a threshold." And he does not mince words about who he sees as responsible: RFK jr.

@washingtonpost.com piece featuring over 1,000 interviews with federal employees. #altgov family spread the word. wapo.st/4b14KAy

#JohnsHopkins @ucsfmedicine.bsky.social and @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social are not obliged to take back Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad & Jay Bhattacharya when they leave the administration.

One of the major problems with epidemiologic research is that we focus so much on the statistics that many (most?) researchers think that "doing research" means running the regression model and not the actual research part, which is everything described in this historian's post. 1/n

McGill is hiring scholars from outside Canada! The Canada Impact+ Research Chairs (Impact+) Program is designed to attract world-leading researchers whose work addresses critical national and global challenges. Review of applications begins 1/16/26. www.mcgill.ca/research/res...

20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events = our attempt at documenting and synthesizing all the ways that the federal government has attempted to destroy access to gender-affirming care since January unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

Manuscript and grant reviewers in biomedical sciences: Do you have any major pet peeves when it comes to formatting of papers or grants that you're reviewing? Anything else not format-related? I'm putting together some recommendations for trainees in our #epidemiology program. Thanks!

A new federal rule would ban gender affirming care at virtually every hospital system in the country. Now, an organization says they've prepared, have private clinics and financial aid ready for families that need them. Meet one group fighting back, the TYEP. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

#econ_ra #EconSky

It is utterly catastrophic that RFK Jr. plans to end CDC recommendations for most childhood vaccines. It’s a betrayal of science, ethics, compassion, and the people of the United States. And it was also a specific goal of Project 2025 (page 254).

As 2025 comes to a close, my university (Dalhousie U in Halifax, Canada) is recruiting faculty, including outstanding early career researchers, and Canada Research Chairs. Applications are due January 19 2026 (was just notified today!). Please repost.

Good morning epi methods community! Please consider applying for (and spreading the word about) this position here at Minnesota. It's a great place to be! (You can read the whole description and apply here: apply.interfolio.com/179313) #EpiSky

CDC PRAMS office is still non-operational, but there's an opportunity for public comment on proposal to support continued collection of state PRAMS data. Please leave even a few sentences, stating support for this critical maternal & child health resource: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... 1/

🚨Job alert! We're hiring experienced programmer to analyze national Medicaid claims data, along w/ colleague Ari Ne'eman @hsph.harvard.edu. Details & application instructions: careers.harvard.edu/job/statisti... @societyforepi.bsky.social @popassocamerica.bsky.social @ashecon.bsky.social @apha.org

Would it be terribly annoying if I posted about things that have made my academic work more... efficient?

What a chart. "This line goes down to nearly -10%"

AAP learned this week that seven grants to AAP under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are being terminated. The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Psst: Postdocs, figures should not be included in your specific aims page. Now you know for Feb/March submissions. grants.nih.gov/grants-proce...

Current feds- OPM cancelled the 2025 FEVS so Partnership for Public Service created Public Service Viewpoint Survey to fill this critical gap and provide career federal employees with an opportunity to share their perspectives on workplace ourpublicservice.org/public-servi... @altcdc.altgov.info

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

1/ Microsoft Copilot (mostly) fabricated a quantitative study for me based on a one-sentence prompt. The prompt? "Generate an academic article which shows that right handed university presidents are more effective fundraisers."

New stories out about Official NIH Policy about "remediating" NIH applications so that they can be considered for funding. First, a story in STAT... www.statnews.com/2025/12/15/n... 1/9

The #NIH IRP Summer (paid!) Internship Program for 2026 has opened its application portal. This opportunity is open to US Citizens who are college students (including rising first-years), postbaccalaureate, and graduate students, including medical and dental. The deadline is 2026/02/18!