First Covid wave for 12 months is well underway. Hospital admissions are already higher than last year's peak, but are much lower than we were seeing in earlier waves. There will be weekly surveillance reports through the winter months here: www.gov.uk/government/s...

How long do we have to wait before starting the conspiracy theory again? How about a round hour?

This chart (from the Guardian) seems somewhat misleading. There are around 13x more Muslims than Jews in England and Wales. So these numbers represent a >10x higher rate of offences against Jews; an astonishing >1 in 100 having suffered a religiously motivated hate crime last year.

First politically hopeful day in a while: Starmer starting to call out corrosive xenophobia and racism for what they are; at least one judge absolutely incinerating attempts to suppress free speech in the US; and their military visibly dismissing Hegseth as a confused, drunken embarrassment.

Much of the British media were awful here, but there was some good. Sunday Times articles by Brian Deer did a lot to bust the whole thing open. Worst offender was the one who should have known best: The fucking Lancet. (Editor absurdly defended the paper, retraction took 12 years, still in post)

Scrolling is not a good response to "Sunday-before-school-starts" vibes, but it did mean I saw this youtu.be/gupUrQT_q-8?...

Discuss (25 marks).

The WHO counts a country as having eliminated measles if it has no transmission for 12 months (i.e., you can have imported cases). The UK lost its “measles eliminated” status in 2019, the US will lose its in 2025. www.cdc.gov/measles/data...

The first time I’ve heard the definition of democracy as “a system in which the ruling party loses elections” and I like it a great deal.

These "What if ... Starmer quits/is deposed/self-combusts" look like political journalists raised on 2016-2024 who can't write about anything other than a crisis. What if Labour govern disappointingly for four years, then win if the economy is OK, not if it isn't? www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Oh

I dunno, I’m starting to have a few doubts about this Trump guy.

Again, the BBC's presentation under-emphasises the astonishing effectiveness of vaccines. This chart, plus the statistic in the article that 90.3% of children are vaccinated & some assumptions, gives a ~99% estimate for MMR vaccine effectiveness against measles cases. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c0...

Got raptured but no-one else did so I came back again just trying to act natural now.

So, experts and those who read the research will be pretty angry about Trump + JFK's latest evidence-free announcements about autism. But I can't imagine how incandescent the proper nutcases will be that they've spun their big wheel-'o'-confounders and come up with paracetamol and not vaccines.

The man is demented.

Kimmel AND the Rapture? Tuesday’s rammed, eh?

Can anyone help track down a quote for me? Could be Bill Bryson? It relates to US network anchors and goes something like: "All had been offered a choice between intelligence, political acumen and incisiveness, or really great hair. All - without hesitation - had gone for the hair."

Paracetamol? a) really? b) an association you'd expect from the confounder of access to autism diagnoses. But let's see the studies. More fundamentally, tying of medical hypotheses to political positions is bad. Science needs to get things wrong and correct. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

A time series for London, but a similar pattern everywhere. Measles vaccine in UK: 1968. MMR in UK: 1988. You can see the impact of each, because MMR boosts uptake enormously. Most of the lives saved by MMR are from measles. Reversing this will - predictably - kill a large number of children.

OK, I am learning for the first time that Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon are not the same person.

ABC executives going “Goddamn it, how come our total capitulation to his batshit demand has just encouraged him to make even more batshit demands? How come absolutely everyone didn’t warn us that would happen?”

If this was deliberate (a vanishingly small chance I know), then I'll concede to those who keep insisting that Trump can be very funny.

It's the Laaaaaand of the freeeeeeee. [dramatic pause] And the hoooooomee [little wobble of emotion] of the braaaaaaaaaaaave.

Last two RTs succinctly explain around 80% of the news right now.

Guy who sells doo doo (squinting wisely and doing visionary voice): We believe within 10 years the world economy will be almost completely powered by doo doo

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

The head-snapping change in the US media from "brutal animal, all of them must pay" to "Poor misguided saint" once it became clear that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was white and straight is bile-inducing. www.wsj.com/us-news/who-...

The @nytimes.com once again ladies and gentlemen.

I see that the BBC's Chris Mason has discovered that when N=2, he can draw a straight line that fits the data perfectly.

When Trump arrives in the UK next week, has Charles considered quietly burning everything down by sending Prince Andrew to meet him?

In 2025, it takes a lot to shock, especially when it’s a story from Gaza, but this does it. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Yes Nigel. And we have a name for people who find themselves doing this a lot. Starts with “L”. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Hopefully the BBC will follow up on this story to cover the fact the venue mentioned in it had all of its windows put out on Friday night by someone with a hammer. Seems somewhat relevant. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Why do you need to come to Europe for high culture? We have high culture at home. The high culture at home:

Hmm. Try using Google Maps to search for "Vaccine". Its autocomplete brings up a list - typically a set of local pharmacies and clinics that offer vaccinations. Then hit "Enter". Everything vanishes & Google Maps denies being able to find a thing. Nothing similar with e.g., "Physiotherapy".

The trouble is, history suggests that the: "Our good king, misled by his evil advisors - if only he knew" stage of delusion can last for decades.

Interesting on "emergent misalignment", where fine-tuning LLMs for bad behaviour in one context (coding) increases bad behaviour more broadly. They claim that no AI researcher predicted it. Question. How did the researchers expect the model to demarcate the context in which it should behave badly?

OK, that's a new Windows 11 bug to me. The toolbar clock insists it's 21:07 on September 1 (i.e., yesterday), and I can't persuade it any different. World clock, internal clock happily show the current time. Restart apparently only approach that works.

Ah, those amusing cross-Atlantic comparisons. Brits call it "Knock down Ginger", Americans: "Ding dong ditch". In Britain the home-owner will do a theatrical: "Bloody kids, I know your parents!" and shake a fist. What do you do over ... oh. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

On the plus side, enemy artillery will really struggle to get a range and direction lock, so they might end up being safer overall.

One of the very few cases in which the most annoying of the internet replies - "What took you so long?" / "And this is new how?" and variants is actually justified. Bloody finally. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Somewhere around here, it's worth explaining that Churchill's "Americans can be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities" was not, in fact, a compliment.

2025 statistics out on UK childhood immunisation rates. a) Still very bad, particularly in London b) They've shifted methodology in some critical boroughs, so some figures unusable (argh). However, Hackney is not affected & they're showing 58.3% for two MMR doses at 5 years old. Target is 95%.

📢 Interested in excess mortality methods, and want a challenge? I'm organising the "One Epidemic, Many Estimates" (1EME) project! Register *now* as a many analyst team (submissions due 15 March 2026), and then join us at LSE for a workshop on 21-22 May 2026! (1/n) www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

Looks like a good bunch of the senior people at the US Centre for Disease Control have either been fired or are resigning today. I imagine we'll see some harmful policy changes before long. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

If there’s one person I hold a petty grudge against, it’s the product manager in Bonne Maman who believes that only milk chocolate sells in the UK, and is blocking the launch of their dark mousses here.

One of the strange things about US journalists is that they never, ever ask who these “They” or the “Many people” are.