This is why it’s good to have specialist reporters, a practice that is basically dying outside of huge outlets like the NYT.

Reducing the number of .tex files in the world that do not contain \begin{document}, one at a time

I found out that the Netherlands has been running a Covid-19 infection survey continuously since October 2020! Let’s have a look! 1/

Addendum: I took a deeper dive, so to speak, in the steaming pool of wastewater data, so you don’t have to. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a thread (data sources at end) 1/

Rollout of #Ebola vaccine has begun in DRC in response to the country’s most recent zairevirus outbreak. It is still thrilling to know a vaccine for this scourge has been licensed and can be rapidly deployed. Vaccines save lives. www.afro.who.int/countries/de...

Excellent deep dive into what the WellKiwis study and wastewater data tell us about how the number of symptomatic infections in Wellington has changed over time

If you read 1 thing today, please make it this: my so-talented colleague @ericboodman.bsky.social explains why babies in the US are vaccinated at birth against hep B — and what the human costs of changing that policy would be. www.statnews.com/2025/09/11/n...

The capital of Finland hasn't had a traffic death in a full year. Lower speed limits, plentiful speed cameras, 1,500+ km of bike lanes, infrastructure for pedestrians, and a new tram line. When you prioritize people and not vehicles, you can save lives while protecting the environment.

New post on the original culture war: kucharski.substack.com/p/the-origin...

New preprint reporting a large piece of work by Katherine Jia to define estimands and estimators for direct impact of vaccines with arbitrary rollout schedules arxiv.org/abs/2509.05508 with Alyssa Bilinski, @chrisboyer.bsky.social and me

Looking for an interesting #HealthEconomics PhD topic to sink your teeth into? Come do a PhD on methods for estimating productivity losses with me! Potential for this to go in lots of different directions Details & how to apply on the #UniMelb website 👇🏼 forms.your.unimelb.edu.au/wf/eyJ0eXAiO...

More cuts to the Marsden Fund of @royalsocietynz.bsky.social. This takes it down to $10/capita in real terms when it was over $16 for most of this century. Australia's equivalent, the ARC, is NZ$42/capita, as is the US NSF (despite ongoing attempts to gut the latter). www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

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.)

Like to develop spatio-temporal models? Interested in Arctic marine mammals 🦭🐳 and their susceptibility to oil spills? You may be the postdoctoral fellow Dr. Mariane Marcoux and I are looking for! See the details in the job ad: tinyurl.com/spatiostatamm

Oh hey, H5N1 in Texas dairy cows! Are you a new spillover or have you always been there, undetected b/c of insufficient testing? It’s migration season, almost flu season, & we’ve never had a handle on the cow outbreak. Bird flu is here & we ignore at our peril www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influe...

Sequence data from the new Ebola outbreak in DRC suggests it is indeed a new spillover. And just incredible to see the virus sequenced and the data publicly shared less than 24 hours after confirmation of the outbreak. #IDsky 🧪 virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

One of the most common misunderstandings about the use and value of placebos in clinical RCTs, often made by both methodological experts and experienced trialists: (from @stephensenn.bsky.social in academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advan...)

Our latest preprint on the genomic epidemiology of flu over 10 years in NZ www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

The history of the #Covid19 #pandemic is being furiously rewritten, especially (though not solely) re: the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. But there is an evidentiary record and this is a hugely helpful compilation of it. Read and bookmark.

Some great comments from @sereananaepi.bsky.social “What we need is a tertiary education strategy that recognises universities’ multiple roles: yes, they train graduates for the workforce and contribute to the creation of new technologies,

University sector changes announced – Expert Reaction www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/09/03/u...

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...

Just for fun, I did a quick google search for papers estimating mRNA vaccine effectiveness against either infection or transmission of the Delta variant. 1/n

PBRF certainly had its faults, but this sounds 😬😬😬

A very special day today, as I look back and remember our trepidation on how this crazy idea of a new pathogen database would go down. Would our work be for naught? But no! I'm so grateful that we've been able to make a big impact on sequence sharing! Here's to year 2! 🥂

"This could have a big effect on emissions from road transport and transport is the largest single source source of fossil fuel burning in New Zealand, so doing things now or in 2027 that are going to increase emissions is exactly the wrong way to where we should be going."

Very pleased to share this newly published work with Aishani Aatresh, part of her exceptional Harvard undergrad thesis. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... .

Using Treasury's estimates of the daily cost of alert levels and the Oxford Stringency Index in other OECD countries I estimated how much it would have cost to implement other strategies over 2020-22. My conclusion: our response saved lives and was one of the most cost effective in the OECD.

I’ve left X because it had become a moral vacuum. However I’ve seen a X post from The Egalitarian - #DissDisinfo (lacking the courage to use their real name or photo). For the record I was invited to the Covid-19 Inquiry public hearings & was set to attend. Also met with them for 2 hours privately.

What cutting cycleways would really save ratepayers Answer: 3/5ths of naff all as these excellent graphs show www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3607...

Interesting myth busting article in the press today, important take aways are 1) Cycleways only contribute 0.11% of the 5% rates rises. 2) The largest contributor to our rates is critical water infrastructure, with a whopping $2 billion 1/3 www.thepress.co.nz/a/nz-news/36...

Two Pandemics, Compared: Reflections on HIV and COVID-19 blogs.jwatch.org/hiv-id-obser...

The magic of car free streets

As Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo put it: "A city where you can get let go of your child's hand"

Resharing this for those that didn't see it.

Brilliant article from the perspective of an infectious disease doctor of two major pandemics in our time. blogs.jwatch.org/hiv-id-obser...

Pre-pandemic, people in the UK on average made 10-11 social contacts per day (according to a large study we ran with the BBC in 2017/18). In late 2022, when there were no COVID restrictions still in place, it was around 6-7 in the UK. Have a guess what the number was in late 2024/early 2025....

Here's the thing, we already were amongst the lowest levels of funding for research in the developed world. And these cuts & reprioritisations make this even worse. You can't determine immediate economic implications from a lot, if not most, research. So, these decisions misunderstand science.

"Misinformation seems to be the name of the anti-Māori game right now" Vini Olssen-Reeder & Corinne Seals on a Ministry of Education making policy based on a series of linguistic fictions e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-...

Screenshot of cases from the U.S. CDC’s website showing the number of national measles cases indexed by rash onset date. Are they going down?

i don’t write opinion pieces, but i felt compelled to write this one with @colincarlson.bsky.social after my friends and former colleagues at CDC had 500 bullets fired at them.

I try to keep the doom posts to a minimum but this is essential reading The CDC shooting was public health’s Jan. 6 In RFK Jr.’s America, it will never be safe to practice public health or medicine www.statnews.com/2025/08/15/c...

Dear Britain, it’s now clear: 20mph zones save lives and don’t slow traffic. Implement them www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Ugh I am seeing more peer review reports that look like they're straight out of chat GPT. I don't really get why anyone would do this?

This is such crucial point for the woulda-coulda-shoulda revisionists doubting the value of NZ’s pandemic response. The cost of doing things differently would have been far, far higher than (just) thousands of lives lost.

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

We just published an excellent commentary in Vaccine by @gavinyamey.bsky.social & Chris Beyrer breaking down how the current regime is laying waste to US vaccination programs & what we can do about it: ✅Congress must withdraw support for RFK Jr ✅Speak up...loudly ✅Study anti-vax movements ✅VOTE

There is a broad scientific consensus that significant challenges remain before reliable estimates of community prevalence of disease can be made from wastewater RNA monitoring. It's a laudable goal, but the science is not there yet. 1/ nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/2751...

Key point being (as I'm sure everyone on this thread knows) you can't argue the alternative choice was 15k more deaths & "life as normal". The alternative was 15k more deaths plus overwhelmed hospitals, a traumatized healthcare workforce, a borked economy AND months of restrictions + closures

Instead of no boats we could have had 30 more years of not cutting Marsden funding by $23m a year 🤔 Minister for Rail Winston Peters on the $671m scrapped ferry fiasco www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...