Not to detract from the rest of Mark's point, but a recurring theme from reporting last year I encountered was the damage done by uncertainty. Without long term assurances, PhD offers were rescinded, new grants were scaled back at NSF & NIH. At Harvard people left before the grants came back.

In our new poll with the Boston Globe of NIH funded scientists in Mass ... - 72% say they have delayed or cancelled projects - 66% reduced research scope - 56% paused experiments or students. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

NIH Dir. Bhattacharya said even if scientists don't think there's any way this could work "If lots of people believe it...we as NIH have an obligation, again, to treat it seriously." In Bhattacharya's confirmation hearing, he defended funding research on nonexistent link btw MMR & autism similarly.

Check out this @nature.com News explainer article on measles, with my comments about our prior work, and featuring an upcoming article led by Drs @malar0ne.bsky.social and @joshuasweitz.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If you didn’t catch the significance of the exploding transformers in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I gotcha. Here’s one of a bunch of pieces I wrote from/on Puerto Rico about the crisis—and Trump’s role in it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

what a shot

"Dr. Norton told NPR in October, “[the admin and president] is asking us to do things that are illegal and harmful to the American public.” @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social has been an inspiration to many scientists and citizens. I can't count the number of colleagues who have praised her to me.

One observation: Several senators brought up terminated grants. Bhattacharya kept saying the agency hasn't cut any funds. That is false. When he says no funds have been cut, he means NIH spent all its allocated money, as required by law. In fact, a watchdog found NIH illegally impounded funds.

BHATTACHARYA: We have to reestablish trust in public health. If you just double down on the same, we're not gonna change it CASSIDY: Now we have a measles outbreak among those who did not trust. To further cast doubt upon the vaccines for no scientific reason - that's not gonna increase trust

Man whose pandemic response plan was "tell people to protect the vulnerable" reveals that his plan to keep clinical trials open while dismantling the infrastructure that runs them is..."tell people to keep clinical trials open" sciencebasedmedicine.org/demands/

Thread of threads on the hearing today (I'll watch later tonight after taking a beta blocker....)

BERNIE SANDERS: Do vaccines cause autism? BHATTACHARYA: I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism SANDERS: Nah. Uh uh. I didn't ask measles. Do vaccines cause autism? BHATTACHARYA: I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism

I hope that when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya says during his Senate HELP Committee hearing today that he’s “trying to restore trust in public health”, someone drops the data on him showing that in reality trust in public health is plummeting under his boss’s and his leadership.

10:00 ET today -- Senate HELP Commitee: Full Committee Hearing Modernizing the National Institutes of Health: Faster Discoveries, More Cures w Jay Bhattacharya bit.ly/3M3YBcU

One other piece... for NIAID, the middle 'programmatic' review section includes a "standardized assessment tool" including 'alignment with HHS, NIH, and NIAID scientific priorities'. There are many ways to bury many things inside such a 'standardized' tool. Essential that this tool is made public.

Bhattacharya, a moment ago: "What you've been seeing in the press is that there have been funding cuts. There haven't been funding cuts. What there has been is a change in agency priorities." Our year in numbers begs to differ www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

AIDS denier Peter Duesberg passed away earlier this month. He gave disastrous advice to the president of South Africa, encouraging policies that led to an estimated 330,000 preventable deaths. 35,000 babies were born with HIV that could have been prevented. www.theguardian.com/world/2008/n...

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

In a new preprint, we combine modeling with school-level vaccine data to contextualize the risk of 'breakthrough infections' and impacts on the ongoing US measles outbreak. #idsky #episky www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Looking for sources for a @nature.com story about how researchers are coping in the midst of current events: If you're a PhD or other academic who's struggling to focus with everything that's happening in the world and would like to be interviewed for this story, please get in touch ASAP!

I will vote NO on the funding bill for Trump’s ICE. They are killing Americans. Detaining children. Trampling our freedoms. We are losing our humanity. This is a defining moment for our nation. A moment for moral courage. We must stand together and say no.

You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

Alex Pretti took care of veterans as an ICU nurse. “He was a super nice, super helpful guy – looked after his patients," said @dimitridrekonja.bsky.social, who worked with Pretti both at the hospital and on scientific research. "I’m just stunned.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

🚨🚨🚨 "At least 63 times since 2007, data from some of the 28 human genomic repositories that the N.I.H. controls was improperly released to researchers, used for unapproved purposes or made vulnerable to theft..." (Gift Link) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

U.S. health officials insisted it was still on. African health leaders said it was cancelled. A hotly debated study on hepatitis B in Guinea-Bissau is indeed halted, as I reported last week. Here's my latest: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

The measles outbreak in South Carolina now stands at 664 cases, basically doubling in a week, and it's spread to several other states. The outbreak first began in Texas a year ago this week - which means the U.S. is going to lose its elimination status. My latest: www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

"We recognize that much of the American public lost trust in the NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NIH; of which the NIAID is a part), and in the greater scientific community." Factually incorrect statement on trust in Nature Medicine via NIH Director + co. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This study has been canceled (for now). Instead, as @pauloffit.bsky.social suggested, “take the $1.6m and vaccinate as many children as you can at birth”. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"Donald Trump has promised to “defeat childhood cancer once and for all”. On the frontlines of the disease, scientists and families say the opposite is unfolding." Critical read that lays out how we got here and the devastating consequences. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Dr. Paul Offit was similarly alarmed. “These investigators will conduct a trial where children who are born to mothers who are HBsAG [Hepatitis B carriers] positive—but don’t know it because they weren’t screened—would not be given a birth dose? That condemns those children to a shorter life.”

We are collecting information on terminated SAMHSA grants at Grant Witness: grant-witness.us/submit-samhs... If you worked on one of these programs, please let us know at the link! And please share with your colleagues. We need a comprehensive record of these terminations to fight back!

What fiction have you read that talk about Covid? I taught a class in fall 2022 on cultural/scientific representations of infectious disease & we talked about how striking it was that Covid was basically absent from new books then. But past 3 books I've started all talk about Covid/the response

I'm curious what is going on behind the scenes with these changes to vaccine recs. RFK Jr overhauled the committee, appointed Kulldorff as chair, suddenly removed him and put him in HHS where he wrote a report that CDC used to justify the changes, bypassing ACIP. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

This was done in response to a memo co-signed by Jay Bhattacharya, referencing a report by Martin Kulldorff. As they did with the Great Barrington Declaration, they are providing pseudoscientific justification for the Trump administration's unscientific approach to public health.

The report by Tracy Beth Høeg and Martin Kulldorff forming the basis for this decision includes references to articles by The Brownstone Institute and Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom.

The US is in track to lose our measles elimination status this month.

Becca Good’s statement on the murder of her wife Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. “On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.” www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Did slashing multiple vaccines from the childhood vaccine schedule bring the US in line with other countries? In a word, no. The US now recommends all kids be protected against fewer diseases than South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan & many more. www.statnews.com/2026/01/09/c...

Physicians in the Trump administration are aligning themselves with anti-public health interests and policies. High profile physicians should be resisting Trump and RFK Jr’s damaging policies, not collaborating with them, @gavinyamey.bsky.social @jonshaffer.bsky.social www.bmj.com/content/392/...

It seems like there should be an amendment or something that protects your right to free speech, including speech critical of government officials. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

The American right, including Jay Bhattacharya, is trying to weaponize free speech by crying censorship. But freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach. To fight back, scientific institutions should say that junk science is junk. New post from me: 1/

i am never, ever, ever going to stop posting that Truemed is Calley Means's company and Calley Means is the MAHA power broker that introduced RFK Jr. to Trump. some 👏 conspiracies 👏 are 👏 real 👏

Macedo and Lee misrepresent what happened during the pandemic and are unable to confront Covid's actual toll, presumably because it undermines their premise. Congratulations, I guess. joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/revisionis...

All ten parts of our series attempting to put our arms around the ramifications of various cuts and disruptions to the scientific enterprise this year are live, and you can read them here: www.statnews.com/american-sci...

Many thanks to cofounder @asinclair.bsky.social & the entire SCIMaP team (scienceimpacts.org) for collaborative work to confront federal cuts to science and medical research; together, our effort was recognized as a 2025 Public Health Hero in @thenation.com. a 🧵 www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This is a reminder of how much it matters that pediatricians, public health specialists, scientists and members of the public who care about vaccines and science based recommendations continue to speak up. Many voices break through. www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

As a reminder, this was all propaganda. Successful propaganda.