The new Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning based on the 1881 assassination of president James Garfield by a deranged office seeker is highly pertinent to our troubled times. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

Study in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025.  #Medsky www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/cov...

Some thoughts on the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and what the litany of campus shootings say about our violent, blood-soaked times. markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/meridian-t...

www.thefp.com/p/sam-harris... Sage advice from Sam Harris:- Get off social media. Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life.

Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/o... “While the internet’s rot once felt safely bottled…within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed”.

When my beloved goldendoodle of 15 years died this summer I was overwhelmed with grief. Then something extraordinary happened: I took a hiatus from social media and began engaging with people in real life. markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/murphys-gift

My worst nightmare is coming true. I am turning into Jay Bhattacharya. @reason.com is writing articles calling me a silenced and censored scientific dissident. What have I done to myself. 😅 reason.com/2025/09/03/f...

I am happy Gov. Kathy Hochul took action to defend COVID vaccine access in the face of the anti-science attacks from Robert Kennedy Jr. and his crank allies like Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya. But I note that it’s only for ages 3 and up. The CDC’s original guidance was 6 months and up.

Today, parakeets are a common sight in public parks. But in 1930 the birds sparked a worldwide panic when it was discovered their faeces contained a deadly bacterium. Click on my Substack to read my new post on the Great Parrot Fever Pandemic of 1930. markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/the-green-...

Despite putting on her ‘happy face’ at the launch of Labour’s 10-year plan for the NHS this morning, the British public are unlikely to forget Reeves’s visible anguish at PM’s questions in a hurry. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

Despite putting on her ‘happy face’ at the launch of Labour’s 10-year plan for the NHS this morning, the British public are unlikely to forget Reeves’s visible anguish at PM’s questions in a hurry. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

@mrjamesob.bsky.social @lbc.co.uk To judge by James O’Brien’s call-in on LBC radio today, sympathy for the Chancellor as the architect of her own misery was in short supply. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

No one knows what sparked Rachel Reeves’s visible anguish on Wednesday, but for a moment at least she showed that she was human.That is something the public will likely remember long after her tears have dried. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

The idea that you can debunk your way out of a conspiracy theory is disproven over and over again. Better imo to ask people with an alternative point of view what their single strongest piece of evidence is and discuss that in depth. For "lab leak" those conversations don't last long.

1/ On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis... However, only 22% of respondents said they were familiar with a 2018 research proposal known as DEFUSE, submitted by EcoHealth Alliance and partnering with the US labs and the Wuhan Institute of Virology...

RFK Jr claims Ralph Baric developed a "seamless ligation" technique to hide the laboratory origins of a manipulated virus, as if its use were nefarious. But its scientific point is to enable mutations to be precisely introduced, including making sure that one can introduce no mutations at all.

This is a good example of the sort of research that can help us detect the next pandemic virus before it can spread more widely. Such a shame that because of the distrust of science due to the obsession with the Covid lab/leak theory, more of this research isn’t being done.

It speaks volumes about the mentality of the fans who packed the West Holts arena that Bobby Vylan’s chant should be so readily adopted at a festival dedicated to love and peace. This is what happens when empathy becomes a substitute for moral thinking. markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/hate-and-t...

The report faults the governments of the United States and Germany for not sharing more information from their intelligence communities but reserves its strongest criticism for China. www.science.org/content/arti...

SAGO Report is out: 1️⃣ No new data in report 2️⃣ Not bioweapon, man-made, or engineered 3️⃣ All scientific evidence points to zoonosis 4️⃣ No evidence for lab leak 5️⃣ New evidence could swing the conclusion In other words, what we concluded in April, 2020. Five years later. share.google/4I8ac1DJMZOM...

No picture can do justice to the UK AIDS quilt or the sense of loss contained in the brightly coloured fabric. Walking beside the panels as shafts of sunlight fell on the soaring concrete walls of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall it felt as if I had entered a cathedral… open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

You can’t cancel our freedoms #nokings

From Gaza to Los Angeles, compassion has become a zero-sum game in which you seemingly can’t have empathy for one cause without having enmity for another. No wonder our politics is so divided. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

“When empathy is stretched to the cosmic vanishing point or else compressed to the width of a grave, it ceases to be empathy.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

When did empathy become “suicidal”? Talk about Doublethink.

In this week’s Observer I review @carlzimmer.com new book Air-Borne, a fascinating tour of the forgotten science of aerobiology and the flawed reasoning that led the WHO to conclude (wrongly) that COVID-19 was a droplet infection that could not be spread via the air. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Excellent review of Christian Frei’s new film, Blame, making case for Covid’s natural origins and debunking the lab leak theory:- “The message is chilling: the very systems designed to prevent the next pandemic are being dismantled…for political inconvenience” www.wsws.org/en/articles/...

With so many humanitarian crises in the world it sometimes feels as if we're drowning in tears. But imagine a pandemic where tears transmitted like a virus? Would the wave of crying enhance our empathy for other people's distress or would it deepen our own grief? open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

Im Budongo-Wald in Uganda haben Forscher etwas Ungewöhnliches beobachtet: Schimpansen, die Fledermausguano fressen. Was das mit Tabak und der Gefahr einer Pandemie zu tun hat, darüber sprechen wir in unserer neuen Folge mit @honigsbaum.bsky.social, der daraus ein Ausbruchs-Szenario entwickelt hat

‘Ebola is believed to have a zoonotic origin (probably fruit bats). But colonial extraction and chronic dispossession in recently independent nations were also among the causes.’ @ednabonhomme.bsky.social on Uganda’s successful outbreak management, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...

With so much misery in the world it sometimes feels as if we’re drowning in tears. But what if tears could go viral? Would the weeping prove cathartic or would it only deepen our distress? Read my pandemic story inspired by true events. substack.com/profile/4612...

It’s the “moronic inferno” (Amis, 1986), aka the “cabinet of horrors”

Part 2 of my interview published today: My take on what China did early in the COVID pandemic to reduce the risk of further spillovers, on the WHO study on the origins of COVID, on “proximal origins paper” & on how politics got in the way. www.wsws.org/en/articles/...

John Stewart in return to form in Jake Tapper take down. #TapthatBook

The UK COVID Inquiry should be required viewing for anyone working in public health. Hopefully people will find my appearance useful youtu.be/kXntLNz_xXs?... but Iain Buchan on Liverpool's experience yesterday was excellent and Sir Paul Nurse, today, is amazing

How a dietary shift in #chimpanzees triggered by the global demand for tobacco and cuts to #virus surveillance programmes triggered a deadly outbreak of #Marburg - a #pandemic scenario. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

How a dietary shift in #chimpanzees triggered by the global demand for tobacco and cuts to #virus surveillance programmes triggered a deadly outbreak of #Marburg - a #pandemic scenario. open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

Read an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book on the origins of COVID-19. ⬇️ As probably the only writer in the West, I interviewed George Gao and Zhengli Shi to tell the inside story of what happened when a new virus surfaced in Wuhan. And who saw an opportunity to mislead the masses.

Brilliant article on how uncertainty plays tricks on the brain, fuelling risk-adverse behaviour and making it easier to control financial markets and deflate bubbles.

UPDATES! New screening dates for Christian Frei's documentary movie Blame! The German premiere is in Munich right now. Listed are new screening dates in May (Germany, Poland) June (Italy) & July-Aug (New Zealand), including links to buy tickets online naturehealthglobal.org/update-new-s...

1/New paper shows SARS-CoV-2 emerged from bats in southwest China or northern Laos five to seven years before sparking the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan - mirroring the SARS epidemic in 2002. But how precisely did SARS 2 get to Wuhan?… www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

Pleased to see Bill Gates getting off the fence and speaking truth to power. Musk’s DOGE cuts to USAID programs are not merely misguided, they’re criminal, putting the lives of millions of children and women at risk of deadly diseases such as malaria and HIV.

‘Black is white, up is down’. @simonmarksfsn.bsky.social on rattling form as he dissects Trump’s disastrous first 100 days in office. Keep tuned for more dispatches from Pyongyang on the Potomac! Check out this episode of Tom Swarbrick on Global Player

Looking to spice up your #histmed classes? Consider two new books coming out just in time for Fall 2025! Full of pithy and provocative essays, Do Less Harm (ed. me & @drkyliesmith.bsky.social) and The Nursing Clio Reader (@nursingclio.bsky.social) offer new perspectives to meet the moment. 1/2

A new film about the origins of Covid-19 tells how rightwing conspiracy theorists pushed the lab-leak theory, diverting attention from the more likely source of the pandemic: bats residing in caves in southern China and Thailand. observer.co.uk/culture/arti...

Good news for bird flu. Bad news for you and me. When will this idiocy end? www.reuters.com/business/hea...