Many vaccines confer surprising knock-on, or indirect, health benefits when they have been put into widespread use. www.statnews.com/2026/03/19/v...

Regularly scheduled reminder that data are *always* political

'25 survey data from @kff.org finds that immigrant parents are facing increased challenges in the current environment. Among other findings, 4 in 10 report problems paying for health care and 3 in 10 say their child skipped or postponed care www.kff.org/immigrant-he...

“RFK Jr’s ACIP squad got smacked down by a judge, Thought their anti-vaccine work was just an illegal kludge, The government will appeal, Try to seal their evil deal, I hope the appeals court stands strong and doesn’t budge.” Limerick Project Day 420

We need to bring this to Pittsburgh

FACAround and find out

Ok folks: have at it

Court granted preliminary injunction in AAP v. Kennedy, though ACIP can still meet Wednesday. Will share more when I have the decision.

Spent this weekend in WV (finally!) dusting off a long overdue collab with my favorite historian re: archival records of disease outbreaks around Bukhara right before the 1889 “Russian flu” pandemic 🦠

Have *you* asked Claude about Star Wars droids?

Man, if farming labor share ends up nonmonotonic that would be an interesting trajectory for humanity.

amichai.

Hey who said LLMs can't replace grad student RAs

sigh

Commentary: Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

Measles is costing the U.S. millions of dollars. The true losses can't be counted. www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-...

Stanley Plotkin had a major hand in the development of a number of vaccines in use today; he designed the rubella vaccine. He remembers the world before widespread use of vaccines & knows what's coming as vaccine policy is rewritten & vaccine confidence is eroded. www.statnews.com/2026/03/02/s...

You can't erase history. Bravo James Millward wapo.st/4kT0GVX

ICE abducted a father of a six-year-old who is undergoing cancer treatment in a suburb outside Pittsburgh on Sunday and took him to a detention center in West Virginia. The cruelty is boundless.

Rare, dangerous side effects of some COVID-19 vaccines explained www.science.org/content/arti...

EXCLUSIVE: In my latest @rollingstone.com investigation, new documents/20+ sources reveal a controversial vaccine study's unusual path to CDC approval, and irregularities in the only ethics review done, in Guinea-Bissau: rollingstone.com/politics/pol... /1 🧵👇

What this KFF chart shows: over one million U.S. citizen kids may lose their Medicaid & CHIP health coverage, due to the over-reaching, harsh policies the Admin is seeking alongside ICE’s overbroad, chaotic dragnet that has harmed people with & without lawful immigration status.

Oh good so no need to worry about nosocomial transmission then 🫠

Today, “U.S. Representative Summer Lee, Democrat of Pittsburgh, is introducing a resolution to award Freedom House with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor a person or institution can receive from Congress. The resolution is being co-sponsored by Representative Mike Kelly”

Next week's ACIP meeting appears to have been officially postponed

Looking ahead, an effort by Ben Lopman and colleagues at Emory to explore health and economic costs of scenarios for declines in childhood vaccination rates. vaximpactmap.org

If you want to learn what SSPE is like, there are real stories from real people about the devastation measles can wreak even years later

Which infectious disease modelers explicitly account for variation in detection rates as a function of barriers to accessing care (e.g., interaction effects)? Because standard vaccine modeling methods & assumptions will vastly underestimate public health impact within the broader US polycrisis.

Doctors say that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases. A nepo baby who barbecues dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says that vaccines make children vulnerable to 5G radiation. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

the actions which would prevent bad outcomes are necessarily political and every single time someone goes viral with a claim that LLMs are stochastic parrots and the industry will vanish into the sea all by itself the odds of successfully finding a good outcome are made slimmer

Major news outlets: Please consider prominently reporting what this all-star team of researchers has found. www.nber.org/papers/w34791

"But less noticed in the brouhaha over rates: CMS also proposed restricting plans from conducting what are called “chart reviews” of their customers." kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Doctors nationwide are seeing patients avoid care amid ICE crackdowns, sometimes with dire consequences. Health providers are now employing pandemic-era tactics to keep care accessible. How immigration policy is changing American health care: www.statnews.com/2026/02/03/i...

Powerful piece in @nejm.org from physicians in Minnesota "When our patients go without medical care, the harm is not theoretical. It is measurable. Fear doesn’t just keep people away from clinics and EDs, it pushes patients into crisis." www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

I remember viewing Watchmen & thinking wow this is so UNREALISTIC

NEW: An audit of routinely updated CDC public databases found that 46% of these databases stopped publishing updates in 2025. The authors warn that these health data gaps could impact public health guidance and trust. Read now: https://bit.ly/4qN25j4

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

The Last Toast by Anna Akhmatova www.divasofverse.com/2016/12/the-...

The most important public health story right now in America is that the Trump administration is executing people in the streets, it is kidnapping people of all ages, including 2-year-olds, it is torturing them, & it is putting them in concentration camps where many have been killed or “disappeared”

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...

I just want to point out that Alex Pretti became a registered nurse in early 2021 -- the height of death from Covid. And he chose the ICU, the sickest patients, in Veterans Affairs.

Sayre: "My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones in Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. What I've seen here is what I've seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people."

The study that started it all. Published after 5 years of re-analysis, revision, & rejection pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37190885/

Concentration camps are the biggest story in American public health right now

The CDC was truly a marvel – some of the brightest minds in our country, working tirelessly to keep our families & communities safe, so effectively that they were a global resource for recommendations & support in emergencies, all for a couple bucks of our taxes every year.

excuse me wut

An 823-word health insurance plan that forgets pre-existing conditions is like a fire insurance policy that doesn’t mention fire. Bold choice.