Dr. Peter Hotez: RFK Jr.'s take on autism is 'increasingly untethered to reality'… www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outl...

The acting CDC Director has no knowledge, training or experience in science/public health. Trump has no knowledge, training or experience in science/public health. Both are calling to make the MMR vaccine into 3 separate shots, which makes absolutely no scientific or public health sense.

Decades of research have found that acetaminophen is safe for children when administered as recommended. Misleading claims link the medicine to autism. These false claims send a dangerous message to parents and does a disservice to autistic individuals. www.aap.org/en/news-room...

Really cool, conceptually simple approach here: cross-referencing grant proposal scores with literature citations and explicit acknowledgments in drug patents to identify patents linked to projects that wouldn't have been funded given a smaller budget

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history. "The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

This ought to be engraved somewhere.

This is the core of the wellness industry’s and RFK’s philosophy on illness generally. If health is fully within individual control, then the responsibility for disease or disability is our own, so why should the government help?

Ah yes. The true cause of autism, “liquid”.

Sure, yeah, quiet part loud. Next let’s make RFK Jr the Secretary of Sickness.

Sen. Bill Cassidy: "Do you agree with me that President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed?" RFK: "Absolutely." Sen. Bill Cassidy: "But you just told Sen. Bennet that the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid?"

I miss the old brand #CDC

Kennedy today in cabinet meeting: "We’re finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism, and we’re going to be able to address those in September." We already know he's employed grifters to implicate vaccines. Get them while you can.

this pretty much sums it up www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

"we reviewed the science" lie.

You’ve got to be KIDDING me! mRNA vaccines have prevented millions of Covid deaths. mRNA vaccines have since shown great promise against HIV and cancer. So of course RFK Jr’s aggressive ignorance demands he destroy their progress.

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Proud to announce the results of the DeWorm3 trial are out in @thelancet.com today! This study was a mammoth. Three study sites, collaborators in seven countries, hundreds of personnel, hundreds of thousands of participants, a million-ish doses of albendazole.

I’m trying to access my SSA account from abroad and have had to jump through so many hoops I stopped a couple of times to make sure I was on the real site and not in the process of having my identity stolen. Now locked out because my phone number changed five years ago. This feels deliberate.

NYT: "Federal guidelines no longer recommend flu vaccines containing a preservative, used in a small % of vaccines, that has been falsely linked to autism." I'm appalled by what HHS has become in just a few months. It can't be trusted. Saying so breaks my heart. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/h...

Well, that’s horrifying. Imagine being on hold for hours on the worst day of your life and never getting through to anyone who can help.

I saw this last week and I felt extremely emotional. 10 years. That's how long this took and it should not have taken this long. www.nrdc.org/press-releas... - I thought also of all of the activists including Little Miss Flint who have CONTINUED to fight for all of these years.

BREAKING: 1 in 4 nursing homes say they will be forced to close if Republicans pass Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. No grandma should be kicked out of her nursing home so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy another Hawaiian island.

Some good news. Tentatively. HIV protection with just two shots a year: FDA approves Gilead drug www.statnews.com/2025/06/18/f... via @statnews.com

Paulo Coelho, at a book signing. He complimented my Portuguese.

I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life in academia and I love what I do. If anything ends up driving me out it will be the AI craze.

So then Elon goes "Kill the Bill!" and Trump goes "Elon has TDS!" so Elon goes "I'm the reason Trump won!" so Trump goes "we waste billions on Elon!" so Elon goes "Epstein!" and a corpulent flunkie goes "Deport Elon!" and Elon goes "Impeach!" And THAT'S why women are too emotional to be President.

Oh. And there is no cure or even any specific (or good) treatment for measles, and the complications from infection have quite high rates of permanent disability and death.

The journalists don’t come out and say it but I will: these fake papers are most likely AI generated in response to a request for references to support statements already written. That’s in addition to the papers that were misinterpreted and incorrectly cited - but real!

THREAD 🧵 Internal State Department records show that months of warnings have become a reality: The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of foreign humanitarian aid has brought about death, violence and unrest. 1/

Drums. Drums in the deep.

RFK Jr talking about the need for doctors to know how to treat measles for those who are unvaccinated. “Only very sick kids should die from measles.” No. They shouldn’t. That was the point of the vaccine. We eradicated the virus so children didn’t die. Sick & disabled kids are not expendable!

"We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors ... " My colleague @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social wrote up her "brief, sometimes confrontational, and even personal" interview with NIH's new director Jay Bhattacharya - and you should read it.... 🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

The measles vaccine is proven to work. It has saved millions of lives. That’s an undeniable fact, no matter what anyone says. The ‘treatments’ repeatedly touted by RFK Jr—budesonide, clarithromycin, and cod liver oil—do not. No matter what anyone like him says. 🧵

For brand new vaccines where no licensed vaccine exists? Fair enough, already standard practice. For updated vaccines or formulations? Clear cut ethics violation. You can’t knowingly leave half your test subjects unprotected. I’m begging the HHS secretary to take one class / read one book.

Has anyone told the administration how many people live in the US? How could anyone take anything they say seriously after a statement like that?

Again, they're trying to take away our vaccines. From the head of the FDA, a gross misrepresentation of the annual process of updating a proven vaccine to target new disease strains. His plan would make it impossible to get seasonal flu and Covid shots, and of course he knows this.

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

I don’t think he knows how long human subjects research takes. Let alone accumulating a body of evidence that allows for definitive causal inference. Now if the plan is to gather his buddies from the antivax speaker circuit and have them write a report, I could see September being reasonable.

Let us check in on Jordan Peterson. How are sobriety and the carnivore diet treating you, sir?

here’s a curse word free version of “look it up” as requested by countless teachers and librarians 🥰😘

"Scientists Hate This One Secret" no they don't. Do you know how much any scientist would love to find "The Cure" for cancer? That's how you win prizes and become a household name forever. Unfortunately cancer is a vast, complicated family of diseases with no single cure, let alone a secret one.

60 Minutes found no criminal record for 75% of the Venezuelan migrants the U.S. sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. https://cbsn.ws/4lC4Vp5

“Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic,” they said. “That means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice and a third, a fourth. Then what happens?”

Jesus Christ, this is horrifying. slate.com/news-and-pol...

This makes me sick. What's happening would be awful even if they were posing as serious bureaucrats making painful but necessary decisions with some gravitas and dignity. But they're killing programs, which will kill people, which will kill US soft power; they know this and they're gleeful about it.

Great article (and thread by the author shared below). This passage in particular is the argument I’ve been making; AI may be a useful tool for experts but it is not itself an expert nor is its use a replacement for expertise. I worry that decision makers fail to appreciate that.

right now i’m worried most AI tools’ biggest contribution is offering a permission structure for devaluing a lot of human work & that its cultural impact is something like giving ppl a private equity mindset - looking at the world & saying ‘what can i strip mine to increase margins/productivity?’

Anyone who claimed to believe RFK Jr’s halfhearted denials of his antivax views during his confirmation hearing should be embarrassed.