Our program is hiring a one-year position in the History of 19th and/or 20th century Western medicine, with capacity for teaching courses related to women/gender and health history and the history of technology and medicine. Please share, and consider applying! Link: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/.

I mean what can you even say anymore?

#Ebola update: As if 7/2, DRC has confirmed 1502 Ebola cases; 473 of those people have died. That's 42 additional cases. 11,360 case contacts have been identified; 82% of them are being followed. insp.cd/sitrep-n049-...

This post blew up like a 4th of July firework! I suppose I should drop a link to the book (now available in paperback!): www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Andrea Shaw, the woman who was just indicted on 2 accounts of murder for the deaths of her toddlers, claims vaccines killed them. She's the key plaintiff for Children's Health Defense in their lawsuit against AAP. And it was clear from the first day that investigators thought she killed her kids.

Today is the 250th anniversary of Boston’s mass inoculation against smallpox on July 3, 1776. The city was effectively closed to commerce from July through September 1776. The mass immunization effort was cheered as evidence of true independence. Here's how I described it in my book:

I…worked on this story for a decade…and…he just…he blurted it out on teevee.

Have a happy & healthy holiday weekend ☀️ Some best practices for swim fun 💦 🛟 Choose areas with lifeguards 🏊🏽‍♀️🏊🏿‍♂️ Swim with a bud 👧🏽 Kids require 💯 adult attention in the water, no phones. Drowning happens quickly & quietly 🎈 Take turns as 💯 attentive “water watchers” in group settings Have fun 😎

Andrea Shaw, the woman who was just indicted on 2 accounts of murder for the deaths of her toddlers, claims vaccines killed them. She's the key plaintiff for Children's Health Defense in their lawsuit against AAP. And it was clear from the first day that investigators thought she killed her kids.

When I explain to peeps how much we do in research labs for how few $$, they simply don’t believe me. I once explained it to a famous person from Pixar, he looked me square in the eye and said “You mean all the cancer, vision, and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be %#ing kidding me!”

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

Can bacterial genomics bring 70 years of epidemiological surveillance back to life? We're hiring a postdoc (2–3 years) to explore the historical evolution of Salmonella Typhi using a unique genomic dataset. More details: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/449895

WSJ: AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report For example, “Meta’s indirect water use was 19 billion gallons in 2024—more than 20x as high as its direct water use” www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-d...

On one hand, it seems astounding that RFK Jr.’s anti-vax organization didn’t vet her before including her in a lawsuit against AAP, in which she claimed that vaccines killed her twins. On the other, it shows the endless capacity of anti-vaxxers to take the word of a random person over facts.

Public health reminder: if you wake up to a bat in your bedroom (not just on your face) that is a presumed exposure to rabies. Contact your doc/health department to get the shots.

🧪 New from @dataforprogress.org: Federal research grants are awarded on scientific merit judged by panels of scientists and outside experts. Trump has moved to change that. Voters don't approve. www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/...

Today we beat Stephen Miller’s lawsuit mill in court! For 3 years I’ve been a defendant in a case filed by America First Legal on behalf of Gateway Pundit & a random antivaxxer we’d never heard of until she sued us. The plaintiffs claimed we “censored” them. It was a lie. They just lost.

Those allegations did tremendous damage — to our reputations, to grant funding for work in our field, to the broader discourse about what "free speech" means and whose speech is protected. The team who did this work at Stanford was dissolved. Our funding took a big hit. But our work at UW continues.

Two years ago, my colleagues and I were sued by Stephen Miller's America First Legal. The Hines v Stamos case — built atop a number of false allegations — was a central element of the "censorship industrial complex" myth. Today, that case was dismissed (by a Trump judge in LA). We won.

Brenner is an antivax "MAHA mom" now leading our pandemic response. We are so fucked.

Brenner is an antivax "MAHA mom" now leading our pandemic response. We are so fucked.

Before I disappear again, here's some great work from folks in my group that I wanted to share, looking at authorship dynamics and power in the One Health / emerging infectious disease / conservation space. We still have a long way to go journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Starts in 30 minutes! If you haven't delved into what's happening with the OMB proposal (especially scientists since that's a big part of my followers, but this affects *everything* with federal grant funding), tune in!

Crowdsourcing attacks on science. The next page of the participatory populist playbook.

If this news of a Marburg outbreak in Uganda is confirmed this will further complicate the ongoing response to the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda. www.statnews.com/2026/06/30/m...

said webinar — if you'd like to hang tomorrow healthjournalism.org/event/white-...

Aaron spoke at @iowacitydarwinday.bsky.social in April and mentioned this upheaval. What a loss to all of us that work like his has been halted, and a loss to so many junior scholars that are in similar positions.

Man this is terrible. Again how do we proceed when this is the reality for many? www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...

Every authoritarian movement in history began by identifying a vulnerable group whose rights were framed as negotiable. How hard you are willing to fight for trans rights is the litmus test for whether or not you understand solidarity. It’s all of us or none of us.

If you didn’t know, former @sciam.bsky.social owner Springer Nature sold us just three days ahead of the tally of the vote to unionize. It resulted in layoffs, including 60% of the union’s organizing committee. We’re out here to fight, to keep doing vital science journalism.

We've hit the 3,000 mark in letters to Congress on the mad power-grab by Russell Vought at OMB to take over all federal grant making with a team of political commissars reporting to him. Let's get to 4,000 letters this week. Share. Share. Share. actionnetwork.org/letters/oppo...

Glad to see this story and coverage of an important paper. www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n... 1/16

Per usual, I'm available for an interview if any news outlets want to talk to a PhD whose expertise is in human genetics and the evolution of sex...and who also happens to be trans I'm tired as hell bc I'm still recovering from being beat up by a transphobe, but I'm still willing to speak up

It's also a good idea to call your reps! Because of the Congressional Review Act, if a majority in Congress gets together and says "we disapprove"...this goes away. www.gao.gov/legal/congre...

And of course you can still comment until July 13. Here's where: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... You might be like "ugh why what does it matter they're gonna to it anyway we're all doomed" and dig further into bedrot. But it matters and here's why:

You may have heard about the OMB rule change that will put politics over federal grants. However bad you think it is? It's probably worse. Thanks to @theverge.com for letting me report this one out. There is still time to comment. bit.ly/4v2X4nQ

GOOD NEWS! A personalized mRNA vaccine, known as mRNA-4157, has shown promise in keeping melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, from returning. FIVE years later, NEARLY 70% of people in the vaccine group are CANCER-FREE. The vaccine also cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by NEARLY 60%.

Just a little taste:

I very much endorse pretending to read my book while lying in a hammock. Thanks, Library of Virginia!

May as Well Get COVID and Flu Shots on the Same Day, Study Says www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

A Guide to Writing Your Federal Comment on the Proposed Changes to OMB 2 CFR Part 200. drruth.substack.com/p/a-guide-to... Deadline is July 13th This could affect you, your family, and your community!

This was always going to happen. MBAs who understand the value and meaning of nothing human were always going to go 💯 behind AI and use it to devastate labor

JOURNALISTS! WE NEED A SIGNAL BOOST ON THIS! I'm not sure how many people realize how dangerous the proposed federal rule on grantmaking is & how it could fundamentally reshape ALL federal funding. Join the @healthjournalism.org webinar WEDNESDAY July 1 at 3pm to find out what it could mean.

*taps microphone* Is this thing on?? I AM LOOKING FOR SCIENCE HISTORIANS. IF THAT IS YOU PLEASE WAVE AT ME OR YELL LOUDLY IN MY DIRECTION! (It's for a wee little side project)

Spent the weekend offline camping and hiking and the highlight was finding this little box turtle gorging itself on a mushroom.

I know the list is endless but I genuinely think trashing the legitimate congressionally chartered org for celebrating the 250th to instead hijack our national assets and taxpayer funds for his personality cult grifter crap should, in and of itself, be fully sufficient to merit removal from office.

I love bringing out this anecdote about Rahm: bsky.app/profile/refr...

I've had a bump in new followers lately, so let me do a mini-introduction to them. I'm a historian of medicine (#histmed) working now on a what's turned out to be a pretty radical reinterpretation of our basic narratives of the Black Death. The bibliography is this: docs.google.com/document/d/1...