Words have consequences

In the early 1930s the SA was roughing people up, creating chaos in neighborhoods, seeking to terrorize with the occasional killing. By the late 1930s it had been supplanted by the SS, which was much better trained.

🎯 Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social on Blue Sky ... On the right side of history finally.

I'm not anonymous, but if lapsing appropriations for Labor/HHS (which includes SSA and, uh, railroad retirement administration) is what it takes to stop executing citizens in the streets, it's worth it.

✨Africa CDC shuts down RFK's attempt to conduct a Tuskegee-like vaccine trial on children in Guinea-Bissau. The study exploited “the scarcity of a proven beneficial vaccine in a context where that vaccine is needed,” said Boghuma Titanji. @melodyschreiber.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Where has public health leadership succeeded in 2025? In one of the most challenging areas of public health work: prevention. Take a look at how failure and success contrast between what we've done in the US and what African leadership has done since 2020. maciekboni.substack.com/p/is-public-...

“I have a very particular set of skills. . . skills that do not include epidemiology.”

I wrote in @statnews.com about the emotional toll anti-vaccine rhetoric is taking on clinicians — and how it’s straining our relationships with patients. This isn’t abstract; it’s happening every day in exam rooms across the country. 🔗 www.statnews.com/2025/12/10/a... #Vaccines #PublicHealth

Again, health and medicine getting frozen out of these conversations. This is the lowest it's gotten, but it can definitely get worse. Every word in this piece. www.statnews.com/2025/12/10/a...

My latest for @thenation.com: "Public Health Needs a New Motto: No Apologies, No Surrender" It’s time we stopped flinching at the assaults of the far right—and started fighting back. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Some important video segments from the esteemed Prof Gilbert Kokwaro and Prof Nick White -- on the importance of confronting and preparing for the current wave of artemisinin resistance. open.substack.com/pub/protectt...

Spot on, Mr. Rather. 🎯 💯

I think the *speed* at which RFK Jr and his Great Barrington Declaration/anti-vaxx/Brownstone wrecking crew have been dismantling the US public health system has been really astonishing

Artemisinin resistance is spreading in Africa. The stories. The urgency. The solutions. The progress. Will all be posted here. Please subscribe (it's free). open.substack.com/pub/protectt...

Today's ACIP- no career CDC scientists presented on vaccine safety, data/materials not posted in advance, vote delayed again despite several months to prepare. My thoughts tonight on @ms.now including what this means for the health of children

New from me: I talked to CDC staffers about the new vaccines and autism page. They said things like: “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” “I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here.”

"This is how the wellness influencer industry works,” Hotez said. “It’s not enough to push the snake oil. You have to discredit mainstream biomedical science and portray scientists as public enemies or cartoon villains, and that's what Kennedy’s seeking to do.”

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s also a reminder that since then we saw, and continue to see, large amounts of preventable suffering and death pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

This, from @maciekboni.bsky.social, is a sobering reminder of just how bad things were five years ago. But it’s also five years since we got the trial results which signposted a way out of the nightmare. Warp speed was a huge success and we should not forget maciekboni.substack.com/p/covids-lea...

We don’t talk enough about how Operation Warp Speed saved many lives in spite of Trump, nor how many people died because of his failure of leadership. Great piece from my great colleague @maciekboni.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/maciekbo...

What were you doing 5 years ago today ? I think a lot of us forgot the news that was delivered and the failures that followed. Important reminder here: maciekboni.substack.com/p/covids-lea... Please click subscribe. It's free.

A bit belated, but happy to have our preprint, “An Ecological Theory of Democracy,” out. We consider political party competition in light of classic ecological theory. Led by a talented former undergrad, Riley Fotis, in collaboration with Brendan O’Leary (neither on bluesky). A 🧵 1/

tinyurl.com/yc5nhcv4 In one of the most irresponsible presidential press conferences in history, Donald Trump declares that Tylenol during pregnancy cause autism. Again, apparently, mothers are to blame.

The point is that many can live quite normally under the thumb of authoritarianism. Yes: many suffer and suffer now but large swaths of the American public chooses to be clueless and it’s not difficult. This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. www.vox.com/the-big-idea...

Monarez: "Kennedy demanded 2 things of me that were were inconsistent w/ my oath of office. He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation regardless of the scientific evidence. He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause"

Discussions grounded in science and clear that pandemic response involves hard choices, are a vital part of how we *should* respond to Covid. Even if they are thin on the ground right now

Thanks to Braver Angels & David Zweig for engaging in this debate on the primary effects of the first year of the pandemic (540,000 deaths), the secondary effects (one year of learning loss for kids, unemployment, isolation), and things that we did right and wrong 1/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Gg...

Pushing back works. Stand strong, Chicago.

Please join us in Sunny Philadelphia, Friday evening Sep 5, for a chat about what went wrong and right during the COVID pandemic response. Hosted by Temple University. Reserve a spot on the Braver Angels website here: www.eventbrite.com/e/a-covid-pa...

Let's please keep the remaining staff at NIH, NSF, etc in our thoughts even as you lose sleep over your own lab and scientific career. They are enduring pure chaos to try to hold the fort. See snapshot from wapo.st/4feKKuu (gift 🔗) saying they are "barely holding it together"

Rewording my earlier post. RFK Jr will be testifying before Congress. I am interested in what experts and others think would be the best way to leverage this time and opportunity for the public good. If you were behind the dais for this hearing, what would you do? What do you want to see asked?

Hello @episky.bsky.social -- tenth episode of "Why Should I Trust You?" , a podcast on the trust we lost in public health and some routes on how to get it back. Episode 10: censorship. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Today, a collaborative grant we submitted to the National Institutes of Health won't be reviewed. No one's will. Grant reviews have been halted for study section after study section. Yes, I am mad. But, folks outside science should be even madder. a 🧵

The taxpayers, through Federal NIH funding, have literally invested tens of millions of dollars in my education & career. This is a privledge, & I have always endevored to give my best back to the taxpayers who put me here I am just one of many thousands of scientists who can tell the same story

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

So many important points on public health communication in this episode. Thanks @pauloffit.bsky.social [Why Should I Trust You?] The Trump and (Likely) RFK Jr. Era is Here. And Paul Offit Won't Back Down. #whyShouldITrustYou podcastaddict.com/why-should-i... via @PodcastAddict

Hi @episky.bsky.social, public health and public policy friends. 2025 will be full or surprises, please listen to this new podcast (episode 1) "Why Should I Trust You" as we are all going to need to communicate clearly and empathetically for the next 4 years. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

The preliminary sequence from the H5N1 human case in British Columbia has been posted and it is not good news. The virus potentially has a quasispecies at HA residue 226 (H3 numbering). This is bad news because we know that mutations at residue 226 can increase binding to human receptors. 1/

New paper on #influenza #vaccination in tropical areas! Published in PNAS Nexus. #episky doi.org/10.1093/pnas... Without strong flu seasonality in much of the tropics, timing annual vaccination campaigns is challenging. It becomes more important to ask WHO to vaccinate instead of WHEN. 1/4

Hi @epidemiology.bsky.social we are #hiring - there is a critical need 4 new global health planning in #malaria specifically to push back the artemisinin resistance identified in East/Central Africa in 2020 #jobs #postdocposition plz contact if interested in job/postdoc/PhD in this area👉 mol.ax/opp/

Hi @epidemiology.bsky.social we have just wrapped up the 4th year of COVID transmission in the US: Mar 1 2023 to Feb 29 2024. CDC recorded 67.5K deaths during this period. Death counts for previous years were 539K (year 1, almost all pre-vax), 443K (year 2, 3 variant waves), & 137K (year 3) 1/

Looking back at a decade of tech innovations 2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse! 2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse! 2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse! 2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!

"We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity" Keep the words of these scientists in your mind when you hear feeble, jelly-like centrists arguing that climate policy that works fast is "too radical"

It's so frustrating that pro- science groups have to beg and beg for scraps of funding, while antivax groups are scoring millions from supposedly reputable charities.

Crystal clear explanation of the Oct 4 Assembly Theory paper. Thanks so much Carl.

Hi @epidemiology.bsky.social 3.5 years after covid started spreading in the US, we just went through a 6-month period (Mar 1 - Sep 1, 2023) with the lowest mortality to date: 24,600 COVID deaths were reported during this time, although hospital admissions have been trending upward since July.  1/

Hello #episky #medsky #epitwitter @epidemiology.bsky.social .. my first foray into blue sky science. This one is about combination therapy, and how it is supposed to prevent drug-resistance evolution. And how triple therapy should, in principle, be more effective at this than double therapy. 1/