Virologist. Evolutionary biologist.
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Vinay Prasad had YouTube censor Jonathan Howard’s channel because he didn’t like how it made him look. A petty act by a vindictive, unqualified hack. And more evidence that these frEe sPeEcH warriors have always been petty censors out to silence criticism that they just can’t cope with.
Its easy to make fun of Bessent, but this was actually a fascinating set of statements today from him on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Can't imagine it was vetted by West Wing...
Adios, Graham Greene. Not just a great actor, but a ballsy actor who took risks and expanded the palate of roles for Native American performers. Sure, Dances With Wolves, but, man, check him out as a total flirt in Transamerica or as a UFO-obsessed loner on Reservation Dogs. Such masterful presence.
Here is my look at this weekend: www.lawdork.com/p/this-weeke...
It's Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and I’m asking our community of travelers to help me spread the word: the earlier prostate cancer is found, the better your chances are of beating it. Visit cancer.org/getscreened to learn more from @acscan.bsky.social & find a screening location near you.
Aside from how Obama is remembered, it's striking that Obamacare is basically the last serious presidential legislative agenda that wasn't just trying to contort an annual budget bill to fit in everything you can crowbar into it.
Ever since we gave him the vaccine my dog has been hyper focused on the same toy.
Ever since we gave him the vaccine my dog has been non-verbal
This 🧵 is long so please bear with me. It is compiles evidence in a historical timeline on how effective #COVIDVaccines are. When a pandemic ends we quickly and easily forget the tools that got us out of it. So here is my labour day gift to you prompted by this headline.
Fantastic, doctor. So well documented and cited. Really appreciate you putting this together.
🧪 And House appropriators say: no cuts to NIH budget! House subcommittee version just came out (link below). Holds NIH flat at $48 billion. To be clear: this is far from over. But a good sign that science still matters across both sides of aisle. YOUR VOICE MATTERS!!
Bessent on sanctions against Russia: "All options are on the table, and I think we’ll be examining them very closely this week." We keep hearing about “this week,” “two weeks,” or “50 days,” but as one deadline expires after another, nothing ever happens.
Well said, sir. That's the whole rub. Never waits to be invited in.
That’s the thing about Silver. I don’t go to Las Vegas and tell him what to lay on black. But he comes to my place of business and pretends to tell me.
a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin
These vaccines are... good?
Ed, too often we're in that Andor episode where he gets stuck with those idiots shooting at each other. Gotta ride with the resistance we got. Sigh.
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
Yep a good-faith critique of learning loss would lead to proposals for a massive, New Deal-scale investment in public education. The people pushing the narrative are doing precisely the opposite.
Compare the murky, indeterminate data on school closures to the stark, decisive findings on vaccine hesitancy. Republican policies and rhetoric killed hundreds of thousands of people! We don’t need to bolster this fake narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
The long term data on hepatitis B vaccination shows it reduces the incidence of liver cancer by 84% and death from liver disease by 70%. This comes from a large cluster RCT in which entire towns were randomly selected to give the hepatitis B vaccine to all newborns.
If a few health professionals say something you don't like, all said it and we should destroy the CDC. If a few students say something you don't like, all higher ed said it and we should end academic freedom. If the president and his party does something, that's one guy spouting off, let it go.
Every conservative principle that could have merit is already represented in the mainstream Democratic Party, not to mention fully abandoned by conservatives themselves. What's left? Bigotry, sadism, tantrums over corporate logos. This is what you're trying to find common ground with
Great analysis of something often forgotten about 'antibiotics': microbes have been at chemical war with one another for all time before our rougly one century clinical purturbation.
What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
One thing I often come back to on COVID 'closures' is that government action was usually **reactive** to the public. Not institutions curtailing freedom of movement -- but a tourniquet on economic demand collapse. Even when lockdowns didn't happen , the public changed behavior in line with a mean.
can an expert explain? yeah man, you made a fake picture and now you’re doing physiognomy on it
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 1/2
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filling an IV bag from a murky puddle near Trump National's sixth tee. "The president needs parameciums," he tells the assembled media. "It's the only treatment proven to work in real testing." His golf cart is piled high with dozens of dead birds.
You guys see where this is going? Right?
If you’ve ever compared unvaccinated kids to vaccinated kids, you’ve seen the former are more likely to die.
Enormous impoundment-related changes in Trump/Vought's Circular A-11 update from Friday, which is OMB's guidance to agencies They: -removed the definition of impoundment -said GAO's impoundment determinations don't matter -claimed pocket rescission authority -claimed profound deferral authority 🧵
(Fred Schneider voice) i wanna fuck you like an ANIMAL
1/ It’s been a chaotic week at the CDC. The director was fired less than a month into her tenure, four senior leaders resigned in protest, & the agency is still reeling from a shooting at its Atlanta HQ. on @cbsnews.com
I believe that 99% of what RFK Jr. does is motivated by: 1. Protecting his ego and vanity. He must convince people vaccines are bad b/c he can’t be wrong. Endless photos of himself exercising b/c vanity. 2. Creating conditions for his law firm to increase profits from suing various companies.
Courts still matter.
It makes me emotional to see Judge Sooknanan showing that she values each individual child’s life at a moment when this administration is doing exactly the opposite
I've never seen such a disconnect between Dem elected/staff/consultants and actual Dem voters. The latter understand what's going on. The former are awash in right-wing brainrot, hence @schatz.bsky.social blaming COVID mitigation and BLM marches for the GOP's wanton destruction of public health.
![@EsotericCD It was in this moment that many of us hanging on to a thin sliver of trust in our institutions irrevocably lost faith in them. One of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory - worse than the effect of the Iraq War in many ways. RFK Jr is a direct result of this. Quote Steve Guest @SteveGuest · Aug 31 Politico 5 years ago: [screenshot of article falsely claiming public health officials lied about COVID measures then abandoned them for BLM protests] Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ddvus7otnqtlh7fdooxm6qat/bafkreihsypwydo5rcis7mc54cwct6h33l5co477nvh7g7hs7na2fz4jl3q@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Or the "twitter is dying because people are mean to me" Senate confirmation hearings.
“The men and women who have joined C.D.C. across generations have done so not for prestige or power, but because they believe deeply in the call to service. They deserve an H.H.S. secretary who stands up for health, supports science and has their back. So, too, does our country.”
It’s really crystallized that sensation of being right while hoping to be wrong and then getting the completely hollow victory that your and your brilliant colleagues’ unheeded warnings were reified. Isn’t the world sick of panic/neglect cycles? I am.
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
Good decision. I've always found the evidence for the idea that we need chickenpox to circulate to boost immunity to shingles quite weak. (And in reality, what's happened in UK is that people who can afford the vaccine get it anyway.)
My quote of the day Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get. William Foege
This should be the lead story in all major national news outlets. Public health people prefer to stay out of the limelight unless there is no other choice. I can’t overstate how bad things have to be for 9 former CDC directors to band together and pen an op-ed in the NYT warning the entire country.
Every single thing, EVERY SINGLE THING, that RFK has done was predictable and predicted. He is doing what every other fascist eugenicist has done before him. The disability community has been warning about this for YEARS. It is not in any way shape or form mysterious and unknowable.
"We have a message for the rest of the nation as well: This is a time to rally to protect the health of every American." Nine former CDC Directors identify the crisis (Bobby) and make a plea. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
JDs favorite neo-nazi account.
Fifty-one of the 85 Federalist papers were written by a guy born in Nevis.
Many more to you in this sacred space, Jonathan!
this should become a thing, putting up signs like this for every arrest & disappearance in public spaces. it would likely break into lower info, less politically engaged demos and local social media groups
Never change
If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.
Joined my former boss @drtomfrieden.bsky.social and @mkraju.bsky.social on @cnn.com today to discuss recent CDC changes youtube.com/watch?v=3zKG...
You can't have a slur against AI, but you can against the people who believe in AI personhood, and that one is "botlickers"
Federal agents in DC have been starting dangerous car cases for small stuff like tinted windows. The chases violate DC police policy. Out of 10 cases, six ended in a crash. One car had a minor in back. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...
ABC News is still calling RFK Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” The dude was one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists for decades. There’s video of him in 2023 saying that there’s no vaccine which is safe and effective. You can call him an anti-vaccine activist!
wow
Every part of the inherent character of American voters that brought us to this moment - fickle, pessimistic, anemic to change, throw the bums out - is the thing that will just as quickly reduce their power. The challenge will be using Congressional power to fix constitutional structural issues.
Judge: I got a call at 2:36 a.m. because the govt chose this time on a holiday weekend to execute this plan. I have been up since then. I haven't been able to reach anyone from govt until this morning at 9:30 a.m. So absent this intervention, all children would already have been sent to Guatemala!
Sooknanan then says that she had an opportunity during the break to read some of the declarations filed by the named plaintiffs. She wants to read from them because they underscore the conflicting information she's received from the government about the children they want to remove.
LA very much almost 'burned down' in January from terrible wildfires -- and that asshole withheld funds to the state of California to help people. I hate these people.
We’ve devolved from a government of laws and rules to a vibe government, where the president just kind of gets to tell everyone what to do because he’s the president and everyone knows you gotta listen to the president
BREAKING: A federal judge has *blocked* the Trump administration from abruptly deporting 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children — perhaps within a matter of hours — granting an emergency restraining order after advocates called the plan illegal + dangerous. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
“The grim reality is that the effects of this mass exodus are likely to reverberate in every corner of our nation's public health infrastructure and across every specialty in medicine. The evisceration of the CDC is a disaster for all of us.”
"Some CDC employees are bracing for what they & many medical experts say could be a death knell for the credibility of public health in America: A declaration from Kennedy that vaccines can cause autism" This is like the NASA chief declaring the moon is really made of Swiss cheese wapo.st/4myP0HW
Pritzker: "We don't want troops on the streets of American cities. That's un-American and frankly the president ought to know better. This one doesn't seem to. He hasn't read any books. He doesn't seem to understand the Constitution or the laws."
@citizencohn.bsky.social shares some of my story and the work that I have done on public health with thousands of scientists and implementers. We ended outbreak after outbreak TOGETHER. Many of those outbreaks occurred because of RFK Jr’s rhetoric. www.thebulwark.com/p/kennedy-rf...
The classical fascist regimes were not invulnerable, even after seizing the reins of power: Mussolini's primiership almost collapsed during a crisis where the criminality of his movement became apparent; it was a lack of political initiative and craven opportunism that allowed him to continue on
GORKA: Instead of blaming an inanimate object, which is the weapon, how about addressing the human being instead? KEILAR: DHS cut funding in July to the Minnesota Dept of Safety and the Hennepin Country Sheriff's Office in July that is the kind of funding used to assess mass violence threats
The thing about a lot of these never Trump Republicans is that, unlike a lot of institutionalist Dems who think the fever will break and we can all return to comity or whatever, these guys saw the rot up close and know the only appropriate response is to tear them out of government root and branch.
Congestion pricing is actually the perfect example here. Trump declared that “congestion pricing is dead” (and that he is the king) Hochul and the MTA told him to fuck off, and now, more than 6 months later, congestion pricing is still alive and working exactly as planned
REP. BUDDY CARTER: What eroded confidence in the CDC was the covid vaccine BEDINGFIELD: Who was president in 2020?
every day i see hundreds of comments of people spinning elaborate scenarios to explain how trump can control everything and all opposition is futile. a) i think a lot of you need to log off and stop following professional doomsayers. b) i think a lot of you are cowards
not just that he has no constitutional authority, there isn't even any particular legal or institutional mechanism by which the president can make anyone treat this as anything other than a weird advisory opinion.
You know why they say - where there’s a will, there’s a Wayans
Fantastic interview/profile of @drdemetre.bsky.social by @citizencohn.bsky.social at The Bulwark. Demetre is the Triple Threat of public health. His loss (with Deb and Dan) is a wakeup call that we need radical action to right this ship. Bobby needs to go. www.thebulwark.com/p/kennedy-rf...
This “explicit” is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. It’s not ambiguous.
Same thing the President said over a decade ago
I really hope this becomes the black eye it deserves to be www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Eugenics 🤝❤️ Fascism
We have a decades of scholarship on how pro-democracy forces win in competitive authoritarian systems: they form a united opposition that brings together people with otherwise profound political disagreements.
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
It’s so weird that people latched onto a bunch of mostly bullshit justifications for disliking a technology that has immediate obvious negative societal externalities. It’s made it way harder to teach writing but people scream about imaginary lakes evaporating.
I can
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding — and indicative of a culture where they’ve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
Lorenz is ironically a very good example of the thesis that upsets her so much: social media is very bad for many people.
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
The Oklahoma Teacher Qualification Test from PragerU is finally up on their website (but you have to at least provide them fake contact info first): "Educators who pass the test will receive an official PragerU Teacher Certificate..." www.prageru.com/teacher-qual...
I sincerely believe we would understand him better were his surname Brown or Jackson. The Kennedy moniker still confers prestige (gag). But he is a basic male disordered-eating eugenics-pipeline health influencer promoted beyond all his abilities or sense.
Begging for a political coalition that will *get caught trying.*
Started/going
Need people to understand that literally the only lever here is public opinion
I got to talk with @lataco.bsky.social's @eltragon.bsky.social about his tireless documentation of immigration raids in LA, and how his knowledge of the city's street food scene makes him a better immigration reporter
Exclusive: The Justice Department gave some senior career attorneys a choice: They could either quit or go to a new Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group. Six months later, all of those attorneys have left DOJ. “The assignment was a sham,” one said.
NEW from me: Trump and RFK Jr. say they want to find the cause of the " #Autism Epidemic." But one child psychiatrist at Columbia University told me that parents are scared of Kennedy creating a database and don't want their kids to receive a diagnosis. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
The devastating flu epidemic of 1918 was particularly dangerous for young adults, for people in their prime, who died by the millions. But RFK Jr. is too stupid to know that. Link below.
Tell your own Senators and Representatives to stand up. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...
