Infectious disease epidemiologist here. In fact, naming and shaming in public health doesn’t work. You meet people where they are at, including parents who haven‘t vaccinated their kids. While it may feel good to name call, it’s bad policy all around.
Irony rolls its eyes as it rolls over in its grave.
From your lips to God‘s ears!
Make sure to follow, like, subscribe & comment, all the stuff that academics usually do not like to do but then how do you think other people will get to see good content?
Also, go march tomorrow with @cdelawalla.bsky.social
www.protagonist-science.com/p/stickly-li...
I think this conversation with @lewan.bsky.social has been incredibly interesting, insightful and intelligent, which is what most content out there is not.
So you can get the full conversation here, either on YouTube or your favorite RSS podcatcher
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHz3...
Vinay Prasad has been an a noxious influence on public health and drug regulation. Good riddance. UCSF should not take him back. He should wander in the wilderness forever. www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/h...
Would have been cool to see comparisons to the SARS2-related spillovers in pangolins, and to the SARS-CoV-2 spillovers to white tailed deer!
In each case we know that there were spillovers, and testing each would show how sensitive these methods are to known spillovers of different sizes
"Business as usual" for SARS-CoV-2, means that it looks like any other virus that jumped from a reservoir, spent a short amount of time in an intermediate host, and then jumped into humans, causing a pandemic immediately after.
1️⃣ No signs of passage
2️⃣ No signs of gain-of-function
3️⃣ It's zoonotic
There's a common misconception that zoonotic viruses require significant adaptation to jump from animals to cause human epidemics.
Not so 👇.
Further, we see clear signs of 1977 flu experiencing cell passage, prior to epidemic.
SARS-CoV-2? Business as usual.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
And everyone in this chain of command is responsible. It is horrific.
This is a chilling crime. A shame on our country. The Iranian ship was unarmed. The US knew this. The sailors were murdered by our navy, and the survivors were left to die at sea.
newrepublic.com/post/207429/...
Tomorrow!
Trump has now explicitly affirmed the right to choose or veto leaders in Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Honduras and Argentina, and implicitly Brazil and various European countries.
This is a direct violation of sovereignty and self-determination, which are bedrock foundations of any international order.
For now he has tried to establish indirect control over sovereign states using threats and bribery (Argentina and Iraq), coercion (Brazil), hectoring (Europe) and the use of force (Venezuela and Iran).
And in some ways Trump is simply saying the quiet part out loud about US forpol.
But in other very important ways, Trump represents a qualitative break in US forpol, similar to GWB and the neocon crusade but stripped of their legitimizing rhetoric of democracy promotion.
That matters, because it removes even the socializing mask that has made US power palatable to other states.
The legitimacy that came of a US commitment to self-restraint, however hypocritical it was at times, was based on a calculation not just of power differentials but of time horizons.
By sacrificing maximal gains in the present, the US was able to reassure partners so its power lasts into the future.
Of course, that's an "industrial economy" mindset, where capital investment is calculated over a lengthy timeframe to ensure future competitiveness.
Trump II's logic is that of a post-industrial "financialized economy" mindset of immediate gains and sweating the assets.
It will work more or less in the short term. But eventually indirect means and the use of standoff force will no longer be enough to compel concessions, let alone cooperation.
At that point, the US will be forced to escalate to direct imperial control, or risk becoming a paper tiger.
In the meantime, with the reassurance of US self-restraint gone, other states will in all likelihood begin seeking to counterbalance US power, in ways that have not meaningfully happened despite IR theory's expectations for a unipolar order.
Hitch's latest statement (translated from the Siberian): "Me glad, Noem the puppy-killer is fired. Don't let doggie door hit you on way out!"
Casey Means still doesn’t have the votes. Keep the letters coming.
If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
It’s a form of cargo cult science. people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/ca...
"They put the number of cases connected to Sturgis in the range of 115,000-260,000, or 10 to 20% of all cases in the US at the time. This was just one month after the rally occurred & it was still spreading."
So @troytassier.bsky.social has written up the results from my @yalesph.bsky.social colleague @rafalpx.bsky.social's brand new paper in PLoS Comp Bio. Read it. With a guest appearance by #KristiNoem. troytassier.substack.com/p/screw-covi...
"Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis!" The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, held in August 2020, was the epitome of the individual choice mindset. Of course it spread cases outward and caused infections, illness, and death. A new research paper allows us to watch the Sturgis Covid wave spread across the US.
👇A comment on our recently published work in @plos.org Computational Biology!
So far the war in Iran has cost an estimated $5.5 billion.
That's roughly $1 billion per day.
$41,666,667 per hour.
$11,574 per second.
People do not want this.
They want a living wage. They want healthcare. They want to be able to afford a home. They want their basic needs met.
In a functional country based on law and order, Sheehy would be arrested for battery
The video shows a US military veteran protesting the Iran War and being violently assaulted by Sen Sheehy, who broke his arm in several places. Sheehy is a violent thug, little more. bsky.app/profile/juan...
