Francisco De La Vega

"No stupid rules of engagement"

FDA’s controversial vaccine chief will exit agency next month | CNN The US Food and Drug Administration’s head of vaccines and biologic medicines will leave the agency at the end of April, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Friday.

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...

There
Is
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Incorporating polygenic risk scores and social determinants of health across populations: Considerations and best practices in research Despite increasing focus on the intersection of genetic and social risk factors on health, heterogeneity in how these factors are measured, distributed, and analyzed across populations and datasets co...

🧬 New Review from Cromer et al!
📄 Incorporating polygenic risk scores and social determinants of health across populations: Considerations and best practices in research
#PRS #SDoH

84% of the time, “ChatGPT Health” killed a customer using their paid service as advertised

David Botstein has passed away. A true pioneer in the genetics and biotechnology industry, known methods to map genes. While at Stanford he collaborated with Pat Brown in microarrays, co-founded the Gene Ontology and became the CSO of Calico. He worked again with Pat Brown at Impossible Foods. RIP.

Here is my opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today.

How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account Our national project of elite impunity

After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The reverse of incomplete penetrance for recessive conditions

Their Mutated Genes Were Supposed to Be Harmless “Carriers” of certain genetic diseases, who have just one affected gene, can have symptoms too.

Rare disease piece in @theatlantic.com, how carriers of recessive conditions can have medical problems, making them more than 'carriers'. Gift link below.

www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

But maybe he just doesn’t care about the lives of those that benefited from USAID.

The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania

Also this: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/b...

“Strong longtermists prioritize the well-being of future generations over the well-being of people alive today, reasoning effective altruists will make the biggest impact by solving long-term problems because exponentially more people will live in the future than live now. “

What To Know About Effective Altruism—Championed By Musk, Bankman-Fried And Silicon Valley Giants The movement is associated with huge amounts of charitable giving—and fraud.

The results of the pursuit of a dangerous delusion www.forbes.com/sites/emilyw...

USAID cuts may cause over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, study says Deep funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development and its potential dismantling could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The ...

I regularly post updates on this story because it's an atrocity on an incomprehensible scale but people don't really talk about it
www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Democracy is when voters choose their leaders. Autocracy is when leaders choose their voters.

ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion converting warehouses into detention centers, according to planning documents, more than the annual budgets of 22 states.

So now the US is spending the enormous sum of $38 billion to build concentration camps? ICE is calling them "detention centers" but we know what they really are. I cannot believe my country would do this. Everyone should speak out against it wapo.st/3OfarSk

Opinion | Vinay Prasad’s Vaccine Kill Shot Does the White House know the harm he’s doing to public health?

WSJ editorial board hits FDA: It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad who rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review.
www.wsj.com/opinion/vina...

Happy #DarwinDay! 🎉We celebrate Darwin’s insight into evolution by natural selection—a reminder that science education helps us question, explore, & understand the world around us. Honor Darwin’s curiosity & learn fast genetics facts at Discover Genetics: bit.ly/4rqaDwN

Opinion | Peter Attia, the Epstein Files and the Lie Propping Up Big Wellness

"We should be skeptical of any people who sell themselves as singularly capable of giving health advice on the internet and should always follow the money and connections where they lead."
gift link
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/o...

This is going to be damaging to non-profit scientific societies where meeting profits drive programs that include advocacy of science, education, travel fellowships for students, support for low cost online-access and unprofitable meetings for low income countries, among others.

Attendance plummets at some science meetings. Travel bans. Gov Shutdowns. Funding. www.science.org/content/arti...

Wow- what is that meeting? Most scientific society meetings registrations are still under $1k. AGBT - which has been on waiting list since last year - is around $3k, but includes hotel and most meals.

Newly revealed emails undermine RFK Jr testimony about 2019 Samoa trip ahead of measles outbreak Kennedy later said the purpose of his trip had nothing to do with vaccines. US embassy and UN staff at the time said otherwise, emails show

RFK Jr said during his Senate confirmation hearings that his trip to Samoa in 2019 ahead of a devastating measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines." Documents obtained by @us.theguardian.com and @apnews.com undermine that testimony. Details here, by me and @aliswenson.bsky.social ⬇️

Excited to share my first preprint on federated conditional analysis of rare single variant and aggregate association tests across six genetically-inferred ancestry groups in All of Us and UK Biobank doi.org/10.64898/202...

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

Surprised (but also not that surprised) that the AlphaGenome paper didn't officially cite any of the primary data used for training their model (see Fig. 1, thousands of datasets made with tremendous time and effort over >15yrs). What's up with that @nature.com ?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Aka: you work was replaced by AI and for those that remain, increase productivity with AI or else …

I wrote today about AlphaGenome, Google DeepMind's AI for DNA. It's powerful, experts told me, but it won't solve the mysteries of the genome overnight. Gift link: nyti.ms/4k5NFIl

Inside a tech company’s secretive plan to destroy millions of books Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

more details and sharp analysis from @willoremus.com and @aaronschaffer.com here is a gift link wapo.st/4rjXAMQ