Disease prevalence in US states before & after vaccine introduction 🧪

From Edward Tufte & graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

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.

There is no conceivable interpretation of the law of war in which a camera set up nearby legitimizes a mass casualty double tap strike on a protected civilian site like a hospital.

The fact that Israel is citing it as if it meets some standard should, by itself, trigger a halt in weapons to Israel.

We’ve discovered a literal miracle with almost unlimited potential and it’s being scrapped for *no reason whatsoever*. This isn’t even nihilism, it’s outright worship of death and human suffering.

I know a lot of you have already heard or read about BDS Movement's call against Microsoft, and felt weird and bad about it all, but decided to move forward as normal because of some degree of ambiguity.

"What service is Microsoft providing?"

Here it is, clear as day. A direct line to death.

Malaria Transmission Blocked by One-Amino-Acid Mosquito CRISPR Edit An allelic-drive system spreads malaria-blocking resistance in mosquitoes by altering a single amino acid in FREP1.

www.genengnews.com/topics/infec...

Crazy what one allele can do, and very exciting to see this working for two different malarial species in Stephensi mosquitos.

“It’s a weird time. I’ve still got to get to work on time, pay my bills, manage chronic illness, all that stuff, while the world in general seems to be falling apart. It can be a challenge to juggle those two things while making sure one of them doesn't completely destroy my mental health. It’s just an odd thing to be like: ‘Oh, all of these atrocities are being committed in Gaza with my tax dollars, but what am I going to eat for dinner?’ Or: ‘Trump just dismantled another check on his power. We’re slowly sliding into fascism, nobody’s stopping him-- but what concert should we go to this weekend?’ The strangest part about the whole thing is that we’ve never been so connected. I could understand if this was eighty years ago; news travelled slowly. But now, in an instant, you get these facts, photos, videos. Verified by credible news, verified by aid organizations—and nobody cares. Well, a lot of people care. But the people who can actually fix things: they don’t care. Instead of standing up for the voiceless, they’d rather lay low, cling to their money or status. It’s hard to be a person who cares right now. Sometimes you just want to melt into your bed or couch and be with your feelings. But I won’t say that I feel hopeless. I’d never say that, because that’s what they want—those people who only care about winning, who don’t care about collateral damage. They want people to feel powerless. And I’m not going to give them that luxury. There are still reasons to be hopeful. Zohran just won the primary. And that’s a sign of change, in New York City at least. Even the people who don’t agree with his politics have to admit: his campaign was built on community. It wasn’t funded by billionaires. This was a campaign of fifty thousand people who volunteered, and canvassed, and made calls. Last week a lot of people who had been feeling powerless realized that they still have some power in this country. Let’s just hope a lot more people are learning from that.”

This was posted this morning by Humans of New York and I think this captures exactly what we are all experiencing right now

Donald Trump wants corrupt foreign leaders to build concentration camps to hold US citizens in an attempt to circumvent the constitution and rule of law.

“They don’t view an honest discussion of policy as something they need to slow down and do.” We’re digging into the Trump team’s logic, or lack-there-of, with @petebuttigieg.bsky.social.

1) Do something autocratic
2) Wait to see how people react
3) If they don't push back hard enough, carry on
4) If they do push back hard enough, "pause" it
5) Illegally consolidate more power
6) Repeat

R.F.K. Jr’s Plan to Send Health Officials to Indian Country Angers Native Leaders (Gift Article) Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he is committed to improving the Indian Health Service. Native American leaders have doubts. “It’s shameful,” one said.

It doesn't matter how genuine your feelings about native people are if you allow the departments and teams that work for them to be disemboweled. Either you are standing with native people, or you are not. Either you have learned from the past, or you have not.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/u...

Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on the Heard and McDonald Islands.

The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.

This is true: The Trump administration said it has imposed a 10% tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose only inhabitants are the U.S. and U.K. service members at the military base on Diego Garcia.

This makes me sick. What's happening would be awful even if they were posing as serious bureaucrats making painful but necessary decisions with some gravitas and dignity. But they're killing programs, which will kill people, which will kill US soft power; they know this and they're gleeful about it.

A key part of this story is how Elon Musk and his followers have been manufacturing consent for exactly this kind of action—repeatedly pushing ideas like abandoning due process, celebrating Bukele and his brutal detainment and detention tactics in El Salvador, on X.

I just wrote about this today

Singing the Songs of Gratitude for Frank Chopp I was three songs into a night of karaoke with the family when I got the news alert that State Representative Frank Chopp had passed away. It was startling. I paused to take it in and feel the loss. H...

www.thestranger.com/guest-editor...

A beautiful remembrance from Colleen Echohawk in @thestranger.com of a great advocate for affordable housing, someone who by his own admission had "always been driven by the belief that everyone deserves a foundation of home, health, and hope."

Beautiful piece in @orionmagazine.bsky.social on the queerness of nature in our times orionmagazine.org/article/the-...

How Cairo's "Garbage City" became the envy of the world | African Arguments Recycling 80% of the city's trash for free and providing employment to tens of thousands, the Zabbaleen have much to teach the world.

africanarguments.org/2025/02/how-...

Really interesting read. The obvious pride taken by the Zabbaleen in Cairo contrasting with (at least my) Western understanding of garbage and recycling collection and the environmental and fiscal impact it has was eye opening.

Fantastic hackathon on spatial mapping in R this morning led by Dr Punam Amratia from MAP. 181 attendees! All past materials available here: ammnet.github.io/ammnet-hacka...

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

Every US scientist needs to 100% clear that this is a fundamental attack on the process of science itself. If allowed to stand it will be the end of US science as we know it. Staying quiet because it does not (yet) target your work is not an option.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Supreme Court rules Trump administration must unfreeze foreign aid payments A divided Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration must pay out nearly $2 billion in foreign assistance funds to nonprofit aid groups.

BREAKING NEWS: The Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration must comply with a district court order and pay for work already done. We are taking on this administration in the courts to hold them accountable.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/sup...

Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts.

Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

"The sorry truth is that without enormous pressure from the party base, a significant number of senators and representatives won’t have it in them to oppose Trump. We, the concerned citizens, will have to force them to do their duty. We’ll also have to march, sooner rather than later."

Health Programs Shutter Around the World After Trump Pauses Foreign Aid (Gift Article) Lifesaving treatment and prevention programs for tuberculosis, malaria, H.I.V. and other diseases cannot access funds to continue work.

For people who don't know exactly what the foreign aid #stopworkorder entails. It's incredibly bleak and you can't sugarcoat that. People are going to die as a direct result of this and I hope that those responsible someday come to know a measure of justice.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/h...

If you or anyone in your network is thinking about how to plan for sustainable surveillance to prevent recrudescence of NTDs in your country, be on the lookout for the full toolkit to be published by WHO soon!

This is part of a larger effort to develop a toolkit for post validation/verification surveillance of NTDs under the leadership of the World Health Organization and with funding from the Gates Foundation. We will soon be sharing reports from pilot activities in Bangladesh and Senegal.

Today marks #WorldNTDDay, a crucial opportunity to raise awareness on the impact of neglected tropical diseases.

At PATH we recently helped pilot the development of integrated sub-national Post Elimination Surveillance for Oncho and LF in Plateau and Nasarawa States in Nigeria. lnkd.in/e9-cSmDp

Not that the vestigial Power Elite wouldn’t do their damnedest to rub them out, of course. But this was evidently also part of Anthony’s master plan. As he gleefully observed, the moment anyone tried to bring a dispute against one of his net-puppets, he would straightaway “crank up HortonWho.vs.aCleanWellLighted-MOO again, via proxy,” and watch with pleasure as the CWL crowd went into a frenzy of hairsplitting attempts to draw the line between their own communications link and his. He readily conceded that their efforts might in time sueced, and that a judgment banning some or even all of the little monsters might at last be won, but in that case his adversaries would then face the even tougher challenge of enforcing such a ban. “If you look at the problem of detecting such players, it’s very difficult,” said Anthony, explaining that the only way to go about it would involve a lot of laborintensive close examination of object code. Not an impossible job, to be sure, but then the purpose of his monsters, ultimately, was not to make themselves indestructible—it was to make the existing social system so chaotic and exhausting that eventually nobody in her right mind would even try to make it work. “The point is this, DrB,” said Anthony. “Wars are not won by killing people, they are won by economic collapse of the enemy.”

Thinking of this passage from Julian Dibbell's MY TINY LIFE (covered in the upcoming episode of Game Studies Study Buddies) wherein a guy who feels he was wronged by a chatroom's moderation system explains his plan to use a semi-automated sockpuppet army to troll the community into ruins.