One Year After Leaving NIH One year ago, I left a job as a Program Official at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that I had held for 22 years.

Play-by-play of how the NIH was demolished and left on the chopping room floor.

elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/one-year-a...

As someone who has had the chance to organize alongside Ms. Edith for 2 years, I can say with certainty that she shows up for everyone. She uses her car for multiple grocery runs a week so she can feed her neighbors! Please donate anything you can to help Ms. Edith and, by extension, Healy towers! 🫶🏽

I will not accept the evil “pineapple on pizza is okay” propaganda!

While BlueSky is crashing, I think it’s time to get off some controversial takes.

1) A lot of people are bad at their jobs (sometimes even YOU 🫵🏾, and I), and that’s okay!

2) Platforming/deplatforming is an issue in the hands of algorithms, not people.

3) Pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza.

“Hey, I know I made getting a grant practically lottery-level odds, but why don’t you try pivoting your entire research portfolio to something (replication) that is historically undervalued in our field? No, I will not make a large replication funding opportunity. Good luck!”

I think that encouraging replication and reproducibility is a good priority if executed well.

It’s a hard sell to tell scientists who are now scrambling trying to figure out how they’re going to “keep the lights on” in a contracting environment to do those studies. Where is the incentive?

How can you expect people to trust you when your mindset is to conduct science with an approach that opaquely and inconsistently punishes people who wrote proposals 3+ years ago? How can you tell those same people to trust you that it won’t happen again for your new priorities?

I do think it’s incredibly important to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. Because of that, I think that new leadership should have a lot of latitude for determining new priorities they will oversee.

One of the most wasteful and untrustworthy things you can do is not honor prior commitments.

What’s the purpose of working w/ someone who doesn’t believe in honoring commitments, unilaterally makes the field unstable, and censors their partners?

Many of the fears of “corporate-captured” industry-sponsored research are those things. I’ve seen that more from federally-sponsored work lately..

Only fitting that I just had one of my WORST experiences submitting a paper 😭😭

Medical schools must continue to teach students about structural barriers to care “Patients don’t experience illness in a vacuum,” writes Uché Blackstock.

My latest op-ed in @statnews.com is out today. I wrote it in response to the LCME removing explicit language requiring medical schools to teach about structural barriers that shape patients’ health. This isn’t ideology. It’s clinically competent care.

www.statnews.com/2026/04/15/l...

"Too often, we fail to address the conditions that determine whether care happens at all. Patients don’t experience illness in a vacuum," @ucheblackstockmd.bsky.social writes about LCME removing language on teaching health equity

As someone who generally is more optimistic about AI in healthcare, I think unregulated use among consumers can easily erode a lot of the gains that could be made on the enterprise/corporate side.

I for one am SHOCKED that chatbots that are notorious for telling people what they like to hear struggle when faced with dispelling medical misinformation.

It’s almost like your point of view and expertise matter!

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announces it has found a buyer to keep the newspaper open Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said they have found a buyer who had agreed to keep the newspaper open, less than a month before it was due to shut down.

The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for.

apnews.com/article/pitt...

We're over half way through the Fed fiscal year.

AHRQ FY26 appropriation: $345M
Amount obligated to date: $0

New AHRQ funding curves up at Grant Witness:
grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

AHRQ supports work to lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes. This is what Trump is unlawfully gutting.

The bots are just the most active/annoying users 😭😭

Genuinely depressing to me that your partner has to Doordash to raise money for your cancer treatment when you get old. What happens if you don't have a partner? Are we just working to pay a landlord and save up for a medical emergency when we're elderly?

“Vibes” matter imo if they result in material behavior change.

I’ve seen data on Gen-Z being on similar financial footing to our predecessors (even when you include adjustments for those who live at home). It’s a common sentiment in my circles that everyone feels stuck, and acting accordingly.

Not to be a shill for the companies that extract unpaid labor out of all of us, but I just had an incredibly pleasant experience submitting a paper through a Wiley journal.

It didn’t have me upload the file and paste the exact same text from said file a billion different times.

AI-generated papers scoring better than human-written papers in conference abstract ratings probably says more about abstract ratings than it does about AI paper quality...

The IAPHS Student Committee is excited to announce our own Instagram account (@iaphs_students)! We'll be sharing about student-relevant/student-led IAPHS events, highlighting student members, and building community. IAPHS account managers will review all submissions. -The IAPHS Student Committee

My quote of the day

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Time will tell though! Thanks for conversing!

Exactly. A lot of these conversations are valuable, but the new changes are not helping anyone. When people are worried about paying bills it’s hard to have a fair convo about anything.

My fear is that dismissing the new harms divides us more. Ideas are valuable, but implementation matters more

I think what JB says is consequential and important to know, but the issue I’ve had is how his stated desires (restoring trust and transparency, supporting early career, and replication) are detached from our present-day reality. I agree with the value of those things but they aren’t happening.

I think the program looks cool. To me, this is a marketing misstep. If you want to highlight integrity in science and open dialogue, why not highlight the interactive portions more?

It’s kinda a hard sell to me and undermines the many productive conversations that could be had.

I think that if you are a really prominent figure, you need to be held to an incredibly high standard.

What new thing will we learn from this panel that isn’t already clear through the actions that are destroying the field and sacrificing the future of science?

I think we can learn a lot through open dialogue, but there’s a point when your actions need to mean something.

NIH is on life support intramurally and extramurally. The moral at CDC and public trust in the institutions is continuing to decline (despite claims that the desire is to restore it).