I’m so proud of these dudes whose social media content I will never, ever check
22.02.2026 16:04
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I’m so proud of these dudes whose social media content I will never, ever check
America’s science and medical research system may have been world-class before but did not have the institutional and legal safeguards to prevent a grievance-fueled takeover. This piece unpacks the COVID origins of that grievance and the imperatives for a transformation. https://substack.com/home/post/p-188677740
Grievance Is All You Need
.... understanding attacks on NIH, CDC and FDA through the lens of COVID revisionists:
joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/grievance-...
Jay Bhattacharya:science::Bari Weiss:journalism.
when that guy who said he'd make the figure for the group project really lets you down
A graphic for our friends in Minnesota.
At long last, a plausible explanation for the tight association between #keratin 15 and the epithelial progenitor epithelial cell state in skin is provided in a new study by Redmond, Coulombe et al. @umich.edu: rupress.org/jcb/article/...
#Cytoskeleton #StemCells
Defunding scientists for the nationality of who they co-author with or who they train.
One of the most radical attack on freedom of speech in US history. A far right nationalist destruction of US science. Such a shameful time to be an American that this racist stupidity has become mainstream.
okay the kids are off to school so
I filed dozens of FOIAs to learn what programs were selling the most booze
the answer is obviously Wisconsin (by a LOT lmao) but here's who else cracked the top of the list. raw sales data and per capita data here:
www.extrapointsmb.com/p/who-is-sel...
Banning “dangerous gain-of-function” pathogen research is actually just banning pathogen research. TB causes chronic disease, the supposed cornerstone of the MAHA movement. Hard to see ending TB research on treatments as anything but another targeted attack on science in service of destroying it.
Not to belabor a "I told you so", but it's been clear for years that the whole "lab leak" discourse has absolutely nothing to do with a potential lab leak and everything to do with a broader anti-science agenda.
I really, and truly, hope more scientists will realize this and take corrective action.
This Executive Order is a gross overreach of Presidential power and undermines democracy. It steals from taxpayers, will destroy science and the economy, and ultimately, America.
Congress must act now.
open.substack.com/pub/rasmusse...
Like science integrity researchers denounced distortion of their work by the Trump administration, I'd like to hear academic lab leakers call out the destruction of US science under the pretext of the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
BREAKING: Watchdog government agency finds the NIH and the Trump administration have illegally withheld funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, and rips into HHS for failing to justify its slow-walking of funds.
www.gao.gov/products/b-3...
At some point, the Republican project shifted from attacking scientific consensus on particular subjects that ran counter to their political interests to trying to shut down all scientific inquiry wherever it might be headed.
Our research has been engulfed by an endless torrent of lab leak conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic - even as the evidence for zoonosis has only grown stronger.
This fuels anti-science agendas and erodes public trust.
Now, we respond 👇
theconversation.com/how-conspira...
Shocking Video Captures Calm Police Officers Handling Situation Nonviolently
More out of #NIH today, announcing termination of anything they call gain-of-function. I can only imagine this will be used as an excuse to kill all manner of virology and immunology programs. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
Please REPORT any such termination: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h...
Every flashbang could instead be a meal for a poor kid. Every hotel room for a National Guardsman deployed to fire at our neighbors could house a homeless vet. Every "less-than-lethal" bullet pulled from a journalist's eye could be already needed healthcare for anyone else. All of this is a choice.
I think the targeting of scientific advisory boards—vaccine panel, the NCI scientific board, etc—is instructive. They are easier to fire than gov employees, and RFK et al can claim they need to eliminate or get "fresh eyes" or whatever on the issue. And then they can construct an alternate reality.
It's being portrayed as an attempt to wipe out US crops, but the disease is already there which is why it needs to be researched.
They may have broken import rules, but this would be a weird form of bioterrorism.
www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area...
A potent mixture of bio-scare and yellow-peril here, so far as I can tell.
Foreign scientists take Fusarium graminearum spores to a lab where they've been studying Fusarium graminearum for decades.
To find ways of tackling the crop disease.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
This month's bonus episode is about the rise of the lab leak theory from an unfounded theory promoted by right-wing cranks to an unfounded theory promoted by prominent liberal journalists.
Nation Adds Second Memorial Day To Honor Brats Eaten In The Line Of Duty
Nation Adds Second Memorial Day To Honor Brats Eaten In The Line Of Duty
This from the NYT ed board after they platform unqualified cranks who push discredited gain of function/lab leak conspiracies or in other cases give false equivalency to them. They need some self reflection here and understand that they’ve been part of the problem
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/o...
Some have painted such challenges as a clear sign of lax standards. In an article published in April 2020, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote that after the US officials’ visit of the Wuhan institute in 2018 they “sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab.” According to Rogin, unnamed sources familiar with the unclassified cables “said that they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns,” and one anonymous Trump administration official told him the cables “provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”
The cables themselves, which were publicly released several months later (with some parts redacted), cautioned about inadequate staffing but didn’t identify any specific dangerous biosafety practices. One cable, sent on January 19, 2018, mentioned the shortage of trained staff “needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory” in a section that discussed how a lack of trained workers could “impede research.” According to the second cable sent three months later, this “opens up even more opportunities for expert exchange.” The January cable also noted the Wuhan institute’s ability “to undertake productive research despite limitations” and said that the work “makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
It's hard to see this as anything other than a Washington Post columnist willingly laundering the Trump administration's conspiratorial talking points into the mainstream with no evidence.
www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/09/1...
NIH funding has collapsed by 35% in just three months -- wiping out over a decade of growth in medical research investment
A $2.7 billion cut. The steepest drop in modern NIH history
If this isn’t a war on science, what is?
New EO banning “dangerous gain-of-function” experiments dropped Monday.
Allow me to break out my deranged anti-vax kakistocrat translator.
Will this improve the safety & security of biological research?
Hell yes, because biological research won’t exist anymore!
The American Society for Microbiology is committed to ensuring that scientific research is conducted adhering to strict standards for biosafety and biosecurity, but pausing research is not the path forward. Read our statement: asm.org/press-releas...
Our tax dollars poured down the drain, because obv we don't need to worry about infectious diseases anymore. This also sounds very Biosafety Now-ish, with the insults to the safety culture-- Connie Schmaljohn is a world-class scientist. The USG was lucky to have her.
www.wired.com/story/hhs-ni...
This is basically the entire budget of the NIH, just to put people in cages.
