Carl Zimmer

Chronically Ill? In Kennedy's View, It Might Be a Patient's Own Fault These attitudes are shaping policies that affect millions of people

Chronically Ill? In Kennedy's View, It Might Be a Patient's Own Fault www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.”

NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Friday's Elk: Air as Infrastructure Some dramatic air over my house 99% Invisible is one of my favorite podcasts. It’s about “the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world,” to...

For my latest newsletter, I wrote about how the US government has taken down authoritative climate reports, while posting an "assessment" that experts describe as more like a blog post full of cherry-picked details. buttondown.com/carlzimmer/a...

Three thousand years of backstory: carlzimmer.com/books/airbor...

Surveillance on California dairy farms reveals multiple sources of H5N1 transmission Transmission routes of highly pathogenic H5N1 between cows or to humans remain unclear due to limited data from affected dairy farms. We performed extensive air, farm wastewater, and milk sampling on ...

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In airborne news: "We report detection of virus in the air during milking of suspected H5N1-infected cows on multiple farms and on multiple days, and in the exhaled breath of cows, suggesting that airborne transmission may serve as a mode of H5N1 spread between cows and to humans in dairy parlors"

Childhood Vaccination Rates Have Dropped Again, C.D.C. Data Shows

New federal data shows that vaccination rates among American children entering kindergarten fell during the 2024-25 school year, extending a worrying trend that began during the Covid-19 pandemic.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/h...

Senate committee endorses NIH budget increase, rebuking Trump administration’s proposed 40% cut Senators from both parties endorsed a $400 million increase to the budget of the National Institutes of Health on Thursday

Senate committee endorses NIH budget increase, rebuking Trump administration’s proposed 40% cut www.statnews.com/2025/07/31/n...

Scientists are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do.

Meet Syn57, a living cell that only needs 57 codons, not the standard 64. Here's my story on how synthetic biology is tackling the mystery of our bloated genetic code. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Hf4f9v

‘A Serious Misuse of My Research’: Climate Scientists Say New Trump Energy Report Botches Their Work “Our work has no relevance,” an astrobiologist whose research was cited in the administration’s climate change report said.

‘A Serious Misuse of My Research’: Climate Scientists Say New Trump Energy Report Botches Their Work www.notus.org/climate-envi...

Contrarian climate assessment from U.S. government draws swift pushback Researchers say DOE report cherry picks data to downplay threat of greenhouse gases

So what makes a climate assessment? In short: not this new Energy Dept report, which rehashes contrarian greatest hits with areas of known uncertainty -- that climate scientists talk about all the time.

It's all a little grim. Who needs 721 authors when you have 5?

Scientists Say New Government Climate Report Twists Their Work A new Department of Energy report “fundamentally misrepresents” climate research and leaves out key context, multiple scientists cited in the report tell WIRED.

NEW: i spoke to nine (!) scientists across several disciplines whose work was cited in the new Department of Energy report that downplays the severity of climate change. all of them say their work was misrepresented, cherry picked, and/or lacked context —

Update: A Trump administration effort to block all funding that flows to outside health researchers was scrapped Tuesday evening after senior White House officials intervened www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Trump Administration Scraps Effort to Pause Health-Research Funding The administration halted and then restarted billions in new research grants flowing from the National Institutes of Health.

Looks like the WSJ story got the money flowing again. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

In a Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding If upheld in court, the repeal would make it almost impossible for future administrations to rein in greenhouse gases.

E.P.A. Plans to Revoke the Legal Basis for Tackling Climate Change. Gift link: nyti.ms/4lV2Y6K

Some wild assertions in the EPA's proposed rollback of the endangerment finding:

www.epa.gov/system/files...

Air-Borne - 99% Invisible This week, a conversation with Carl Zimmer about his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Air-Borne is an epidemiological history of how we think about the air and its relati...

I'm a big fan of the @99pi.org podcast, so I'm thrilled to be on this week's episode talking about AIR-BORNE with @romanmars.bsky.social We discuss air as infrastructure. 99percentinvisible.org/episode/637-...

A major NIH grant to study ways to restore hearing was terminated by the Trump administration bc it was awarded through a DEI initiative—to a researcher who qualified bc of his own hearing loss www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/h... @manorlaboratory.bsky.social

certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun

Actually heartbreaking, the list of colleagues that have run the show behind the scenes for so many years who are saying their pre-emptive goodbyes and taking literally thousands of years of amassed knowledge and expertise with them.

Not to mention camaraderie and community.

Morale is ... bleak.

Ugggghhhhhh

Nearly 4,000 NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program The employees who have chosen to leave the agency amount to about 20% of NASA's workforce.

4,000 NASA workers are leaving through deferred resignation. "The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce" www.npr.org/2025/07/26/n...

A non-exhaustive timeline of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s war on vaccines He's transformed conspiracy theories into action and reshaped American policy in just a few months.

Long before he became secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was laying the groundwork for his war on vaccines.

We have the receipts📑

Cold‐Induced Vomiting of a White‐Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) by an Invasive Burmese Python (Python bivittatus) in Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida, USA The Burmese python (Python bivittatus) has an established invasive population throughout South Florida. Here, we detail an observation of a radio-telemetered female Burmese python that ingested an ad...

"Observation of a radio-telemetered female Burmese python that ingested an adult white-tailed deer, retained the deer within the digestive tract for 10 days, and then vomited the deer...The python survived the vomiting and was alive at the time of publication" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New analysis predicts sprawling effects of proposed NIH budget cuts Initial analyses of the Trump administration’s proposed NIH cuts neglect key aspects of their long-term economic and health impact, study says.

Proposed NIH cuts predicted to cause a drop in the US scientific workforce, to reduce support for public health, and to create gaps in scientific knowledge. Story by @aniloza.bsky.social
industryhttps://www.statnews.com/2025/07/28/nih-cuts-new-study-says-long-term-they-will-cost-more-than-saved/

"The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years. Instead of “quickly and fairly” awarding compensation, Special Masters dismiss over half of the cases. Most of those that proceed typically take 5+ years to resolve, with many languishing for more than 10 years as parents struggle to care for children suffering with often extreme disabilities. Petitioners’ attorneys complain that the Special Masters make punitive downward adjustments to attorneys’ fees and medical expert fees to punish effective advocacy. Expert witnesses for injured children complain that they suffer intimidation and even threats that they will lose professional status or NIH funding if they testify for injured children. The government pays its own medical expert witnesses promptly while simultaneously slow-walking payments for petitioners’ experts—sometimes for years. The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals. I am grateful to be working with @AGPamBondi and HHS staff to fix the VISP. Together, we will steer the Vaccine Court back to its original Congressional intent. "

"The structure itself hobbles claimants. The defendant is HHS, not the vaccine makers; and claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the U.S. government represented by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, most of the Special Masters come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side. There is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply. The government lawyers do not allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a taxpayer-funded CDC surveillance system that houses the best data on vaccine injuries. Attorney compensation is in the hands of notoriously biased Special Masters and often hostile government attorneys, who can leverage this power to turn petitioner attorneys against their clients' interests. The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years. Instead of “quickly and fairly” awarding compensation, Special Masters dismiss over half of the cases. Most of those that proceed typically take 5+ years to resolve, with many languishing for more than 10 years as parents struggle to care for children suffering with often extreme disabilities. Petitioners’ attorneys complain that the Special Masters make punitive downward adjustments to attorneys’ fees and medical expert fees to punish effective advocacy. Expert witnesses for injured children complain that they suffer intimidation and even threats that they will lose professional status or NIH funding if they testify for injured children. The government pays its own medical expert witnesses promptly while simultaneously slow-walking payments for petitioners’ experts—sometimes for years. The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals."

"The 1986 Vaccine Act gave vaccine makers immunity against lawsuits by children who suffer vaccine injuries. The statute, and numerous subsequent court decisions, recognized that vaccines, like all medicines, are, in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics case, “unavoidably unsafe,” and that a percentage of vaccinated children will suffer injuries or death. Congress, therefore, simultaneously created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which obliged HHS to compensate injured children. In the words of then Labor and Public Welfare Committee Chairman Senator Edward Kennedy, “when ... children are the victims of an appropriate and rational national policy, a compassionate [g]overnment will assist them in their hour of need.” Under the VICP, vaccine victims can petition for compensation to the so-called “Vaccine Court,” which pays out awards from a trust fund endowed by a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine. Congress intended that injured children be compensated “quickly and fairly” for injuries, “either presumed or proven to be causally connected to vaccines,” with doubts about causation resolved in favor of the victim. To date, the Vaccine Court has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners. But the VICP no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent. Instead, the VICP has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption as government lawyers and the Special Masters who serve as Vaccine Court judges prioritize the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims. The structure itself hobbles claimants. The defendant is HHS, not the vaccine makers; and claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the U.S. government represented by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, most of the Special Masters come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side. There is no discovery, and "

Secretary Kennedy posted a lengthy tweet about vaccine court. As is common, he misrepresented the facts in his claims. A thread.

Here are his claims - screenshot and text below. x.com/SecKennedy/s... 1/n

Covid measures pushed down deaths from influenza to remarkably low levels. The death rate is surging back--including 266 children. 90% of children who died in the 2024-2025 flu season were not fully vaccinated against the flu. www.cdc.gov/fluview/surv...

Is the FDA about to keep pregnant women from taking antidepressants? A panel of experts repeated what one women's health expert called "MAHA talking points."

Mental health conditions, like suicides & overdoses, are the leading underlying causes of maternal deaths in the US.
Antidepressants save women's lives—& they're safe.
So why is RFKJr's FDA hell-bent on undermining their use among pregnant & postpartum moms?
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

TAPPER: 14 Republicans say you're risking undermining critical research by holding up NIH funding

VOUGHT: If they were a company, their stock price would in shambles. They in some respects caused the pandemic. You have an entire institute that does nothing more than DEI research at the NIH.