Amy Maxmen, PhD

One Detail About Trump’s Pick for Surgeon General Has Haunted Me for Years. Get Ready. A wellness influencer could soon be writing the warning labels on your vices.

@shanpalus.bsky.social reviews "Flackers" and nails the problem with Casey Means.

slate.com/technology/2...

Lonny Fritzler installs paneling on a future therapeutic foster home for kids whose parents need addiction treatment elsewhere. He says he had to leave his hometown of Lodge Grass to recover from his own addiction to meth.

Illustration by Oona Zenda of a man having to weigh prioritizing either his job or access to health care with a lawmaker in the background.

Hundreds of people join a protest in downtown Hamilton, Montana, in April supporting the work of federal employees as President Donald Trump oversees efforts to restructure the nation’s government.

Hi — new to BlueSky! I’m a journalist covering how health policy and systems impact people. Lately I’ve reported on federal cuts hitting a rural bioscience hub, a town recovering from meth, and a man who said he had to break Medicaid rules.

Based in Montana, I write for both 📰 and 📻

To: Jeffrey epstein[jeevacation©gmail.com] From: roger schank Sent: Mon 1/4/2010 12:15:13 PM Subject: there is a simpler explanation about women and intelligence intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature) it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what thinking and feeling about her hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag roger schank http://www.rogerschank.com/

Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.

The last part abt how measles disrupts immunity vs other infections is, imo, underappreciated (& mechanism was recently clarified). It's part of why measles vaccination was seen to help beyond just reducing measles complications - not getting measles reduces severity of subsequent infections too.

Cambodian national dies in ICE custody in Indiana A detainee died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Indiana on Monday, with the cause of death under investigation, ICE said on Wednesday, marking at least the seventh death ...

A Cambodian man -- old enough to have survived Pol Pot genocide but too young to die -- is the 7th person to die in ICE custody this year.

A Cuban man died of asphyxia in Jan, with witnesses saying guards killed him. A Palestinian woman was shackled after a seizure.

www.reuters.com/world/us/cam...

Minneapolis is in a state of chaos. Racist immigration policies are to blame | Jamil Smith What is happening in Minnesota is proof that racist ideas lead to racist policies – and it produces bad, dangerous governance

Hatred cannot govern a country effectively. Prior to this morning's arrest of journalists for doing their jobs, I wrote about this government using fear as policy in the Twin Cities, and why racist governance is bad governance. My first column for @us.theguardian.com.

Immigrant Kids Detained in ‘Unsafe and Unsanitary’ Sites as Trump Team Seeks To End Protections - KFF Health News President Donald Trump’s Justice Department seeks to terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement, which since 1997 has required U.S. immigration officials to hold migrant children in facilities that are...

The Trump admin is pushing to terminate rules that mandate basic rights & sanitary conditions for detained children.

Already, CBP is detaining kids in tents, airports & prison-like settings, according to lawyers

By @sandywestreporter.bsky.social @kffhealthnews.org kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Extensively drug-resistant Salmonella outbreak linked to moringa powder. MAHA and FOX News, among others, have promoted moringa as a "natural" medicine.

content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USF...

It's important to put this in context of one of the first things Taubenberger did when he took over as the director of NIAID - he canceled the premier pandemic preparedness network ("CREID" - which we were part of) because it was deemed "unsafe for Americans".

Cc. @maxkozlov.bsky.social.

Ack. 1.2 *million*

Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation Staff members have been instructed to scrub this topic and ‘biodefense’ from the agency’s website.

After more than 1.2 Americans lost their lives to Covid, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya orders the agency to deprioritize pandemic preparedness & biodefense.

Make it make sense.

Scoop from @maxkozlov.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Statement on the planned hepatitis B birth dose vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau WHO is aware of the proposed randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine in Guinea-Bissau. Based on questions raised in publicly available information and consultation with...

"Exploiting scarcity is not ethical."

WHO director @drtedros.who.int puts out a statement explaining basic research ethics to RFK.

www.who.int/news/item/13...

Why are all the US media using words like "revoke" and repeal"? They mean nothing in this context. Why not "refuse to accept", "deny", or "lie about"?

I can't believe we're using Guantanamo for this shit

My dad was career US Public Health Service. He deployed after 9/11, after Katrina, helping to set up the basic infrastructure that saved lives. Its nauseating thinking about the position these folks are being put in.

HHS Has Been Using Anti-Trans Language From a Christian Right Think Tank The department refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-denying procedures,” a term coined by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

SCOOP: The Department of Health and Human Services has been using the term “sex-rejecting procedures” to describe gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary individuals.

The term is not clinical or medical. It comes from a Christian Right group.

www.importantcontext.news/p/hhs-is-usi...

SMH. RFK's CDC measles dashboard has a lead image of flights coming into the US from abroad -- as if other countries are to blame for our skyrocketing measles numbers.

>89% of cases last year were home-grown and >92% of cases this year. This is a US problem that needs domestic solutions.

Measles Cases and Outbreaks Find the latest numbers of confirmed U.S. measles cases. CDC updates this page weekly.

Reference: www.cdc.gov/measles/data...

Wow. 733 measles cases so far this year. At this rate, 2026 will far exceed 2025, the worst year for measles in decades

Only 6 cases this year were imported from abroad. This is a domestic problem that will grow FAR worse when the babies going unvaccinated on RFK's watch admin go to kindergarten.

TrumpRx debuts with several dozen discounted drugs Drug pricing experts have questioned whether the effort would benefit most Americans.

Most people will do better through insurance than TrumpRx. Many without insurance will not be able to afford the still-high TrumpRx prices.

But drugmakers certainly will appreciate Trump’s free product promos, delivered with a false veneer of price accountability.

www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Thank you! Very kind.

Hell of a story. The federal government has awarded contracts to a senior figure in the Patriotic Front, a “white nationalist pyramid scheme.”

The group recruits & trains white nationalists in preparation for what they believe is a coming race war.

Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo - KFF Health News U.S. Public Health Service doctors and nurses are being deployed to Guantánamo and other detention centers as President Donald Trump escalates mass arrests in his campaign to curb immigration. Some ha...

Uniformed health workers have been deployed to President Donald Trump’s secretive immigration operation at Guantánamo Bay. They describe a dark prison and limits on medical care.

@amymaxmen.bsky.social investigates ⤵️

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

A huge thanks to everyone who spoke with me for this sensitive story. Americans have a right to know what our government is doing & where our taxes go.

Thanks to @kffhealthnews.org @wired.com for editing & publishing. If you have an inside view, I'm AmyMaxmen.25 on Signal and amym(at)kff(dot)org

Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo - KFF Health News U.S. Public Health Service doctors and nurses are being deployed to Guantánamo and other detention centers as President Donald Trump escalates mass arrests in his campaign to curb immigration. Some ha...

Immigrants detained at Guantanamo have been imprisoned in a dark prison without natural light. One officer said immigrants were surprised to learn they were at GTMO.

Imprisoning people at GTMO is enormously expensive - an ACLU lawsuit argues it's also illegal. kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo - KFF Health News U.S. Public Health Service doctors and nurses are being deployed to Guantánamo and other detention centers as President Donald Trump escalates mass arrests in his campaign to curb immigration. Some ha...

Uniformed nurses & doctors deployed to ICE are facing ethical dilemmas. What if they're asked to overlook - or do things - that conflict with their professional pledges to put patients first?

After all, they were asked to abet torture GTMO in the early 2000s.

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

ICE detained & deported immigrants, under Biden too. What changed is that prisons used to send people convicted of crimes to ICE. Now ICE is racially profiling, arresting people at home, work, streets, w/out reason.

ICE street arrests were 11x higher in 2025. deportationdata.org/analysis/imm...

A chart of ICE data showing a surge in the number of immigrants detained by ICE without a criminal record.

Trump pledged to send "the worst of the worst" to Guantanamo, but many of the immigrants shipped to the Navy base have no criminal record.

Across the US, ICE is imprisoning a growing number immigrants with no criminal record, according to ICE data. kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo Doctors, nurses, and other officers are increasingly being deployed to ICE detention centers. Some have resigned in protest, while others offer a rare look into bleak conditions.

I talked w/ uniformed health workers about their deployments to prisons where ICE holds immigrants.

ICE's operation is especially secretive at Guantanamo -- the place where America flouted its own rules to torture detainees post 9/11.

@wired.com and @kffhealthnews.org (no paywall)