Candice Johnson

We now have a CDC grant tracker and are collecting information on CDC terminations. If your CDC grant was terminated, we need your help to gather data and documents! Please report!

grant-witness.us/submit-cdc.h...

Jay Bhattacharya strikes again

Utter leadership chaos 😢

Did you know that Black women's job losses made up more than half of job losses for all women in 2025?

New research from the Institute for Women's Policy Research shows that Black women are disproportionately sidelined from the labor market.

(Let's pretend we're in the normal times for a second)

I have had a few discussions with scientists over the last few weeks that have gotten me to solidify a problem I am going to call "failure to generate enthusiasm." Grant reviewing is an emotional exercise and sometimes scientists forget that.

This post is not about epidemiology. And yet.

An approved mRNA flu vaccine will undermine the $500M non-peer-reviewed research project that Bhattacharya gave to his buddies Memoli and Taubenberger to develop vaccines with an outdated, inactivated virus approach. Connect the dots.

Screenshot of the HHS chatbot (Grok) explaining why RFK Jr is the worst HHS Secretary. It mentions his anti-vax views, firing NIH and CDC workers, cutting funding, and withdrawing from WHO.

I asked the new HHS chatbot who the worst HHS Secretary is. It's RFK Jr!

When I worked at CDC, anything on our website reflected the official agency position. Can we assume this is the official HHS position now?

Health Advice From A.I. Chatbots Is Frequently Wrong, Study Shows

people don’t understand the scale of this stuff on gov websites. grok is going to get someone killed and it probably won’t take long

I'm so interested to learn that I'm not the only one to have this train of thought when looking at my cats. Thanks for putting it into words.

To me it's another symptom of spending 98% of our time teaching people how to answer questions and 2% of our time teaching people how to ask questions.

AMA joins effort to launch vaccine science review amid CDC turmoil The American Medical Association and a partner group are taking on a new role in reviewing vaccine safety and effectiveness as the CDC’s review process faces criticism.

NEW: The AMA and a leading public health research group focused on vaccines are teaming up to create a parallel system to review vaccine safety and effectiveness. 
The CDC’s vaccine review process has “effectively collapsed” under RFKJr. My story.
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

I realize that it might look like I'm coming out against MDs. But it's the opposite. I think it's hugely unfair to expect MDs to interpret the literature with the little training they receive. I disagree with how epidemiologists with many years of epi training interpret the literature. It's hard!

For example: if 84% of people already agree that scientific research aimed at advancing knowledge is usually a worthwhile investment over time...

Why are you so sure that the real problem is that people "just don't know enough about why research matters"
www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...

Interested in using data to tackle health inequalities? Join a 1-day, online hackathon for undergrad & grad students w/ at least 1 coding or stats class. Learn about epidemiology and how quantitative methods can answer urgent public health questions. Feb 28. Info: bit.ly/3MtiJFq #EpiSky #DataSciSky

The Board of Governors decided, unilaterally, that no published textbook in the field of sociology could be used in compliance with the law for an Intro to Sociology class. None. Victor: There's not a single existing textbook on the market that could be used that would qualify under state law? Zachary: Correct. Victor: I'm sorry, that's kind of funny. Like, the absurdity of not a single sociology textbook getting past the censors. I mean, it makes me kind of proud of our colleagues, but...

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors.

Great work everyone.

Science, technology, engineering and math occupations

Periodic Table Day: BLS periodic table of STEM occupations www.bls.gov/opub/ted/202... #BLSdata

‼️ If you’ve been following social media from CDC, be aware that with the exception of their Emergency and NIOSH accounts, all other CDC Centers have been told their socials are shut down and nothing can be posted on them.

Further posts will come directly from HHS‼️

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.

A growing number of U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) doctors, nurses, and officers are resigning rather than accepting deployments to the Trump administration’s expanded immigration detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This story was published in partnership with @kff.org.

Sometimes I hear, "we need to frame our research as associational otherwise the MDs reading it will not interpret it correctly."

It took me a while to realize how bonkers this is. It's saying some important primary users of the knowledge created are unable to understand what they're reading.

I feel like this is a great time to remind everyone that it's not even technically wrong to say that logistic regression is machine learning

Trump's Schedule F Rule Finalized A bizarro rule formally justifies politicizing public services

New, from me: Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants.

The new rule is dishonest and unmoored from reality in its effort to formalize the politicization of the federal government 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-sch...

🚨Postdoc alert!

@harvardpopcenter.bsky.social is now accepting applications for 2026-2028 Bell Fellowship! Apply by March 3: popcenter.harvard.edu/postdoctoral...

@popassocamerica.bsky.social @iaphs.bsky.social @societyforepi.bsky.social @ashecon.bsky.social @asanews.bsky.social

Tenure Will Be Eliminated at Most of Oklahoma’s Public Colleges, Governor Says Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, directed the state’s two-dozen regional universities and community colleges to phase out the practice. Existing faculty members will be grandfathered in.

Breaking, from me: An executive order from Oklahoma's governor directs most of the state's public colleges to "phase out tenure." #AcademicSky #HigherEd @chronicle.com
www.chronicle.com/article/tenu...

Things we learned about the labor market in official data releases today:

- new unemployment claims up 11%

- job openings down 6%

Flash-fill, and I have tried so many times to figure out how to turn it off. Literally the worst Excel feature.

support.microsoft.com/en-us/office...

Some Public Health Service officers quit rather than serve in ICE detention centers A special corps of health care workers have been called in to work with detained immigrants and many feel deeply conflicted about the assignment, saying they're not able to provide good care.

We see our colleagues courage, strength, and integrity. Please take a read. Learn about why our colleagues resigned, instead of working in ICE detention centers.

Share their stores widely.
@npr.org

“They are using program as scapegoats to evaluate their grants (50% of my divisions grants are flagged), and when we spend hours creating a rationale for why the project is aligned, we get overruled. Just write in the NIH guidance that this tool is not a screener, it is rule of law.”
- NIH colleague

Thank you to Congressional leaders for recognizing that a healthy United States requires a well-resourced CDC — and to the dedicated scientists, epidemiologists, and public health professionals who work every day to keep Americans and people around the world safe from health threats.

💡For those teaching stats, data literacy, methods--I just wrote a short Medium piece for @asjadnaqvi.bsky.social's
amazing Stata Gallery. The piece covers how and why graphs with two y-axes can be so deceiving. Includes an applied example (with code). Hope it's useful! 😁 Link 👇

We have a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine!

Patient race is widely used in medical algorithms...but it's unclear how patients feel about this.

We conduct the first nationally-representative YouGov survey to find out, producing four findings with practical clinical implications. 1/