Keith Durkin

RFK Jr’s health department to halt $500m in mRNA vaccine research Agency to end 22 federal contracts, questioning safety of technology credited with helping end Covid pandemic

He must love infections and cancer.
A short list of what’s been achieved or is in active development with this tech:
– Seasonal flu (Phase 3)
– RSV (FDA-approved, 2024)
– CMV (Phase 3)
– HIV (early trials)
– Rapid-response design for emerging pathogens
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Was living the US during the peak Celtic Tiger years, came home over the thanksgiving holidays in ~2007, Newark/Shannon flight was packed with giddy groups of women on New York Christmas shopping trips.

Kennedy Withdraws U.S. Funding Pledge to International Vaccine Agency

Mass murderer.

(gift link)

MUST SEE: Congresswoman Schrier nails conspiracy theorist and unfortunate HHS Secretary, RFK Jr., on the value of vaccines—and it’s glorious.

Schrier also happens to be the first pediatrician in Congress.

Our sister died because of our mum's cancer conspiracy theories, say brothers Paloma Shemirani’s brothers say she refused chemotherapy because of their mother’s beliefs.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Restrictions had unequal impacts, but the pandemic itself did too. - Boston Review Adam Kucharski responds to Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee.

New piece on why it’s unhelpful to characterise COVID debate as ‘lockdowns are bad’ vs ‘lockdowns are good’ when it was really about people who claimed that COVID was 100x less fatal than it was + optimal to have a massive epidemic immediately before vaccine… vs those who sense checked these claims.

RFK Jr. Removes All CDC Vaccine Panel Experts (Gift Article) The U.S. health secretary chose to “retire” members of a committee that makes significant decisions about who receives immunizations, including the vaccines for children.

“This is an unmitigated public health disaster,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Story by @apoorvanyt.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/4mV37YK

📣 Latest from the lab: Performance of deep-learning-based approaches to improve polygenic scores www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Its thought deep learning will substantially improve PGS but the reality is MANY have tried but no/little gain has been seen so far. Here we report our negative results.

Ambitious project to develop low-cost genome sequencing for pathogens known and unknown - University of Birmingham Project will build on research that helped diagnostic labs to adopt sequencing capacity for COVID-19 and permit characterisation of future infectious threats

Absolutely thrilled to announce the launch of ARTIC2 - a £5.5M 5 year project funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social to build on the ARTIC approach of low-cost, globally accessible genome sequencing for surveillance of outbreaks, epidemics and endemic diseases: www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/am...

www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-12...
Latest This week in virology has a nice discussion of the recent cell paper from @sdellicour.bsky.social and colleges on bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV-2

Robert F. Kennedy Jr will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo testing, WaPo reports U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr intends to shift the way vaccines are tested, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a spokesperson from the HHS.

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise."

Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms.

Ethical violation as POLICY.

oprah winfrey is wearing a red dress and holding a microphone while dancing on a stage . ALT: oprah winfrey is wearing a red dress and holding a microphone while dancing on a stage .

you get a T2T, you get a T2T, you get a T2T..

The mayo of sumo

Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees

I can't believe we're still allowing completely inadequate and uninterpretable Epigenome-Wide Association Studies (EWAS) to be published.

I don't care that this study is probably well-intentioned, and probably trying to draw attention to awful events in Syria.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@charles_h_martin, not on #Bluesky, on #23andMe

H.H.S. Scraps Studies of Vaccines and Treatments for Future Pandemics (Gift Article) Federal officials cited the end of the Covid-19 pandemic in halting the research. But much of the work was focused on preventing outbreaks of other pathogens.

"Angry, disappointed, frustrated"--Scientists were making progress on vaccines and antivirals for the next pandemic--until this week, when the Trump administration abruptly told them to stop. Here's my story with @apoorvanyt.bsky.social Gift link: nyti.ms/43Xz77q

HHS Pulled Funds for HIV Research at 22 Universities The Trump administration pulled around $34 million in HIV-related grants.

The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services terminated around 60 federal grants supporting HIV and HIV prevention-related research over the past five weeks www.notus.org/health-scien...

Sorry to see that Flow, massive respect for all you do, dont know how you have the strength to wade through the lab leak nonsense and put up with the personal attacks when you call out their BS.

People do forget how common zoonotic exposure is. In this study 12% of people working in the guano industry in Myanmar were seropositive for sarbecoviruses: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In utero was the first nirvana album I bought, wore out the tape

Tool Ænima

I had forgotten about that madness, suddenly everyone was a expert on Ct thresholds.

Great thread, thanks

Do you remember BA.3—the weakling cousin of BA.1 & BA.2 that seemed to take the worst from each & had weaker ACE2 binding than even the ancestral Wuhan Virus?

After three years, BA.3 is back.

And it is transmitting.

Who saw this coming?
1/13

As you read this "Exclusive" on the lead FBI agent spilling the beans on their "SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab", the thing that sticks out is the fact that they have absolutely nothing suggesting it did. Bupkis.

It's the same ignorant misrepresentations and conspiracy theories, 👇 being but one example.

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore WASHINGTON—Addressing the ongoing outbreak in Texas that has infected at least 124 state residents and killed one child, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed Thursday to mak...

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore

Opinion | The Pharmaceutical Industry Heads Into Elon Musk’s Wood Chipper (Gift Article) Who needs N.I.H. grants? A lot of red-state universities, for one.

"Every $100 million in investment leads to 78 patents and $598 million in further research, according to N.I.H. calculations"

Or $100 million will get the taxpayer one Falcon 9 launch with SpaceX

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/o...

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12