Onyi Arah, MD, DSc, PhD

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

"Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function. What value, after all, is there in automating art, thinking, or reading – especially in educational and academic settings? None."

😞

This is bad. Will there be a JAMA Ethics launch?

Congratulations!!!

Flyer advertising debate on 15 Dec 2025 at 5:30pm at Punnet Hall, 20 Bedford Way, IOE, London, entitled 'Is AI the future of health and social science?'

DEBATE: "Is AI the future of health and social science?"

For those in London on 15 Dec 2025, don't miss this fun in person debate between me and David Bann sponsored by @ncrm.ac.uk!

Will the arguments change anyone's mind? 🤔

Sign up to attend IN PERSON: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/is-ai-the-...

Even as the anti-vax lobby erodes public trust, new evidence confirms that "immunizations against Covid-19, RSV, and influenza have shown consistent effectiveness & safety and are associated with a substantially reduced risk of hospitalization & severe disease"

www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

NEJM and public health group are launching rival to CDC’s MMWR publication Two institutions are coming together to create an alternative to the CDC’s vaunted Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

www.statnews.com/2025/10/21/c...
#PublicHealth #MMWR #PHalert

newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/3-no...

#UniversityofCalifornia #ScienceMatters #Science #HigherEd

UC wins 5 Nobel Prizes in 3 days — and sets a new world record These discoveries span decades and disciplines, but they all have one important thing in common: They’ve all relied on competitive funding from the federal government.

www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-wins...

#UniversityofCalifornia #Science #Progress

@uofcalifornia.bsky.social

Respect to those who got here first.

Familial confounding or measurement error? How to interpret findings from sibling and co-twin control studies - European Journal of Epidemiology Epidemiological researchers often examine associations between risk factors and health outcomes in non-experimental designs. Observed associations may be causal or confounded by unmeasured factors. Sibling and co-twin control studies account for familial confounding by comparing exposure levels among siblings (or twins). If the exposure-outcome association is causal, the siblings should also differ regarding the outcome. However, such studies may sometimes introduce more bias than they alleviate. Measurement error in the exposure may bias results and lead to erroneous conclusions that truly causal exposure-outcome associations are confounded by familial factors. The current study used Monte Carlo simulations to examine bias due to measurement error in sibling control models when the observed exposure-outcome association is truly causal. The results showed that decreasing exposure reliability and increasing sibling-correlations in the exposure led to deflated exposure-outcome associations and inflated associations between the family mean of the exposure and the outcome. The risk of falsely concluding that causal associations were confounded was high in many situations. For example, when exposure reliability was 0.7 and the observed sibling-correlation was r = 0.4, about 30–90% of the samples (n = 2,000) provided results supporting a false conclusion of confounding, depending on how p-values were interpreted as evidence for a family effect on the outcome. The current results have practical importance for epidemiological researchers conducting or reviewing sibling and co-twin control studies and may improve our understanding of observed associations between risk factors and health outcomes. We have developed an app (SibSim) providing simulations of many situations not presented in this paper.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#siblingstudies #siblingdesign #episky

To fluoridate or not to fluoridate: what is the question? Water fluoridation has been deemed one of the top 10 public health successes of the twentieth century [1]. It is thought to have reduced caries incidence b

academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

#episky #publichealth

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😂

Congratulations!

COVID vaccine now universally available in California A recommendation by Western states allows anyone over 6 months old to get a COVID-19 shot. California insurance providers will have to cover the cost.

COVID vaccine now universally available in California www.berkeleyside.org/2025/09/18/c...

UCLA’s Terence Tao: Losing support for research means losing our best and brightest The "Mozart of Math" warns that federal funding cuts could irreparably damage the nation’s scientific ecosystem and drive our top young scientists abroad.

newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/tere...

#universities #research #funding

ACOG Continues Recommending COVID-19 Vaccine During Pregnancy This JAMA Medical News article discusses updated guidance on COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant people from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Breaking with the CDC, @acog.org reaffirms support for #COVID19 vaccination in pregnant people.

Here’s what to know.

Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out A nationwide study suggests infections with human papillomavirus (HPV) types 16 and 18 have been virtually eliminated since vaccination began in 2008 – protecting even unvaccinated women.

I am here to say vaccines are awesome because guess what Denmark is close to completely eliminating the two most dangerous HPV strains (serotype 16 and 18) and with the cervical cancer.I think that is bloody AMAZING!!!!
bit.ly/4pbHxjT

COVID-19 vaccine (or diagnosis) effects are stronger for non-pregnant women

COVID-19 vaccination is safe, including during pregnancy

Adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination are rare in women of reproductive age

Adverse events are higher following a COVID-19 diagnosis than COVID-19 vaccination

Pregnancy does not increase adverse events risks given COVID-19 vaccination

Adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccination or diagnosis among pregnant and non-pregnant women in the United States, 2021-2022 : To quantify the incidence of adverse events given COVID-19 vaccination and COVID-19 diagnosis in women of reproductive age; to examine pregnancy as …

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#covid19 #vaccine #vaccination #publichealth

#causalsky #episky #StatsSky

💡A new paper by Elias Bareinboim and Drago Plecko underscores the intractability of ignorability assumptions commonly invoked in the potential outcomes framework, explains why structural causal models—explicitly grounded in well-defined causal mechanisms—are far easier to interpret. 1/2

What a mess

California, Oregon, and Washington to launch new West Coast Health Alliance to uphold scientific integrity in public health as Trump destroys CDC’s credibility

In response to the dismantling of the CDC, California, Oregon, and Washington have launched the West Coast Health Alliance, which will make their own science-based vaccine guidelines, and make sure vaccines are accessible to everyone.

Not for nothing, whenever someone conflates search algorithms, LLMs, and whatever the fuck AI is, I send them this article.

Yep

Give humans anything promising or good and they will find a way to corrupt it. Remember Mendelian Randomization? It’s basically turned into junk literature…