ambilinski.bsky.social

Breaking: The Trevor Project received a stop-work order last night on its contract with the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. The Trump administration is eliminating the option for LGBTQ callers to the hotline to press 3 and connect with someone who specializes in LGBTQ mental health.

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

In a new memo, @pennldi.bsky.social and @yalesph.bsky.social researchers project that, based on available evidence, the rollback of coverage in the House-passed reconciliation bill will lead to 42,500 additional deaths per year.

d197nivf0nbma8.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025...

*Every time* we present on pregnant inclusion in clinical trials, one or two women come up afterward and say, "This happened to me too" -- with depression, anxiety, asthma, epilepsy, hypertension, nausea, glaucoma.

Natalia Emanuel, Andrea Ciaranello, and I took at stab at counting these harms.

Excluding pregnant and nursing people from clinical trials causes more harm than it prevents, study finds Professor Alyssa Bilinski has found that systematically including pregnant participants in trials would speed up the detection of adverse effects and increase uptake of beneficial medications.

“A common concern is that we shouldn’t ‘experiment’ on pregnant people—but the reality is that we already are,” Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. “Every time a pregnant person takes an untested medication it’s an uncontrolled experiment.” sph.brown.edu/news/2025-05...

Did I just cite this in an R01 proposal about responsible LLM use? Perhaps.

Long-term care in the U.S. faces two existential threats: an immigration crackdown and Medicaid cuts The combined impacts of an immigration crackdown and slashing Medicaid budgets could create an exodus of long-term care workers.

How do you devastate an already-fragile system? Target its workers AND its funding.

In our @statnews.com op-ed, @rachelwerner.bsky.social and I explore how immigration enforcement & Medicaid cuts will impact millions who depend on long-term care—and what we can do.

www.statnews.com/2025/05/30/l...

YouTube video by 222zink Eugen Cicero - Solfeggio in C minor (1965)

For anyone else who needs grant deadline music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7C8...

"[T]he impact is larger than any single lab or the University itself — it is a dismantling of the national research enterprise and the loss of a generation of scientists."

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

HHS cancels nearly $600 million Moderna contract on vaccines for flu pandemics HHS has notified Moderna that it is canceling a nearly $600 million contract for vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics.

BREAKING: In a serious blow to US pandemic flu preparedness, HHS has cancelled a contract with Moderna to test and license prototype vaccines for #H5N1 #birdflu and other potential pandemic viruses.
In a pandemic, mRNA is the fastest way to vaccine doses. www.statnews.com/2025/05/28/m...

Frighteningly, it was articulate, subtle, and sophisticated -- and yet incredibly misleading!

I recently experimented to see whether ChatGPT could be used to generate misleading anti-vaccine information, particularly about autism.

I was not heartened by the results...

bsky.app/profile/ambi...

Worth noting: we previously projected that if pregnant individuals been vaccinated at the same rate as age- and state-matched women, we would have averted 20% of maternal COVID-19 deaths (i.e., 8% of ALL maternal deaths) from March-November 2021.

doi.org/10.7326/ANNA...

Maternal deaths doubled in the US during the height of COVID, new Brown University study finds - The Boston Globe Increases were reported “across nearly every age and racial group” during the health crisis in 2021, according to researchers.

“We wanted to understand the trends in maternal, fetal and infant deaths in the U.S., but that turned out to be tricky," Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. Learn how she and colleagues disentangled 20 years of health data to arrive at their concerning findings. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/29/m...

U.S. maternal deaths doubled during COVID-19 pandemic, among other findings in new study Public health researchers untangle two decades of maternal mortality data and find that while early increases were driven by reporting changes, real increases followed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new study finds that at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, US maternal deaths nearly doubled, reaching 18.9 deaths for every 100,000 live births. The findings highlight the importance of accurately tracking maternal health data, Professor Alyssa Bilinski says. www.brown.edu/news/2025-04...

🧵New survey paper: "Inference with Few Treated Units"
Luis Alvarez, Bruno Ferman and Kaspar Wüthrich

Tired of referees saying your standard errors are wrong?

This survey will help you understand if you really have a problem — and, if so, how to fix it!

Trends in Maternal, Fetal, and Infant Mortality in the US, 2000-2023 This cross-sectional study investigates the trends in maternal, fetal, and infant mortality in the US from 2000 to 2023.

Published in @jama.com Peds today: doi.org/10.1001/jama...

Also important to note -- considerable racial disparities in both maternal and infant health have persisted over the past 25y.

So overall, amidst reasons for optimism with respect to trends, we shouldn't lose sight of work still to do. 4/n

@robbieparks.bsky.social +Seth Flaxman

And once we accounted for this effect, maternal mortality was flat...until COVID-19. Then, the change -- particularly during the Delta wave -- was real...and drastic, about doubling maternal mortality. 3/n

In work led by Robin Park (@ox.ac.uk), we used staggered difference-in-differences to examine the impact of reporting changes. These showed a sudden and drastic effect of the pregnancy checkbox on mortality as it was rolled out across states. 2/n

Has maternal mortality been increasing in the US?

Previous reports have noted a drastic increase in US maternal mortality. This was largely among "cause unspecified" deaths, leading to suggestions that some or all of these trends may be driven by changes in reporting.

We took a closer look. 1/n

I wrote a letter to the editor replying to a JAMA viewpoint that said we shouldn’t experiment with being more generous to nondirected donors of kidneys for transplant. JAMA readers won’t see my letter, but you can see it below. #econsky #lawsky #medicine
marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/04/jama...

Use of No-Cost Preventive Services Jeopardized by Kennedy v Braidwood This cross-sectional study analyzes the use of 10 no-cost preventive services by individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance, which may be threatened by the upcoming Kennedy v Braidwood Supre...

On Monday the Supreme Court hears a case that could strike down the ACA mandate that insurers cover preventive services at no cost to patients.

We found that ~40 million people with private insurance use these free services, including half of enrolled women.

JAMA Health Forum:
ja.ma/3GcUZC6

🩺📊

NICHD is also all gynecological research! So, see also: having a uterus.

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

Now there's a memorable stat!

"Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined."

wapo.st/3EvzMCI

I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe."

But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment.

1/

Game on. ✊

Let this be the start of a civil society cascade of just saying no to authoritarianism.

Proud of Shuo Feng's research highlighted at Brown's Public Health Research Day --
"How Do We Know It Works? A Test-Driven Development Framework for Large Language Model-Supported Coding of Disease Simulation Models"

www.brown.edu/news/2025-04...