Sarah Cobey

Here’s the full clip @whyshoulditrustyou.bsky.social

I completed an Open Science poll recently that asked what fraction of my papers were replication studies and struggled to remember a project that didn’t involve replication of others’ published work in some stage.

Dr. Bhattacharya recently came to U. Chicago for an "off the record" event. My strong impression was that he is truly unfamiliar with how most biomedical research works.

We found that while close contact contributed to elevated risk (rate ratio 1.16 per doubling daily time, 95%-CI 1.01–1.33), time spent in shared classrooms and poor air quality had larger effects (RR 3.17, 95%-CI 1.96–5.17 and RR 1.90 95%-CI 1.23–2.94) respectively).

I get it, I just meant the purifiers that try to be ultra portable and don’t plug in aren’t solving any problem. N95 when moving or something small that plugs in that gives highest CFM at the filtration level you need.

(Some of the suggestions have been for purifiers to be worn around the neck, which isn’t as good as a N95.)

That’s true! I was thinking of more diverse exposures en route. Then whatever gives the best CFM at MERV-13 or whatever you need to filter out.

Your best bet is a N95.

This is a targeted attack on science media.

Bhattacharya has slammed science media for what he calls biased coverage, but how are our readers — the global scientific community — supposed to understand his new agency priorities if we can't even get in the door?

👯‍♂️👯‍♀️👯👯‍♂️

Just spoke to The Hill about how the dismantling of the NIH is impacting science in America. We still face a cliff of unfathomable heights, w easily 1000+ labs poised to close in the next year due to funding ending. A generation of young scientists lost because there is nowhere for them to train.

Yes, we have a problem.

The problem starts at the top.

The problem is worsened by leadership of @nature.com & other journals & professional organizations who think that power demands a platform without scrutiny.

Isn’t it opening the wrong way?

A bad thing is unfolding at NIH this week: It looks like the Trump administration is trying to replace key civil servant scientific leaders, the Institute Directors, with political hires. These directors control the NIH budget, tens of billions.

A bit of a video explainer here: 1/ 🧪

Philanthropy, to the Rescue Having donated more than $19 billion since 2019, MacKenzie Scott ’92 is setting a new model for philanthropy, not just in the scope, but also in the way she gives

Her net worth is dropping: paw.princeton.edu/article/mack...

It was surreal to be quizzed on “freedom of inquiry” and other values in my mandated U. Chicago/NIH/NSF research security training tonight given the restrictions to our research over the past eight months. Jeremy describes the experience perfectly below. (His piece is outstanding.)

Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404

Immigrants, particularly on H1Bs, are the lifeblood of American innovation. If you wanted to hurt US competitiveness in the next century, I can think of few more effective ways than a move like this

Even when found illegal, the mere intent will have irreparably harmed our future

This doesn’t affect your main point, but I think the imprinting/“original antigenic sin” hypothesis, in which differences in mortality arise from differences in early influenza exposures by birth cohort, has much more support.

But it does not *want* to do that. It has the personality and confidence of a 10x coder, and *absolutely lies to your face* to maintain the illusion.

It races to establish huge frameworks, call up parallel agents, and build you something that gives an output.

Removed datasets: "Percent Positivity of Viral Detections Among Enrolled Children in the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN), Acute Respiratory Illnesses (ARI), 2017–Present" and "Pathogen Detections Among Enrolled Children in the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN), Acute Respiratory Illnesses (ARI), 12 Month Rolling Period"

Chart showing the deletion of data from the CDC's website over time, it starts with 1,488 items last year and currently stands at 1,398 items.

NEW: I just observed two interesting data deletions from the CDC's website. Both having to do with vaccine surveillance in children. There's nothing about these datasets that would have tripped any "gender" flags.

You can still download them from our site: www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/t...

Just few days left to apply to one of these postdoc positions in my infectious disease modelling Unit at @pasteur.fr in Paris!

Coauthors are Bjarke Nielsen, Emily Howerton, and Bryan Grenfell. This work was mostly funded by the Life Sciences Research Foundation and NIH. Daniel is no longer on social media but is happy to answer any questions. [8/8]

Overall, quantifying pathogen resilience offers a new perspective on understanding how pathogens respond to both large and small perturbations. These insights have important implications for pathogen persistence, prediction, and model validation. [7/8]

We've focused on resilience in the context of large perturbations. We also showed that resilience determines how sensitive a system is to smaller stochastic perturbations, with less resilient systems exhibiting greater deviations from deterministic trajectories under demographic stochasticity. [6/8]

What determines how resilient a pathogen is? It depends on the per-capita rate of replenishment of the susceptible population. Faster replenishment = more resilient dynamics, where the rate of replenishment depends on the duration of immunity and basic reproduction number (R0). [5/8]

We estimated that common respiratory pathogens are much more resilient than vaccine-preventable infections, such as measles. Our predictions about pathogen return also closely match the observed deviations (or lack thereof) from the pre-COVID dynamics of respiratory pathogens. [4/8]

We analyzed relevant time series data from Hong Kong, Canada, Korea, and the US. By quantifying the resilience of common respiratory pathogens, we could predict when each pathogen would eventually return to its pre-pandemic dynamics. [3/8]

COVID-19 interventions disrupted the circulation of many pathogens. To understand if and when they might return to pre-pandemic patterns, we developed a framework for quantifying the rate of return to pre-pandemic patterns—a measure of pathogen resilience in a given host population. [2/8]

Sang Woo (Daniel) Park and I are excited to share a new preprint, "Susceptible host dynamics explain pathogen resilience to perturbations" [1/8]

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...