Matthew Wheeler 🦋

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

Shell-shocked drivers advised to egg-cercise caution near Donner Gate after big rig crash This is no yolk... An "egg-spensive" crash may leave drivers in the Sierra shell-shocked early Thursday morning.A big-rig hauling eggs flipped into the center m

What a lede

mynews4.com/news/local/e...

Stanford Department of Medicine is recruiting a Division Chief for Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

If you're passionate about advancing digestive health and leading a dynamic team, I invite you to apply.

facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

The #tradewar is on. Real-time electricity prices doubled few minutes after midnight EST in New England. 🔌💡

My son Charlie — and the breakthrough that changed our lives James Coney and his wife, Sarah, struggled not knowing why their 12-year-old was born with a severe learning disability. In their darkest moments, they blamed themselves. Then, out of the blue, came a...

A few weeks ago, I had an incredibly emotional call with James Coney, a writer for the Sunday Times whose son Charlie was in the @genomicsengland.bsky.social 100k project and was recently diagnosed with ReNU syndrome. This beautiful article tells their story ❤️ www.thetimes.com/article/0bcc...

It has been 38 days since the last NIH meeting was posted in the Federal Register. Reminder to call your Senator and Representative.

Today is Rare Disease Day, and a great reminder of the importance of NIH and science funding in driving hope 🧬⬇️

www.rarediseaseday.org

But are the potatoes grown with Gatorade yet?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is "watching" the outbreak, which he described as "not unusual" during a Wednesday meeting of President Donald Trump's cabinet members. The health secretary did not provide specifics on how or if the federal agency is assisting on the ground.

CDC chart of measles cases, showing a profound drop off after the vaccine was introduced in 1963 and an elimination declared in 2000.

No one had died of measles in America for ten years, until yesterday.

That 2015 death in WA was preceded by a 12y period of no US deaths. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. says it’s “not unusual.” apnews.com/article/meas...

It is unusual. www.cdc.gov/measles/data...

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Title: What Costs More: Billionaire Tax Avoidance or Federal Workers? Subtitle: Musk’s tax avoidance could fund 677K federal jobs • Current Tax Rate: 3.27% • Top Federal Tax Rate: 37% Cost Comparison (Bar Chart): • Cost of Musk’s Tax Avoidance (smallest bar, purple) • Cost of Top 100 Billionaires’ Tax Avoidance (largest bar, red) • Total Federal Workforce Salaries (mid-sized bar, green) X-axis ranges from $0B to $380B, showing that billionaire tax avoidance covers a significant portion of federal workforce salaries. Impact on Federal Workforce: • Average Federal Salary: $106,000 • Jobs Musk’s Avoidance Could Fund: 677,782 (29.5% of all federal employees) Federal Workforce Breakdown (Pie Chart): • A segment representing 29.5% of the workforce highlights the share Musk’s avoided taxes could fund, labeled “Share Equal to Musk’s Avoided Taxes: 29.5%”. Sources: • Musk’s Tax Rate: ProPublica • Billionaire Gains: Bloomberg Billionaires Index (Dec. 31, 2024) • Federal Employee Data: USAFacts

How many federal workers would DOGE need to fire to make up for Musk not paying his fair share of taxes?

Answer: 677,000. That's 44% of the entire non-DoD federal workforce.

Again, this power grab is not about the budget. It’s about politics.

If the block on the Federal Register isn’t removed in the next few months, I fear a majority of labs will close within a year. This small procedural wrench has the power to kill US science indefinitely, losing an entire generation of discovery and innovation.

NIH awards have quite literally flatlined since the change in administration. Council meetings, where the decisions on which grants to fund are made, are being canceled daily. No meetings, no decisions, no grants. The freeze is most definitely on, folks.

UCSF ‘borders on panic’ facing potential Trump funding slash As the lead of the Center for AIDS Research at UCSF, Dr. Monica Gandhi is spending the month in a world of devastating “what-ifs.”

Joe DeRisi: "The feeling within the university, from my perspective, has been one that borders on panic"

missionlocal.org/2025/02/ucsf...

I'm Blake Gendebien, the dairy farmer running to replace Elise Stefanik in #NY21

This election will be tough, but I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and get the job done. Will you?

✅Follow me
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✅Ask your friends to follow
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“The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”

This is the message we need to send at #TeslaTakedown protests today: we know Tesla's trillion dollar valuation is built on fraud and abuse, and we are coming for it. We will make Tesla ownership a taboo, cars and stock, unthinkable to anyone who believes in the basic values of the U.S. constitution

"A democracy becomes an oligarchy when the rich figure out how to pervert the laws for themselves...this is plain even to a blind man."
- Plato, Republic - approximately 350 BC

Trump maintains funding freeze at NIH, defying court order The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information.

BREAKING

The Trump administration is maintaining a funding freeze at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in defiance of two federal court orders.

The ongoing freeze was confirmed by an NIH official and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information.

Researcher views on returning results from multi-omics data to research participants: insights from The Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) Study - BMC Medical Ethics Background There is growing consensus in favor of returning individual specific research results that are clinically actionable, valid, and reliable. However, deciding what and how research results sh...

📑 New paper alert! Our work on returning #multi-omics results to research participants

Key message-We need better systems and policies for returning research results in the multi-omics era

🙏 Thanks to my team of co-authors for tackling this complex issue in #researchethics

🔗 tinyurl.com/3hzc587m

National homemade soup day

Federal workers day

A stock exchange

Have searched LinkedIn for private sector employment outside of academia

Have wasted (taxpayer) time and money traveling to an abruptly cancelled or postponed meeting

Have been ghosted by HHS staff for group or individual discussions or meetings

Have spoken with a junior group member who have new worries about their funding or immigration status

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