Claire P. Smith

NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women The Women’s Health Initiative has produced numerous influential findings

I don't get how anyone can possibly be okay with ending the WHI. This study has accrued decades of data from 42000 women and it is still going. It helps to address critical research gaps that have been allowed to go unfilled because of durable misogyny and provides invaluable insight into aging.

The White House has turned COVID.gov from a public health resource into a politically charged platform promoting the lab-leak theory and attacking specific scientists and the pandemic response in general. Let’s fact check its 5 headline claims… 🧵

Opinion | The Uncertain Fate of the Young American Scientist Young researchers are choosing between staying in science or staying in the United States.

I fear there will be a missing generation of scientists and the effect of that absence may resonate for years if not decades to come.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/o...

Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs.

Find out how your community may be impacted.

Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org

a 🧵

NIH Grants Fueled $95 Billion In FY 2024 Economic Activity, Finds New Report National Institutes of Health grants generated almost $95 billion in economic activity nationwide in FY 2024 according to a new report by United for Medical Research.

New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024.

That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved.

Show me a better investment than that.
www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

This is doubly disappointing considering this is the most adorable flu vaccination campaign I have ever seen.

The audacity to take this stance while also pushing an anti-vax health secretary pick makes me want to scream at the sky

“Our ethical obligations do not vary according to the whims of politicians. We must forcefully take a stand against these profound violations” It feels fitting that this is my first publication since getting tenure; it is my duty to speak up. So grateful to @martinmckee.bsky.social for co-authoring

Pandemic monitoring with global aircraft-based wastewater surveillance networks - Nature Medicine By simulating the implementation of airport-based wastewater surveillance sites at the global level, a modeling study shows how this early warning system would perform in identifying sources of pandem...

Wastewater from airplane toilets?
We introduce a global Aircraft-Based Wastewater Surveillance Network (WWSN) for pandemic monitoring in Nature Medicine 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Aircraft-based wastewater surveillance allows for real-time, non-invasive monitoring of global pathogen spread
Short 🧵

Trump Administration Live Updates: Nearly All USAID Jobs Are Said to Be Cut (Gift Article)

Everyone who doesn't oppose this has blood on their hands. I will always welcome those who want to wash it off. But the longer you wait, the harder and more painful it will be to scrub.

Opinion | There Is No Going Back The president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was.

Yeah so the Constitution isn’t really in effect right now

Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders National Science Foundation staff have been combing through thousands of active science research projects, alongside a list of keywords, to determine if they include activities that violate Trump’s ex...

The words on this list are deeply telling. Censorship of science in an attempt to make it conform to an specific ideological agenda is incredibly dystopian.

www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

Ebola and a Decade of Disparities — Forging a Future for Global Health Equity | NEJM Since the 2014–2016 West African Ebola outbreak, there have been numerous proposals and promises to reform global health infrastructure. Yet inequity remains deeply entrenched.

It’s a really tough time to make an argument for equity and global health

Which means it’s the most important time to make an argument for equity in global health

Read, share, and envision our safer, better future

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

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

Many people have asked me how can they best stay informed and protect their health while we navigate the indefinite pause on communications from NIH, CDC, & FDA. Here’s a thread on concrete steps YOU can take to protect yourself & your community. 🧵

The "Miracle" of the Polio Vaccine | Think Global Health Polio expert Walter Orenstein speaks about the important legacy of the polio vaccine following efforts to undermine it

Walter Orenstein on miracles:

www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/mira...

"I was 7 years old in 1955 when the Salk polio vaccine became available. I was a real anti-vaxxer, not wanting a shot for something I knew nothing about. My mother said to me, 'Better you should cry, than I should cry.'"

Rwanda’s Marburg response is a masterclass in how to prevent pandemics Today marks the official end of the outbreak. Swift action saved many lives and helped protect the rest of the world from potential disaster

Rwanda’s Marburg response is a masterclass in how to prevent pandemics www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

Don't drink raw milk, folks.

Sex, a Hex and a Sick Child Offer Clues to an Epidemic’s Birth (Gift Article) In a remote Congolese town, a medical mystery led to the discovery of alarming changes in the mpox virus and, eventually, to a global health emergency.

This brilliant article on mpox *perfectly* encapsulates all the challenges and complexities of responding to outbreaks in places like rural DR Congo.

Access, resources, stigma, and so much more.

Gift link below. Wonderful reporting @stephanienolen.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/h...

WHO sheds some light on factors possibly at play in DRC outbreak The WHO has shed some light on factors possibly at play in a mysterious outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The lab results from Panzi, DRC still aren't in — for completely understandable reasons — so it's not yet known what is causing the outbreak there. But an update from @who.int suggests known diseases exacerbated by severe malnutrition could be the cause. www.statnews.com/2024/12/08/d...

Serodynamics: A primer and synthetic review of methods for epidemiological inference using serological data We present a review and primer of methods to understand epidemiological dynamics and identify past exposures from serological data, referred to as ser…

Are you interested in analysing serological data for infectious disease epidemiology? Check out our new review article on serodynamics! With Saki Takahashi at JHU and Isobel Routledge at UCSF. (See next comment if you're into serology modeling) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

an orange and white cat is playing with a cardboard box ALT: an orange and white cat is playing with a cardboard box

Epidemiologists be like

"What's happening with this mystery illness in the Congo"

I've gotten this text dozens of times in the past few days.

Here's what we know. What we don't.

And what really matters 🧵

paramix : An R package for parameter discretisation in compartmental models, with application to calculating years of life lost Compartmental infectious disease models are used to calculate disease transmission, estimate underlying rates, forecast future burden, and compare benefits across intervention scenarios. These models ...

Congrats to team member Carl Pearson and his co-authors @lucygoodfellow.bsky.social and @mert0248.bsky.social. An important tool for a pervasive problem in modeling infectious disease data www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

You're very welcome! Thanks for the work you do!

Official statement from the #DRC Ministry of Health on an unknown disease with 376 cases and 76 deaths since Oct 24, 2024 in Kwango.

Symptoms include fever, headache, anemia, and respiratory issues.

Monitoring closely—could be many things. More details needed.

Translation via Google translate

Humanity’s history is a battle against infectious diseases. And for most of our history we were losing very decisively.

From my article about vaccines:
ourworldindata.org/microbes-bat...