Tyler G. James, PhD, MCHES

So this happened... Useful if you want to make economic (and health) arguments about the importance of NIH.

Young people need to understand what RFK Jr. just did

Before Obamacare, insurance companies could deny you coverage for CHEMOTHERAPY because you had acne as a teenager. They considered PREGNANCY a pre-existing condition. Childhood asthma too. And could deny you.

This is bad.

Heard from #AHRQ that the entire grants staff has been let go! They are unable to issue funds for grants already funded, let alone fund new grants. This is outrageous and will make Americans poorer and sicker. Why? A brief thread about just some recent AHRQ-funded research: #MedSky #HealthPolicy

Exclusive | RFK Jr. to Oust Advisory Panel on Cancer Screenings, HIV Prevention Drugs The task force determines which preventive services insurers must cover at no cost to patients.

Oh, for fuck's sake. We knew this was coming after Braidwood, though. We have the most anti-health health secretary imaginable.

www.wsj.com/health/healt...

Data manipulation within the US Federal Government A US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in ...

🚨 Lancet report to highlight: 49% of 232 US public health datasets were quietly altered this year. Most changes? Swapping “gender” for “sex.” Only 13% logged it. Silent edits undermine data integrity and trust.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Trump’s EPA has:

-Killed $15 million in research into forever chemicals in farmlands
-Attempted to roll back forever chemical limits in drinking water
-Delayed rules requiring corporations to report their forever chemical usage

How does this “make America healthy again”?

Brett Hankison fired 10 shots into Breonna Taylor’s Louisville home.

He was convicted of civil rights violations.

Trump regime is recommending a ONE day sentence.

It was an illegal entry. He fired through closed blinds.

An innocent black woman lost her life.

This is not justice. This is racism

Spatial-Structural Disparities in Acute Care Accessibility Among Latin American Immigrants and Spanish Speakers in the Rural US South - Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Given that rural hospital closures in the USA have increasingly occurred in rural communities with higher-than-median shares of Latinx residents, this study examines disparities in travel times to acc...

New paper! In collaboration with health behavior, health services researchers, and geographers, I examined differential access to acute care at the nexus of ethnicity, immigration status, and language dominance among rural-dwelling Latine people in the South link.springer.com/article/10.1...

My K01 scored 1st percentile last summer. Hasn’t been funded because AHRQ didn’t disburse funds under continuing resolution. Career downers for sure.

This blog post is almost 3 years old but I still use these #rstats tips in my work to this day. :)

cghlewis.com/blog/dict_cl...

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

New York Times headline: EPA Plans to Reconsider a Ban on Cancer-Causing Asbestos

What is this—Make Asbestos Great Again? www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/u...

Happy Juneteenth!
A day to remember freedom won and freedom still being fought for.

These Black public health heroes deserve to be known and celebrated. Their legacies shape our work today — and our future.

#Juneteenth #PublicHealthSavesLives

publichealth.nyu.edu/events-news/...

If you’re documenting the ICE atrocities, make sure to back up your data.

Don’t assume it’s safe in the cloud or on social media.

Keep a copy (or multiple copies).

I also strongly recommend journaling what you witnessed by hand if possible.

Tell your story. The world is watching.

More from Judge Young, who has previously expressed concerns with NIH's broad cuts:

"I have concerns about even-handedness. This is healthcare. I have concerns about Black Americans. I have concerns about women. I have concerns about legitimate gender issues having to do with health."

Oh man, what a self-own. A govt lawyer brought up DEI in passing, Judge Young was Not Happy:

"If putting these words together, DEI, is somehow offensive... does that mean our policy is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion?

Are you going to stand there and tell me that's now the policy of the NIH?"

Work requirements penalize workers in volatile occupations Elizabeth Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, and Olivia Howard warn that work requirements, such as those Congress is currently considering adding or expanding in means-tested programs, penalize low-income w...

Low-income workers don't control their hours, which means Medicaid work requirements will hurt them even though they're doing everything they can to work. See this important Brookings analysis. www.brookings.edu/articles/wor...

Scientific societies should be leading the charge when it comes to advocating for science funding, federal scientific employees, and academic freedom in this moment.

I am paying close attention who is and who isn’t, and making decisions about membership and future conference attendance accordingly.

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

quote on a dark blue and purple background from Sudip S. Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), criticizing proposed cuts to science funding in the FY26 U.S. federal budget. The quote reads: “If enacted, the FY26 budget request would end America’s global scientific leadership. The cuts to science would imperil our nation’s future health, security and prosperity. This budget proposal stands in stark contrast to the President’s call for a renewed commitment to American scientific leadership. Congress has demonstrated a bipartisan commitment to investment in research and must do so again to answer the President’s call.” The quote is attributed to Sudip S. Parikh, CEO of AAAS and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals. The AAAS logo appears at the bottom right.

I don't think anyone outside of universities, pharma and biotech, independent research institutions have any idea of what is happening right now. If you haven't sounded the alarm among your friends, family and colleagues, now is the time to do it.

The story of Alma Bowman, a disabled woman and US citizen detained by ICE, keeps getting worse

She’s been in the country for 50 years. They took her wheelchair, denied her medications & threw her in a detention facility in Georgia

Did you know she was a whistle blower against forced sterilization?

Further resources on the interpretation of null results.

A dataset was generated showing simulated data points in two groups A and B. Group A follows a normal distribution with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 1, while Group B exhibits a bimodal distribution, characterized by peaks at 9 and 11 with a standard deviation of 0.5. As shown in the figure (A), barplots often fail to capture the true distribution of the data. Although boxplots in (B) provide more insights into the data distribution compared to barplots, violin plots in (C) and raincloud plots in (D) provide a more accurate representation of the actual data distribution. Reproducible code to generate this figure is available at https://osf.io/mk5qa/.

Table 4. Overview of effect sizes for popular statistical models, with descriptions and software tools for estimation

Papers are one-way conversations. Getting additional info from authors can be hard, so clear reporting from the outset is critical.

In our new preprint, we (@annalschubert.bsky.social, Meike Steinhilber & @heeminkang.bsky.social) propose a set of psych reporting guidelines osf.io/preprints/ps...

Everyone 6 months and older is eligible to get a flu vaccine.

It makes no sense to restrict Covid vaccines to only people who have specific medical conditions.

The FDA is basing its decisions on politics, not science.

I just left a comment.

If you are concerned that RFK Jr.'s FDA chief Marty Makary is limiting the Novavax COVID booster to those over 65 or with underlying conditions, and may do the same for Pfizer/Moderna as well, consider leaving a comment as well.

“you should have a choice” means “we get to choose for you”

44% of all American children benefit from Medicaid or SNAP.

Republicans' budget guts both programs.

Yes: the so-called "party of family values" is putting 34 MILLION kids' health care access and food security at risk.

MAP demands accountability after destruction of Gaza's only specialised cancer hospital - occupied Palestinian territory News and Press Release in English on occupied Palestinian territory about Health and Protection and Human Rights; published on 22 Mar 2025 by MAP

In parallel: Gaza no longer has any functioning cancer hospitals, in part, due to the US taxpayer-funded weapons reliefweb.int/report/occup...

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

People should be calling their Senators and Members of Congress to push back on this (particularly if those folks are Republicans), and/but I wish this article had noted that the relevant provision is overwhelmingly likely to be removed from the bill in the Senate as a violation of the Byrd Rule.

DOGE: prosecute, jail time

This is horrific. the DOGE boys are not just doing destruction of biomedical research, they're doing fundamental attacks against humanity.