Bill Hanage

What We Know About the C.D.C. Shooting in Atlanta

I’m horrified by the scant coverage this story has received www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/u...

BeMeal - get a notification at a random time and upload a selfie of yourself eating something within 2 minutes. If you don’t you can only eat once more that day

#BadAppIdeas

You are not alone!

Why do Starbucks lines at the airport move at 1/3rd the speed of elsewhere?

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

On Vaccines, Kennedy Has Broken Sharply With the Mainstream

The mainstream, the slipstream, the upstream and downstream

Certainly the datastream

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/h...

(And I confess I found the pronunciation of his name challenging at first!)

I’ve not heard much from @jeremykonyndyk.bsky.social since Covid, but good to hear the shout out on the podcast!

Yep that’s why BA.2.86 was so important too

That’s basically right. Variants make a difference for the amplitude of the wave, but the approach is relatively agnostic to that. And it’s hard to explain why evolution would show periodicity, or why winter temperatures would matter for it!

Similar findings, but among other things more sims and reframing to specifically consider role of variants

Seasonal forcing and waning immunity drive the sub-annual periodicity of the COVID-19 epidemic Seasonal trends in infectious diseases are shaped by climatic and social factors, with many respiratory viruses peaking in winter. However, the seasonality of COVID-19 remains in dispute, with signifi...

It’s been a few weeks since posting, but delighted to share this updated preprint for anyone interested www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Because of course buffer is the right control for an experiment to test whether purified samples of deep sea phage are a specific risk for “dysbiosis”, as opposed to oh I dunno. How about purified samples of phage from the mouse gut?

🤣

Children around the world face a death sentence because o... As Robert Kennedy Jr amplifies vaccination fears, beyond America millions of people will die unnecessarily from infectious disease

Yes, it’s not just American children at grave risk… children worldwide will pay the price for the anti-vaccine nonsense unleashed by the US government

observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

No, the FDA did not actually fully approve Moderna's pediatric Covid-19 vaccine yesterday. Despite media headlines, a narrow approval was granted, which will make Moderna's vaccines far less available to children than they have been until now.

You may have seen news stories reporting that the FDA has approved Moderna’s Covid shot for ‘at risk’ kids, and thought that sounds like a sensible middle ground. It’s not, and this explains why insidemedicine.substack.com/p/no-the-fda...

Woah!

Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know | Rebecca Solnit We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – especially now

This from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social is really good on why we should not jump to conclusions, however tempting, because reality is complicated www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is clear eyed and thoughtful

And note - he has no stake at all in the game

“Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free?”

Happy birthday America - thinking of you

Just a reminder that saying something is “Gold standard” is much easier than working to make it as good as it can possibly be

Oooh yes!

RFK Jr's vaccine panel to review long-approved jabs for children Health experts have concerns about the new panel, which helps determine who gets vaccines in the US and when.

Bill Hanage @billhanage.bsky.social weighs in on RFK Jr’s newly appointed ACIP’s move to examine vaccines licensed seven or more years ago. Read more from BBC News at bit.ly/40rDoxk

Linkage-based ortholog refinement in bacterial pangenomes with CLARC Abstract. Bacterial genomes exhibit significant variation in gene content and sequence identity. Pangenome analyses explore this diversity by classifying g

New tool for pangenome analysis! CLARC refines bacterial gene clusters using functional annotation + linkage—not just sequence. New publication by @indragon.bsky.social & collaborators, advised by @mlipsitch.bsky.social & @billhanage.bsky.social. Read more at bit.ly/4ek0Y51

YouTube video by American Academy of Pediatrics AAP Steps up on Vaccine Recommendations

Bravo @ameracadpeds.bsky.social youtu.be/pb2ETtS65W0

Opinion | The Waste Musk Created

This from @nickkristof.bsky.social documents some of the damage done by Musk’s clumsy, heartless and foolish actions in the last few months. It is not a comfortable read, but nevertheless I recommend it www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/o...

What it’s really like … to know I’m going to miss my Harvard graduation because of Trump’s travel ban Like many other international students I have had my educational dreams suspended without reason – and learned plenty about racism and resilience

Deeply affecting article by an @hsph.harvard.edu PhD student denied the opportunity to graduate due to blanket exclusion of Sierra Leone citizens by the US Government. A very particular example of pointless cruelty by the US Government. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Restrictions had unequal impacts, but the pandemic itself did too. - Boston Review Adam Kucharski responds to Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee.

New piece on why it’s unhelpful to characterise COVID debate as ‘lockdowns are bad’ vs ‘lockdowns are good’ when it was really about people who claimed that COVID was 100x less fatal than it was + optimal to have a massive epidemic immediately before vaccine… vs those who sense checked these claims.

Paging @dieworkwear.bsky.social

(NB whatever other comments might be made on these clothing choices, they are not personal protective equipment as worn by professional scientists who are trained to handle risky materials)

I struggle to imagine a respectable scientist who would feel comfortable making such judgements outside their immediate experience.

Unless it’s not actually improving research, and simply a fig leaf to cover an assault on the rights guaranteed by the first amendment - at least until recently