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Benjamin Mazer
1.4K posts
Benjamin Mazer
@BenMazer
Doctor, pathologist, and medical journalist. This is a personal account.
Baltimore, MD Katılım Aralık 2009
2.3K Takip Edilen13.8K Takipçiler
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The same cycle that contributed to Prasad’s ousting appears to be expanding to others in leadership. It’s relentless criticism across news and social media that centers on narratives around individuals rather than engaging with the reasoning behind decisions.
The risk is not only losing good people, but also deterring those who care about standards from stepping into or staying in these roles. That’s a problem for the institution, not just the individuals, and by extension for all who care about maintaining standards.
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Imagine how hard it must be to communicate nuanced public health messages in an unfriendly media environment.
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If you can’t get your message across in an adversarial environment, you can’t succeed in modern public health. Just the (sad?) truth.
Benjamin Mazer@BenMazer
The medical contrarians now in power seem a bit surprised that not everyone is giving them the benefit of the doubt or always interpreting their actions in the best possible light. I do wonder if it has occurred to them that they once did the same thing to public officials.
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Looking forward to the follow up lecture on how COVID came from a wet market. No one appreciates open scientific debate like Dr. Bhattacharya.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD@NIHDirector_Jay
🔬Scientific progress depends on discovery, but also the freedom to question, debate, and examine evidence wherever it leads. In the spirit of that ideal, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of our NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series, an exciting new forum aimed at advancing transparency, rigor, and open scientific inquiry. Please join me March 20 at 2:30pm ET for our inaugural talk, titled “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19” featuring a conversation with Matt Ridley, D.Phil. Guests can attend in person at the Masur Auditorium in NIH Building 10 or online via the NIH videocast page. bit.ly/3PsHAu5
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Nothing says scientific freedom like inviting someone you already agree with.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD@NIHDirector_Jay
🔬Scientific progress depends on discovery, but also the freedom to question, debate, and examine evidence wherever it leads. In the spirit of that ideal, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of our NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series, an exciting new forum aimed at advancing transparency, rigor, and open scientific inquiry. Please join me March 20 at 2:30pm ET for our inaugural talk, titled “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19” featuring a conversation with Matt Ridley, D.Phil. Guests can attend in person at the Masur Auditorium in NIH Building 10 or online via the NIH videocast page. bit.ly/3PsHAu5
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“Focused on rebuilding” trust
Andrew Nixon@AndrewNixonHHS
When public health agencies (those like Michigan) abandoned basic principles like informed consent and transparency, in favor of draconian toddler mask mandates and coercion, trust eroded. Once lost, it takes time to rebuild, which is what we are focused on doing.
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How ironic that Kennedy is a lawyer yet he broke the law.
Dr. Gator@DrJoelGator
How ironic is it that Kennedy “isn’t qualified” to lead HHS because he’s not an MD— … But a random judge in Boston is “qualified” to override the work of the HHS Secretary, government departments, medical committees, and countless physicians?
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@AndrewNixonHHS @Reuters The current administration is precipitating a massive loss of trust in the government’s childhood vaccine schedule but in MAHA land 2025 simply doesn’t exist.
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🧵This article misses the big picture. @Reuters points to a single year of state level data while ignoring the larger structural collapse of trust in our healthcare system caused by Democrat-led pandemic policies. Trust in our healthcare system collapsed under the previous admin, falling from 71% in 2020 to about 40% by 2024.
Reuters@Reuters
Michigan's 2025 drop in childhood vaccination rates represents about 4,500 additional toddlers with an increased vulnerability to serious illness, according to a Reuters analysis of state data reut.rs/4sB0XQF
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The current administration is precipitating a massive loss of trust in the government’s childhood vaccine schedule but in MAHA land 2025 simply doesn’t exist.
Andrew Nixon@AndrewNixonHHS
🧵This article misses the big picture. @Reuters points to a single year of state level data while ignoring the larger structural collapse of trust in our healthcare system caused by Democrat-led pandemic policies. Trust in our healthcare system collapsed under the previous admin, falling from 71% in 2020 to about 40% by 2024.
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Once again Kennedy and co's "informed consent" hypocrisy is on display, as HHS has no problem recommending colon cancer prevention measures, but struggles to make simple recommendations about vaccines.
Of course, these guys are flat-out anti-vaxxers so it shouldn't surprise us.
HHS@HHSGov
We stand alongside every American courageously battling colon or rectal cancer and honor those who lost their lives to the disease. This Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, we are encouraged by breakthroughs in screening and care that can save lives as well as the national revival of interest in healthy eating, exercise, and other lifestyle choices that can help prevent all types of cancer. whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat…
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Notable,the new "simple" dietary guidelines discouraging consumption of ultra-processed foods did not actually define what an ultra-processed food is.
AnechoicMedia@AnechoicMedia_
Ultraprocessed food isn't a coherent scientific concept and the attempts to formalize it have been a joke, as with the scale used in this study. Slice a potato and bake it: Unprocessed (Group 1) Slice a potato and fry it: "Ultraprocessed" (Group 4) Nuts: Unprocessed Nuts, salted: "Processed" (Group 3) Homogenized, pasteurized milk: Unprocessed Milk churned with sugar into ice cream: "Processed" This is a search for a scientific-sounding language to describe why one set of foods is nutritionally suspect, but in moralizing terms of how it was created by an industrial system, rather than characterizing food impacts directly by nutritional content or satiety. They can't just call the system "added sugar" because that's too obvious and not morally satisfying.
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the nice thing is that now you can kinda publish your writing wherever and it gets taken seriously, I read as much good stuff on unedited newsletters as print magazines
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@jsm2334 @doritmi @DschlopesIsBack This isn’t “people,” it’s the FDA. Symptomatic infection, ie disease, was the original trial endpoint.
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@BenMazer @doritmi @DschlopesIsBack Yes although people use those interchangeably and the boundary is not always clearly defined.
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Branch Covidians: “Nobody ever said that the vaccines prevent transmission of Covid-19."
Literally Pfizer: (This post is still up today) 🤡
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Naive people use terms like "prevent transmission", which implies 100% effectiveness.
After rollout, vaccines clearly DID reduce risk of infection and transmission -- since it was not 100% effective, it did not "prevent" or "stop" transmission altogether, but it mitigated it.
And of course with waning antibodies and emergence of immune escape variants, the VE vs. infection (and transmission) decreased greatly over time -- but that does not change the fact it was high in 2021 after rollout -- which is significant since that time was the heart of the pandemic in which hospitalization/death rates from C19 were by far the highest (especially for unvaccinated!)
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