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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The American academic research engine has long been the envy of the world. Generally well-funded, labs in the United States have been able to attract the best minds who generate breakthroughs and train the next generation workforce that powers the U.S. economy. But since the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025, new federal policies have destabilized the American scientific enterprise.
The disruption generated by the Trump administration’s funding, DEI and visa policies has been well reported by the media. On an individual level, though, what do academic researchers think of all these changes and how have they been directly affected?
We are researchers affiliated with Arizona State University’s scientist opinion panel survey, known as SciOPS, a 5-year research program designed to monitor, understand and improve how scientists communicate with the public. We wanted to know more about the reality inside today’s universities as researchers grapple with Trump administration policies.
Along with our colleagues, we fielded a survey of randomly sampled members of the academic science community participating in the SciOPS panel. We obtained responses from 280 scientists from several fields, including biology, chemistry, civil and environmental engineering, computer and information science engineering, geography and public health from 131 universities.
Our results show dramatic, mostly negative, effects of federal policy changes on researchers, the research system and American competitiveness.
Any research enterprise thrives because of its ability to fund cutting-edge science and thus attract highly motivated, well-trained people. Since the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, just over half of the scientists in our survey report that their overall funding has declined.
Declines in federal funding have had knock-on effects. Around one-quarter of scientists reported that state and local and university internal funding have also declined. Another 9% reported that internal funding has increased, presumably as universities have provided emergency funds to researchers to support critical studies.
According to the scientists who responded to our survey, Trump administration policies have also affected the scientific workforce pipeline, hampering their ability to recruit internationally and domestically.
We hypothesize that these hiring issues can be related to visa and immigration policies, which make it difficult for international graduate students and postdocs to work in the U.S. or attend international conferences. Just over half of scientists in our survey reported that international students or postdocs have expressed concerns to them about deportation.
Concerns about longer-term career impacts are also to blame for trouble recruiting the next generation of researchers. Over 80% of surveyed scientists reported that graduate students or postdocs on their research team have increased concerns about future job prospects.
These impacts have taken a toll on scientists’ professional work environment and overall outlook. Over two-thirds reported more work-related stress and almost half reported increased workloads since January 2025. About half reported decreased work motivation.
We found scientists’ responses to be a mixture of resilience, acquiescence and considering an exit.
While many scientists said they were less motivated at work, most reported no change in their efforts to obtain federal research funding. Small proportions did report successfully increasing their efforts to obtain funding from non-federal sources.
Our survey also asked scientists whether they had taken any self-censoring actions since January 2025 due to concern over potential negative consequences for their work or career. Over half reported having reviewed or adjusted key words in research proposals, and almost half said they’d reframed research topics. Forty-three percent had also cautioned students or collaborators to be careful what they say publicly and more than a third had abandoned plans on one or more research topics.
Although scientists are adopting strategies to cope with the new challenges, nearly two-thirds of the scientists in our sample appear to be considering one or more other career options.
Scientists and engineers in our sample have strong opinions about the impacts of current U.S. science policy. A large majority (87%) believe the administration’s actions have influenced research priorities more than previous administrations. Most scientists in our survey had a negative opinion of the Trump administration’s overall changes to science policy.
Scientists in our sample believed that administration policies have had a negative effect on the future scientific workforce and the ability of scientists and engineers in the U.S. to produce breakthroughs and discoveries and contribute to national welfare.
Large majorities believe these policies have harmed public perceptions of the integrity of U.S. scientists (85%) and hurt public trust in science (84%).
Academic scientists’ reactions to the Trump administration’s changes to science policy are perhaps not surprising given the perceived level of threat these actions represent to the research community. What is less certain is whether the dramatic changes we are currently witnessing – cuts to grant funding, politicization of research, downsizing of federal agencies, restrictive immigration policies, attacks on the autonomy of higher education and more – are temporary or if they represent the initial phase of a transition to a new research environment with less federal support for American science.
Eric Welch is Professor and Director, Center for Science, Technology & Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University and Timothy P. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of Public Administration at University of Illinois Chicago
Filed Under: academics, donald trump, research, science, science policy
The fuckery that is going on across HHS and vaccine programs is just plain incredible. As the Trump administration continues to provide whatever cover it can so that RFK Jr. can wreck shop on the health of Americans, the damage Kennedy is doing to our inoculation programs is going to take years, if not decades, to unwind. Led by a man who doesn’t believe in the foundational theory of modern medicine, America’s health agencies have begun to engage in direct misinformation campaigns via the censorship of real scientific information. Warnings about bogus autism treatments were removed from FDA websites. The CDC buried a report demonstrating how effective COVID vaccines are under dubious justifications.
And now it seems that it’s the FDA’s turn to likewise hide studies about the safety of COVID and shingles vaccines from the public.
The Food and Drug Administration blocked the publication of several studies supporting the safety of vaccines against Covid and shingles in recent months, a Health and Human Services Department spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. FDA scientists worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records for the studies, which found side effects of the shots to be rare, The New York Times first reported on Tuesday.
In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid shot studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals, the Times reported. In February, top FDA officials did not sign off on submitting study abstracts on Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a drug safety conference, the paper added.
Now, spokespeople for HHS have stated that the studies were withdrawn because either they drew conclusions not supported by the data, or that the designs of the studies were done “outside of the agency’s purview.”
That’s bullshit. We all know it’s bullshit. And they know that we know it’s bullshit. And they simply don’t care, because this is not about medicine, or health, or even traditional politics. This is about the ego of one man, Kennedy, and his cohort of tinfoil hat wearing bumblefucks.
As the New York Times article itself quotes knowledgeable professors of medicine, this is censorship.
Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, a Harvard University medical professor who studies F.D.A. regulation, said he had worked with the agency on a number of research papers and found its work to meet “the highest standards of scientific investigation.” He suggested that the request to pull the papers was an act of “censorship.”
He added: “At any other time in history, this would be a major scandal that would lead to congressional hearings and resignations of leadership, and I hope that’s what happens next.”
These studies were seen by people who know what they’re talking about in the pre-publication stage. It’s not just Kesselheim who is pointing out that these studies seem both perfectly valid and very useful for evaluating the safety and efficacy of these vaccines. And the conclusions they draw are as full-throated as they are at odds with Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense.
Take one study, which worked to examine millions of health records for those who received a COVID shot at anywhere from 6 months old to 64 years old.
That study examined the records of 4.2 million Covid vaccine recipients and examined their later experience with 17 conditions, including swelling of the brain, major blood clots, stroke and heart attacks. The study found rare cases of fever-related seizures and myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, known to be associated with Covid vaccines.
“Given the available evidence, F.D.A. continues to conclude the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” the study said.
Angela Rasmussen, an editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said the paper had been withdrawn by the authors.
Dr. Caleb Alexander, a drug safety and methodology expert at Johns Hopkins University, reviewed both studies at the request of The Times and said that “no study answers every question” but “there is nothing inherently problematic regarding these reports.”
The point earlier was a good one: this is god damned scandal. Or, rather, it should be, except the talking heads on our televisions are far too busy covering every other scandal or ginned up controversy the administration creates, and more than half of our elected officials can’t be bothered to do real political combat out of fear of who knows what. And so the health of Americans is put at risk instead, because our government is made up of an unholy combination of crackpots and cowards.
At this point, I could be convinced that Kennedy and some portion of the government is actually attempting to cause people to die. I can’t understand another coherent motivation for this kind of censorship of scientific information, other than pure ego.
And if one man’s ego really is standing in the way of getting us back on track on matters of life and death, then impeach Kennedy and let’s get back to sanity. This really isn’t that complicated.
Filed Under: covid vaccines, fda, health & human services, rfk jr., science, shingles, shingles vaccine, studies, vaccines
The Trump administration’s war on science has been a furious one. Be it deep cuts to scientific research, policies that ignore scientific research, or the appointment of deeply unscientific people to lead scientific cabinet positions, it seems that Trump thinks that knowledge is the enemy.
You will recall how RFK Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP vaccination panel last summer. It became obvious in the aftermath why he did so, after installing a cadre of anti-vaxxers to replace them and moving to shift immunization policy away from vaccines at the federal level. Trump appears to have taken a page from Kennedy’s playbook, as he recently terminated the entire board of the National Science Foundation days ago.
All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email on Friday. The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the president and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.
Members received a two-sentence email saying that, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.”
The post is filled with commentary from the board members and others pointing out that this leaves America with a gaping hole of leadership from a scientific advisory standpoint. The NSB advises both the Executive and Legislative branches. Trump has also nominated Jim O’Neill, an investor, to be the next Director of NSF. There is speculation that this move was done as a way to clear the field for O’Neill to replace them with hand-picked members that will further his tech bro agenda. He also already works for the federal government as Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of HHS.
But maybe the explanation for the timing here is much more simple: Trump may have caught wind of a forthcoming NSB report about America falling behind in scientific research.
Multiple dismissed members believe the timing was deliberate, as the board was finalizing a report highlighting a widening U.S.–China gap in research and development spending. The report addresses areas central to Trump’s stated priorities, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the Moon race, but underscores lagging U.S. investment. Critics suggest the administration may seek a board more aligned with short-term political goals rather than long-term, exploratory research.
Now that sounds more like the Donald Trump I’ve come to know. This is less likely to be 4D chess at work then he simply didn’t want to be embarrassed by this report. There’s a simple test for whether that was part of the impetus here. If that same report does get finalized eventually and gets released, then it wasn’t. If we never get that report, it probably was. Simple.
But wasn’t isn’t simple is going to be digging ourselves out of the scientific debt that Trump is placing upon the country. If knowledge is power, as the saying goes, then America is less powerful today than it was before this administration.
Filed Under: donald trump, nsf, rfk jr., science, scientific research
Dr. Vinay Prasad is currently the FDA’s top vaccine regulator. He’s also one of many medical goons hand-picked by RFK Jr. to help lead his decidedly anti-vaxxer movement. In fact, the last time we discussed Prasad, it was over his selective censorship attempts at avoiding public criticism for his anti-vaxxer nonsense. If you show clips of Prasad spewing his anti-vaxxer views to critique them, he’ll have your YouTube channel axed. If you show those same clips to praise his nonsense, you get to continue on unmolested.
He’s an asshat, in other words. An anti-science, anti-medicine asshat. And he’s also someone who is unilaterally keeping us from making progress on vaccines, apparently out of pure joy in exercising such power.
Moderna is producing a new influenza vaccine, this one utilizing mRNA technology, a la the COVID vaccine. Moderna sent an application to the FDA for a review of the vaccine it has produced, as well as the data from the trials the company conducted to demonstrate its efficacy. We learned last week that the FDA flatly refused to review any of this data.
In a news release late Tuesday, Moderna said it was blindsided by the FDA’s refusal, which the FDA cited as being due to the design of the company’s Phase 3 trial for its mRNA flu vaccine, dubbed mRNA-1010. Specifically, the FDA’s rejection was over the comparator vaccine Moderna used.
In the trial, which enrolled nearly 41,000 participants and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Moderna compared the safety and efficacy of mRNA-1010 to licensed standard-dose influenza vaccines, including Fluarix, made by GlaxoSmithKline. The trial found that mRNA-1010 was superior to the comparators.
Moderna said the FDA reviewed and accepted its trial design on at least two occasions (in April 2024 and again in August 2025) before it applied for approval of mRNA-1010. It also noted that Fluarix has been used as a comparator vaccine in previous flu vaccine trials, which tested vaccines that went on to earn approval.
This looks for all the world like Moderna did what it was supposed to do in getting the proper sign-offs from the FDA to conduct its trials. Prasad himself sent the refusal notice to Moderna, however, and cited within it that the trials Moderna conducted, which were signed off on by the FDA, were not appropriate. The letter didn’t bother to indicate why.
But in a letter dated February 3, Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator under the Trump administration, informed Moderna that the agency does not consider the trial “adequate and well-controlled” because the comparator vaccine “does not reflect the best-available standard of care.”
In its news release, Moderna noted that neither the FDA’s regulation nor its guidance to industry makes any reference to a requirement of the “best-available standard of care” in comparators.
Everyone at Moderna was understandably confused. The company has already reached out asking to meet with the FDA, ostensibly to sit down in a conference room with them, look them in the eye, and ask “wut?”.
The answer is unlikely to be satisfying. And it should be quite alarming to the rest of us. That’s because the rejection of a review of all of this data reportedly came from Prasad and Prasad alone, over the objections of his own scientists at the FDA.
Vinay Prasad, the Trump administration’s top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, single-handedly decided to refuse to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, overruling agency scientists, according to reports from Stat News and The Wall Street Journal.
Stat was first to report, based on unnamed FDA sources, that a team of career scientists at the agency was ready to review the vaccine and that David Kaslow, a top career official who reviews vaccines, even wrote a memo objecting to Prasad’s rejection. The memo reportedly included a detailed explanation of why the review should proceed.
According to those same sources, Prasad’s reason for refusing to review Moderna’s vaccine makes little sense. The story goes like this. As Moderna was seeking guidance for its trials for the vaccine, it chose a currently licensed flu vaccine against which to compare its own vaccine. At one point, the FDA suggested a different comparative vaccine be used. Moderna declined that suggestion and moved forward with the comparative vaccine it originally chose. Despite that difference the FDA reviewed the company’s plans for its trial on several occasions and at no point suggested its choices were a show-stopper.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Prasad is claiming that the choice Moderna made for a comparative vaccine, for which the company received only mild feedback from the FDA, is why the FDA is refusing to review this mRNA flu vaccine entirely.
Because that reasoning is almost certainly bullshit. As evidence of that, these same sources from within the FDA offered up this:
This wasn’t enough for Prasad, who, according to the Journal’s sources, told FDA staff that he wants to send more such refusal letters that appear to blindside drug developers. The review staff apparently pushed back, noting that such moves break with the agency’s practices and could open it up to being sued. Prasad reportedly dismissed concern over possible litigation. Trump’s FDA Commissioner Marty Makary seemed similarly unconcerned, suggesting on Fox News that Moderna’s trial may be “unethical.”
The explanation here is remarkably simple. This current government is being run by anti-vaxxers. And these anti-vaxxers are particularly anti-vaxxer-y about mRNA vaccines. And so folks like Prasad are throwing up every roadblock they can dream up to make it as difficult as possible to get new vaccines utilizing new technology approved. Or, as in this case, even reviewed.
Now, if that reads like the opposite of scientific progress to you, give yourself a gold star, because you’re right. Thomas Jefferson once said “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” when, hypocritically, discussing slavery in America. I think we should tremble for our country as well when I reflect that we are getting sicker as a nation, given that we have morons at the helm of the nation’s health.
Filed Under: fda, flu, flu vaccine, health & human services, mrna, rfk jr., science, vaccines, vinay prasad
Companies: moderna
The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he’s done to the CDC’s ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It’s really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill Cassidy, claimed they extracted promises from Kennedy that he wouldn’t screw with vaccination programs and the like. These were all lies, designed to get him past those hearings and into the post, where the GOP would close ranks and refuse to do anything so crazy like impeach a charlatan from a cabinet position.
This iteration of ACIP is a disaster. It is full of anti-vaxxers who have already altered the guidance on vaccines for COVID, Hep B, and childhood vaccines more generally. And this is all happening in the context of a measles outbreak that is now in month 13 and getting worse, despite that disease having been officially declared eliminated over two decades ago.
Well, as you know, retro and nostalgia are all the rage these days, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that ACIP is pining for other eliminated diseases to come back. In this case we have the chair of ACIP wondering out loud on a podcast whether we should be vaccinating for polio any longer.
The conversation started off with this absolute banger.
Kirk Milhoan, who was named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, appeared on the aptly named podcast “Why Should I Trust You.” In the hour-long interview, Milhoan made a wide range of comments that have concerned medical experts and raised eyebrows.
Early into the discussion, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, declared, “I don’t like established science,” and that “science is what I observe.” He lambasted the evidence-based methodology that previous ACIP panels used to carefully and transparently craft vaccine policy.
I barely know what to say. “I don’t like established science” is the kind of quote I would expect in The Onion, not on Ars Technica. As for the follow up line of “Science is what I observe,” that is a gross misrepresentation of the scientific process. Observation is certainly a part of the method. But you have to couple that observation with tedious and silly things like generating a hypothesis based on those observations, and then testing that hypothesis through rigorous and skeptical methodologies, typically experimentation.
To instead state his stance as he did on this podcast is lunacy. Milhoan went on to claim that vaccines had caused all kinds poor health outcomes, such as asthma, eczema, and deaths. Going even further, he claimed that measles and polio vaccines didn’t actually curtail the spread of those diseases, which flatly flies in the face of basic statistical analysis, before making the following jaw-dropping statement.
“I think also as you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then,” he said, referring to the time before the first polio vaccines were developed in the 1950s. “Our sanitation is different. Our risk of disease is different. And so those all play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not.”
Polio is no joke. While a large percentage of infections will present with little to no symptoms, it is an incredibly infectious virus. 6% of cases have more severe symptoms, including aseptic meningitis and paralysis. Infants infected can get encephalitis. It can result in horrific body deformations as well. The disease is so horrible that international health organizations created the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the 80s.
And this assclown, hand-picked by RFK Jr., wants to use his position on ACIP to question the need to vaccinate against it?
In a statement, AMA Trustee Sandra Adamson Fryhofer blasted the question. “This is not a theoretical debate—it is a dangerous step backward,” she said. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives and virtually eliminated devastating diseases like polio in the United States. There is no cure for polio. When vaccination rates fall, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death return. The science on this is settled.”
Fryhofer also took aim at Milhoan’s repeated argument that the focus of vaccination policy should move from population-level health to individual autonomy. Moving away from routine immunizations, which include discussions between clinicians and patients, “does not increase freedom—it increases suffering,” she said, adding that the weakening of recommendations “will cost lives.”
Yes it will. Milhoan may not like established science, but that science is established for a reason. It’s also trivially easy to go look up case rates for polio and measles before and after mass vaccination programs were put in place and see the results.
Moving to curtail vaccinations of polio should be as clear a line in the sand as could possibly exist for those overseeing this fiasco in Congress. The anti-vaxxer stuff thus far has been bad enough to warrant impeachment hearings for Kennedy. This would be something completely different.
Filed Under: acip, anti-vaxxers, evidence, health & human services, kirk milhoan, polio, rfk jr., science, vaccines
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage of RFK Jr., for instance. Recall all the topics on him alone that we’ve covered: his anti-vaxxer stances, his failures to advocate for his staff at HHS and its child agencies, his war on Tylenol, his swimming in a creek rife with human waste, his thoughts on sperm counts, his thoughts on circumcision, his hiring and firing practices at HHS, measles, ACIP, and goddamned chemtrails. How are you supposed to focus on anything meaningful in that cornucopia of chaos?
The problem is that it’s all interrelated. The overarching theme is that Kennedy is an anti-science ignoramus who espouses eugenic tendencies and puts his beliefs into practice as a matter of public policy and/or guidance, all of which leads to adverse impacts on the American public.
Let’s put some examples to that theme. We talked recently about how the CDC changed its webpage advising the public on concerns about vaccines and autism such that it now informs the public that there may indeed be a link. Its stated reason for doing this is, essentially, because a link between the two has not been “disproven”. As I mentioned in my post, that isn’t how science works. You don’t have to prove a negative in science. The onus of evidence is on the party making a claim. If there is no valid evidence to support a claim, the default is null, or to behave as if the claim is not true.
And now we know that Kennedy personally directed the change to the website.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, he told The New York Times in an interview published Friday.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday.
Again, this isn’t how science works. It’s not a “determination” that’s been made. It’s that the claim that autism and vaccines are linked has not been demonstrated through evidence and science and therefore is not considered a valid claim. If researchers want to do more peer-reviewed research, following good scientific methodology, have at it. More good data is always good. But we no more have to make a “determination” that vaccines don’t cause autism currently than we would need to make a “determination” that chocolate milk causes autism. A link has simply not been established, so we behave as though there is no link. That’s how this works.
Couple that with the even more recent news that Kennedy’s new Deputy Director of the CDC is Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham. Abraham himself has espoused many of the anti-vaxxer views that he shares with Kennedy.
Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.
While he doesn’t support lifesaving vaccines, he is a big fan of using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite studies finding both ineffective against the viral infection. In his newsletter, Faust notes that in 2021, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin out of 12,000 practicing physicians in the state. This fits with his longer record of troubling prescriptions. In 2013, he was one of the top opioid prescribers.
So, Kennedy publicly puts anti-vaxxer talking points on display as public guidance via the CDC website, not to mention all the words that manage to tumble from his mouth, and continues to put anti-vaxxer and anti-medicine officials to lead HHS and its child agencies. What’s the result? Pertussis is on the rise. America is about to lose its elimination status of measles.
And, if you want to put a local lens on all of this, communities in South Carolina, that have essentially behaved as Kennedy would wish, are suffering from outbreaks of measles and still people won’t get vaccinated.
South Carolina’s measles outbreak isn’t yet as large as those in other states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas. But it shows how a confluence of larger national trends — including historically low vaccination rates, skepticism fueled by the pandemic, misinformation, and “health freedom” ideologies proliferated by conservative politicians — have put some communities at risk for the reemergence of a preventable, potentially deadly virus.
“Everyone talks about it being the canary in the coal mine because it’s the most contagious infectious disease out there,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “The logic is indisputable that we’re likely to see more outbreaks.”
10% of children enrolled in Spartanburg County do not meet the vaccination requirements, including for the MMR vaccine. Many have religious exemptions, which are laughably easy to obtain and don’t require any affirmative description of what religion we’re even talking about. And the drop from 95% vaccinated status, the percentage in which a community will obtain herd immunity, happened in the last five or so years. Right when Kennedy became a nationally public figure. Go back a decade and its even worse.
The number of students in South Carolina who have been granted religious exemptions has increased dramatically over the past decade. That’s particularly true in the Upstate region, where religious exemptions have increased sixfold from a decade ago. During the 2013-14 school year, 2,044 students in the Upstate were granted a religious exemption to the vaccine requirements, according to data published by The Post and Courier. By fall 2024, that number had jumped to more than 13,000.
Public health officials are putting on mobile vaccination clinics in the area, but very few people are showing up. Misinformation, it seems, is more powerful than watching your fellow neighbors get infected with measles.
This all looks like chaos. And to a large degree it is chaos. But you can draw a straight line between the national bullshit that Kennedy and his cadre of sycophants are engaging in and the illness that is taking hold in places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Do not mistake one as being separate from the other. They are in direct relation.
Unlike the many causes Kennedy has claimed for autism.
Filed Under: anti-science, conspiracy theories, health, health and human services, measles, mmr, pertussis, ralph abraham, rfk jr., science, vaccines, whooping cough
I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it’s been abundantly clear that he’s an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it’s important to note that there are a great many Kennedy fans out there who will tell you he’s not that and that he instead is merely seeking more science on the effects of vaccines. Some say this in genuine fashion, while most say it knowing precisely how full of shit they are. The man’s time at DHS has made any debate over this point academic, of course. Every action he’s taking is the action an anti-vaxxer would make, no matter what he may admit to or otherwise. Still, there was enough nuance and subtlety in all of this to give some folks the cover needed to claim that Kennedy isn’t what he plainly is.
Well, that time is now past. The CDC recently updated its webpage meant to educate the public on the lack of a link between autism and vaccines to indicate that, hey, there might just be a link after all.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website to promote the widely debunked claim that vaccines may cause autism. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly linked vaccines to autism, and now the public health agency he oversees is publicly reversing its position to reflect that belief.
The CDC site previously said studies showed there was no connection between receiving vaccines and developing autism. HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said the agency updated the site to reflect “gold standard, evidence-based science.”
Okay, I’m not going to mince words on this: this change to this publicly facing webpage is unscientific, dangerous, and fucking evil. It’s one man and his cadre of handpicked anti-vaxxer cronies foisting upon the public guidance that is not built on science or medicine. And it’s patently obvious that the approach here is an unscientific one.
There is going to be some nuance here, but this is really important. Here is the banner at the top of the page after the changes:
Let’s go one by one. The first bullet point is by far the stupidest. Scientists simply don’t talk like this. If the CDC would like to have a webpage for every single potential cause of autism that studies haven’t “ruled out”, well, that is going to require a hell of a lot of webpages. Has science ruled out that ghosts don’t cause autism? Or that the hand of god isn’t directly involved? How about, oh I don’t know… turtles? Have there been enough studies done, peer reviewed of course, that specifically rule out the possibility that proximity to turtles doesn’t have some causative link to autism? I can promise you there hasn’t, because that would be insane.
In science, the burden of proof is on those who make a claim. In absence of that proof, the proper course of belief is in the null. In other words, scientifically, making a scientific claim puts the onus to prove it on the claimant and puts zero onus on anyone else. If I want to argue that turtles cause autism, I have to prove it. Otherwise, you assume no link exists. And that’s what the CDC’s page used to do. It used to say that there is no link, which is shorthand for the fact that no link has been proven to exist, which is precisely the right way to describe this.
As for the claim that studies proving a link have been ignored, they very much have not. They’ve either been exposed for their poor methodology or they’ve been debunked. That’s it. And the rest of the research out there indicates, again, there is no link between autism and vaccines.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism,” said Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism.”
She went on to say, “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”
As for CDC’s new assessment of causes of autism, who the actual fuck knows what that means. So far, out of Kennedy at least, we’ve heard that the causes of autism are maybe vaccines, definitely Tylenol (except maybe not), and male circumcision. They’re all over the damned place and there is zero trust from anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together that any new analysis coming out of this bullshit iteration of the CDC is at all trustworthy.
And, people, this matters. We are, right now, on the verge of losing our measles elimination status and it’s because of exactly this kind of bullshit from exactly these assclowns. That has happened because vaccination rates have been steadily falling for two decades and this is going to make it much, much worse. Kennedy should be dragged before Congress for hearings to explain why this change was made, on what scientific basis the change was made, and why in the world impeachment efforts to oust him ought not to begin immediately.
Anything less is Congress abdicating its responsibility.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, autism, cdc, conspiracy theories, rfk jr., science, studies, vaccines
Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is accessed—or outright suppressed.
In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of volunteer labor. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serious human rights issue.
While alternatives like Diamond Open Access are promising, crashing through publishing gatekeepers isn’t enough. Large intermediary platforms are capturing other aspects of the research process—inserting themselves between researchers and between the researchers and these published works—through platformization.
Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has come for research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance. Most professors are now worried their research is being scrutinized by academic bossware, forcing them to worry about arbitrary metrics which don’t always reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat of surveillance in scholarly publishing gives these measures a menacing tilt, chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks spike in the midst of governmental campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge, buttressed by a scourge of platform censorship on corporate social media.
The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open Science and decentralization. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers. Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight. As we’ve seen in EFF’s TOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher education.
Using social media as an example, universities have a strong interest in promoting the work being done at their campuses far and wide. This is where traditional platforms fall short: algorithms typically prioritizing paid content, downrank off-site links, and prioritize sensational claims to drive engagement. When users are free from enshittification and can themselves control the platform’s algorithms, as they can on platforms like Bluesky, scientists get more engagement and find interactions are more useful.
Institutions play a pivotal role in encouraging the adoption of these alternatives, ranging from leveraging existing IT support to assist with account use and verification, all the way to shouldering some of the hosting with Mastodon instances and/or Bluesky PDS for official accounts. This support is good for the research, good for the university, and makes our systems of science more resilient to attacks on science and the instability of digital monocultures.
This subtle influence of intermediaries can also appear in other tools relied on by researchers, while there are a number of open alternatives and interoperable tools developed for everything from citation management, data hosting to online chat among collaborators. Individual scholars and research teams can implement these tools today, but real change depends on institutions investing in tech that puts community before shareholders.
When infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers gain new powers to capture, enshittify, and censor. The result is a system that becomes less useful, less stable, and with more costs put on access. Science thrives on sharing and access equity, and its future depends on a global and democratic revolt against predatory centralized platforms.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: decentralization, diamond open access, knowledge, open access, open science, paywalls, research, science
Back in April, RFK Jr. committed publicly to firmly knowing the cause of autism by September of this year. In May, Donald Trump himself weighed in with the already baked conclusion that autism doesn’t “occur naturally” and therefore must have some environmental cause. Both statements were absurd at the time. Autism causes have been studied for decades and RFK Jr. has no magic wand to make the answer more knowable to him than the collective medical community. Donald Trump is not a doctor, nor a medical researcher, and unless he has actual evidence and research to back up his claim, it is fit for being ignored and nothing else. Meanwhile, Kennedy also shut down the research that was actually being done to find causes of autism.
But it’s now September and a promise was made, so the Trump administration had to at least pretend to make it a promise kept. To that end, reporting came out last week that Kennedy and HHS would be pointing the finger at prenatal use of Tylenol as a major cause of autism. And just this week, that’s exactly what Trump and Kennedy did.
“Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the unwieldy White House news conference, also urging mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen in the U.S. or paracetamol in most other countries. He also fueled long-debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism in the U.S., without providing any medical evidence.
The rambling announcement, which appeared to rely on existing studies rather than significant new research, comes as the Make America Healthy Again movement has been pushing for answers on the causes of autism. The diverse coalition of supporters of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. includes several anti-vaccine activists who have long spread debunked claims that immunizations are responsible.
Okay, so where is this coming from, you might be asking? Well, to start, studies do exist that point to correlational data between use of Tylenol and autism rates. That’s just the truth. So, if you hear any opponent of this administration tell you that there is zero data or studies indicating that this might be a concern, that is simply not true. It’s important that we be really precise about this sort of thing.
One such Harvard study, for example, did find that there was an uptick in rates of autism diagnoses among children who’s mothers took Tylenol while pregnant, primarily to reduce a high fever in the mother. The problem is that even those who performed that very study don’t agree with Trump’s message to pregnant women, which was, again, “Don’t take Tylenol.”
One of the researchers on that study was Ann Bauer, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts. Bauer said she thinks pregnant women should be told about a possible risk from acetaminophen. But the researcher also was worried that it might be too soon to have the federal government offering guidance on its use.
“I’m a little concerned about how this message is going to come because I think they may be jumping the gun,” Bauer said before the announcement was made. “I think those of us in the research community would like to see stronger evidence.”
This is how scientists talk when the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. We’re talking about one study, with a relatively small sample size and for which all kinds of externalities that could impact an outcome of autism were not accounted for. “We need more data” is exactly the right conclusion of such a study, as opposed to “Don’t take Tylenol.” Again, precision here matters very much.
Trump and Kennedy didn’t bother being precise. They advised the nation on a health matter that they can’t possibly understand, since the current researchers of it don’t understand it. And they even took it further than studies like the Harvard study would suggest even if we wanted to draw conclusions based on it.
One challenge is that it’s hard to disentangle the effects of Tylenol use from the effects of high fevers during pregnancy. Fevers, especially in the first trimester, can increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems, according to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
Trump also urged not giving Tylenol to young children, but scientists say that research indicates autism develops in the fetal brain.
Responding to Trump’s warnings, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine said they still recommend Tylenol as an appropriate option to treat fever and pain during pregnancy. The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said Monday that suggestions that Tylenol use in pregnancy causes autism are “irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients.”
Ironically, high fevers in pregnant women have also been suggested as a potential cause of autism diagnoses in children, among many other negative healthcare outcomes for the unborn child. This is the same flavor of medical advice that Kennedy had on COVID vaccines: the cure is worse than the disease. That’s bullshit, of course, but it’s the kind of bullshit you get when you believe that those who suffer negative health outcomes are at fault for those same outcomes.
And, despite the plain advisory language from definitely-not-a-doctor Donald Trump, he also threw out the repeatedly debunked claims about vaccines being linked to autism in the same announcement. Perhaps he did so because he really believes in such a link, but I doubt it. Instead, this was red meat to Kennedy’s base of supporters, because they were fucking furious when the news first broke about the announcement of the link to Tylenol.
“We didn’t wait 20 years for Bobby to finally speak and then get served Tylenol as an answer,” anti-vaccine group Georgia Coalition for Vaccine Choice wrote in an unhinged Facebook post on Monday morning. “If that’s all we hear – is that the end? Not thimerosal. Not aluminum. Not MMR. Not Hep B. Not the insane schedule pushed after pharma got liability protection. Are we supposed to just forget?”
Children’s Health Defense (CHD)—the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy—even got in on the backlash, retweeting a post on Monday about parents who falsely blame vaccines for their children’s neurological condition, with the statement: “THIS WAS NOT CAUSED BY TYLENOL.”
And if that’s not good enough for you, here’s Steve Bannon and a guest on the matter.
In an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room Monday, CHD President Mary Holland downplayed the link, telling Bannon: “Today may be something of a sideshow—Tylenol is not the primary cause. Vaccines are the primary cause [of autism],” Holland said. (The claim that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.)
Bannon, for his part, slammed Kennedy’s effectiveness as health secretary, calling his efforts to implement an anti-vaccine agenda unserious and amateurish. “This Tylenol thing stinks to high heaven,” he said.
Again, precision in how we talk about this matters when we’re talking about science and healthcare. I am unwilling to say that vaccines definitely do not cause autism. Instead, I say that there is no scientific evidence that has gone through a rigorous process to suggest that it does, so there’s no reason to operate as if there were. I will not say that there is zero link between Tylenol use in pregnant women and autism. But I can sure as shit say that here too there is certainly no conclusive causal link of significance between them, only correlational data that doesn’t account for a zillion other factors, and therefore we don’t put too much weight on this claim until more studies and data shows otherwise.
Many medical experts, instead, point to a novel 2024 study conducted in Sweden. The study, published in JAMA, used data from a population of 2.5 million children and was also able to compare differences among (full) siblings. This provided a simple way to skirt confounding variables, such as genetics and environmental factors, to which siblings would have similar exposure.
In the entire population, children exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy were slightly more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who weren’t—echoing some earlier studies. But, in the sibling analysis, which compared siblings who were exposed to acetaminophen to siblings who were not, the association vanished. In all, the data suggests that acetaminophen was not causing an uptick in autism diagnoses; rather, there were other confounding factors behind the link.
Meanwhile, the President tells the public “Don’t take Tylenol.”
There is so, so much damage being done by these halfwits looking for a headline rather than real answers. It seems obvious to me that some non-zero number of pregnant women out there will adhere to Trump’s message and their unborn children will either suffer the consequences of high fevers in life, or miscarry and never have that life to begin with. Some will even refuse to give their already-born children Tylenol as Trump instructed and some, almost certainly, will die. On who’s ledger will we place those deaths? The answer must be on Kennedy and Trump.
And beyond that, this cavalier attitude towards healthcare pronouncements will do no favors when it comes to getting the public to trust doctors and researchers on matters of health and medicine. And that is of paramount importance, as the American people today trust both their leaders and medical institutions in particular less than perhaps they ever have in the past.
On matters of life and death, that will literally kill people.
Filed Under: acetaminophen, autism, bad science, donald trump, junk science, rfk jr., science, studies, tylenol, vaccines
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.
And it appears to be getting worse as Musk (and other companies, like Amazon) launch more LEO satellites. A new study (hat tip, Gizmodo) found that all of the launched satellites exceed brightness limits established by the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), harming scientists’ ability to conduct scientific research:
“Although there are no official regulations in place, the CPS established recommendations for maximum acceptable brightness for satellites orbiting below 341 miles (550 kilometers). The IAU established a maximum brightness of +7 magnitude for professional astronomy and below +6 magnitude as the aesthetic reference so it does not impact the public’s ability to stargaze without interference from satellites.”
Again, it’s worth reiterating that Musk initially stated this would never be a problem. While the study found that the brightness levels of Starlink satellites have improved some, the lower orbiting altitude of some of the newer Starlink satellites means the brightness impact is actually worse.
Despite Musk’s endless whining about “burdensome regulations,” the U.S. doesn’t really regulate this sort of thing. And the damage goes well beyond astronomy.
Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.
Starlink’s about to get a big boost by taxpayers, too. Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect billions in subsidies to Elon Musk and Starlink, despite the service’s high costs, congestion problems, and increasingly problematic environmental impact. And, of course, Starlink is just one of several emerging competitors in the LEO space, all jockeying for a huge boost in taxpayer subsidies.
Filed Under: astronomy, elon musk, leo, low earth orbit satellites, research, science, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink
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