If I had a nickel for every time someone has accusingly asked me “who funds you??”, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy a box of pipette tips, because research is expensive and requires funding to do much of anything. With the confusion and distrust circulating around science and
You may have heard the shocking headline this week that 250,000 people die every year in the US due to misdiagnosis in the ER. You may be even more shocked to know that this statistic is extrapolated from the death of… just one man. In a Canadian ER. Over
Yesterday, the Florida State Surgeon General issued new guidance around the COVID vaccines based on an analysis they performed. They say the results show “an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39” for the mRNA vaccines, and recommend this group not receive these vaccines. This is a bold recommendation.
I am a data visualization nerd. Even as a kid I was stealing my dad’s graph paper and finding random things to chart. When my mom was recently asked what each of her kids were into when they were young, her answer for me was “data.” (Also kittens.) Graphs
BA.1, BA.2, BA.3, BA.4, BA.5… while we’re all getting lost in an alphanumeric soup, it’s important to understand why we continue to see new variants. Some have speculated this is evidence of engineering — that “someone” keeps putting these new variants out. Others blame
This is part 2 in a series covering the story of the COVID vaccines in the US, looking back at how well they have worked and why the communication around them has been confusing. Read part 1 here. It was late November 2020, and we were just about to start
The COVID vaccines are undoubtedly among the most impressive medical feats in history. One model estimated they have saved millions of lives in the United States alone. As a physician-scientist, watching the scientific world come together to produce not one but multiple vaccines in a matter of months in the
While COVID cases are thankfully falling in the US, omicron, despite being “milder,” continues to kill more people per day in the US than the worst day of the delta surge. Why is this happening? Omicron is "milder" than delta, but that doesn't mean it'
Arguments about vaccines are often rife with logical fallacies. Many logical fallacies, at their root, are oversimplifications. They are appealing because they make something complex, like vaccine safety or the efficacy of vaccines, into something very simplistic that is easy to understand. However, that oversimplification often leaves out important details,
This morning I awoke to luciferase trending on twitter. Since the pandemic, I suppose I have grown to expect once niche molecular biology topics to become the focus of mainstream discourse, but it still is rather odd to me when it happens. When I was studying molecular biology, I never
Recently an article entitled “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States” was published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. This article has been used to argue that higher levels of vaccination are not associated with lower levels of
With the introduction of the COVID vaccine mandates, one common question has arisen: if vaccination works, then why should the vaccinated care if others don’t get the vaccine? If I’m vaccinated, then aren’t I protected? Why do I need my neighbor to be vaccinated, too? This line