Jon Shaffer

@jonshaffer.bsky.social

3553 Followers 3311 Following

Assistant Professor of Sociology @UVM | STS | Med Soc | Social Movements | Previously Post-doc @BermanInstitute, Partners In Health Personal Website: https://www.jonathanshaffer.net

Figure 1.2. DoD Budget FY 2010 – FY 2026

The Substance (2024)

Picture of the book “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History” by Paul Farmer.

Quitters —
Big news, and we want you to be the one who spreads it:
Harvard just cancelled its ChatGPT EDU contract.
The oldest, richest, most over-the-top-prestigious university in the country looked at Sam Altman, looked at the Pentagon deal and the warrantless surveillance fight and the headlines piling up week after week, and said: nope. Not on our campus. Not with our students' data. Not in our name.
Universities are some of OpenAl's most important sources of revenue, and every university in the world is currently deciding its Al policies and providers. With your help, we can get schools around the country to cut ties with ChatGPT.

Picture of a computer and beer by Lake Champlain

A drawing of a snake eating its own tail, an oroboros.

Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling books expanded the depth, range, and popularity of immersive, narrative nonfiction, has died.

picture of Karl Marx with a speech bubble that reads:

"“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.
 Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.”  Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)"

Today, the Gates Foundation and OpenAl announced we will collaborate on a pilot initiative to support African countries as their governments work to integrate Al into national health systems. Through Horizon1000, we're jointly committing $50 million in funding, technology, and technical support to back their work.
Sub-Saharan Africa faces a health workforce shortfall of ~5.6 million. Training alone won't close that gap, but Al can support health workers to extend clinical capacity, improve quality of care, and reach more patients in places where resources are scarce.
This work will start in Rwanda, with a goal of reaching 1,000 primary health care clinics and their surrounding communities in several countries by 2028.

Zambia is nearing the signing of a confidential memorandum of understanding with the United States that would link health sector support to expanded access for American interests in the country’s mineral resources, including copper, gold, and cobalt.

The draft agreement, referred to in official circles as the Zambia US Health Deal, is expected to formalise a long term health financing framework while opening pathways for greater American participation in Zambia’s extractive industries. The arrangement has not yet been confirmed publicly by the government, and key elements remain undisclosed.

Edwin Cadwick, c. 1860
Science Museum Group Collection

Dear Editor:

I read with great interest this article recently published in The BMJ, which analyzes the role of senior officials and influential physicians in the dismantling of public health in the United States under the administration of Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As a former Minister of Health of the Province of Tucumán, a professor of public health, a pediatrician, and a current National Deputy in Argentina, I feel compelled to express my solidarity with the U.S. scientific and health community, while also warning that what is happening there is not foreign to us.

History shows that health policies in the United States do not only have an impact within its borders, but often radiate to other countries, particularly in our region. Argentina is not an exception. In recent months, we have observed with alarm how certain decisions, discourses, and approaches currently applied in the United States are beginning to be replicated—uncritically and dangerously—in our country.

I am particularly concerned about the advance of anti-scientific narratives that downplay evidence, discredit vaccination, cast doubt on essential medicines, and erode public trust in the health system. We know from our own experience that these narratives have serious consequences: sustained declines in vaccination coverage, the reemergence of preventable diseases, increased infant morbidity and mortality, and growing inequality in access to quality care.

EMTALA violations increase in Texas
Ever since the constitutional right to abortion was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022, experts have worried about how abortion bans might affect people’s ability to get emergency, lifesaving obstetric care in situations where an abortion is medically necessary. A new study shows there was reason to worry: In Texas, which bans abortion without exceptions for the health of the pregnant person, there was a small but substantial increase between 2018 and 2023 in obstetric-related violations of EMTALA, the federal law that ensures everyone receives emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay. (The increase came out to about one additional violation per quarter.)

That’s according to a study published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, which analyzed all EMTALA violation filings between 2018 and the first quarter of 2023. The five other states with similarly strict bans had smaller, imprecise increases. The numbers are small, but the study authors emphasize that these are only the confirmed violations – in reality, there could be many more that were never formally recognized. And before the bans, these states had less than one EMTALA violation per year. So the quarterly increase may seem small, study author Liana Woskie said in an email to STAT, but “from a relative perspective it’s large.”

Screen shot from our new paper titled "Obstetric-Related Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act Violations and No Health Exception Bans"

Janus:

"once the machine works people will be convinced"

"the machine will work when all the relevant people are convinced"

Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how Al image captioning depicts archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800 captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney—a modern, state-of-the-art generative Al platform. Combining quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a 'colonial gaze,' an epistemological viewpoint from the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism (41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with striking parallels between Al-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative Al as an automated process of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both
colonizers and the machines.

Abstract: "Theorizing the failures of computer vision algorithms requires shifting from detecting and fixing biases towards understanding
how algorithms are shaped by social, historical, and political real-world precursors. To better understand the socially
embedded and historically rooted representational harms of these algorithms, we analyze how AI image captioning depicts
archival images of living ethnological exibitions (so-called 'human zoos'), mass stereotype-producing public exhibitions
of colonized people common in Europe and the US from the 1870s to the 1930s, which were meant to symbolize the
imagined superiority of Western societies and justify their colonial violence. We collected and analyzed more than 3800
captions from 100 archival images using MidJourney––a modern, state-of-the-art generative AI platform. Combining
quantification with close reading of the captions, we found evidence of a ‘colonial gaze,’ an epistemological viewpoint from
the perspective of colonizers characterized by significant representational harms representing five main themes: essentialism
(41.6% of captions), cultural erasure (54.5%), dehumanization (11.1%), othering (28.4%), and infantilization (26.8%), with
striking parallels between AI-generated captions and the original framings of human zoos informed by a broader colonial
epistemology. Based on this analysis, we propose to conceptualize the colonial gaze in generative AI as an automated process
of object identification and relational interpretation that draws on historical visual tropes and hierarchical logics rooted
in colonial epistemologies. Trigger warning: This article contains extremely racialized text and images produced by both
colonizers and the machines."

screen cap of Bill Ackman tweeting "•@ZohranKMamdani, congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If | can help NYC, just let
me know what I can do."

Cover of Marshall Ganz's "People Power Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal"

Dogers celebrating

Photo of the Vermont State House this morning!

Photo of Jeff Tweedy

Picture of me and Sarah and Conor after the Portland half marathon!

Big pumpkin getting ready for its move.

photo of a chair with a pile of books including: Selected Writings of Stuart Hall, Necro-Politics by Achille Mbembe, People Power Change by Marshall Ganz, the MAHA Report and others.

Big pumpkin

I just need to lock in dot gif

Big pumpkin #1

One pretty big pumpkin.

Screen shot of the article in The Guardian titled, "‘Distracting the public’: group of health professionals call for RFK Jr to be removed".

"Ahead of the second Maha report, grassroots Defend Public Health warns that everything HHS is doing is ‘horrifying’"

A picture of Wrigley Field during last night’s game.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced it is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness.

More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system. The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications.

“For decades America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high tech upgrade,” President Donald Trump said during an event with company CEOs at the White House on Wednesday. “The existing systems are often slow, costly and incompatible with one another, but with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age.”

"As social scientists with decades of experience working in the field of global health and development, we deplore the recent decision by the Trump Administration to dismantle key US aid programs. This abrupt withdrawal threatens to exacerbate existing humanitarian crises and undercut the potential of future reforms. And while the international aid system is much larger than the contributions of any single country, the contributions of the US government to international development have been incredibly significant in terms of both monetary value and impact. The US has provided the largest single contribution of any country to foreign aid and investments for decades (Herre and Arrigada 2024; OECD 2025). The recent decisions made by the Trump Administration regarding US foreign assistance are an abdication of responsibility that has taken place without careful deliberation, due process, or transparency — and are already costing lives around the world, undermining in a matter of weeks sensitive development partnerships and trust that have taken years to create."

"British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the UK will recognize a Palestinian state in September unless Israel agrees to a cease-fire in Gaza and takes steps toward long-term peace."

A nice photo of a tonight’s sunset over Lake Champlain in Charlotte, VT.

Picture of my computer on my porch with books, some mandarin oranges and a cup of coffee.

Photo of three books on a desk: Ian Hacking’s ‘Representing and Intervening’, ‘The Emergence of Probability’, and his edited volume, ‘Scientific Revolutions’.

Happy pic of me and Sarah getting hitched.

Abstract: The climate crisis and its harmful effects on human health are staggering. It is motivating clinicians to transform their scope of practice. Physicians and other clinicians are on the front lines of managing a growing surge of illness and injury directly caused by increasingly extreme temperatures, weather, and ecological transformation.
But the joint institutional constraints of clinician socialization through training and the labor conditions of health care delivery tend to obfuscate and disincentivize the array of possible practical strategies for meaningful, collective intervention in the climate health crisis. How do clinical professionals respond?

This paper empirically and theoretically explores how clinicians can respond to this crisis by examining findings from a study of the first two cohorts of a Climate Health Organizing Fellowship – a year-long training
program for interdisciplinary teams of health workers in which they launch a real-world organizing campaign to challenge and change a concrete climate health problem that they experience in their clinical setting or community.Rooted in the organizing leadership pedagogy of Marshall Ganz, to date this fellowship produced several
campaigns that have successfully changed hospital carbon emission policies, won a municipal electric bus campaign, expanded climate-health medical education curricula in medical schools, and secured new climate health leadership roles within their institutions. In this study we found that this program provided an opportunity for clinical professionals facing the “crisis of expertise” presented by the climate-health crisis to “insource” new leadership capacities and technical skills necessary to organize to win material change in their efforts to combat the climate health challenges they and their communities face. The program also expanded participants’ professional identities and sense that they had jurisdiction in the domain of collective climate health interventions.

Picture of the fam at the Lake Monsters game

Sitting at a patio, sipping a beer, rereading a paper that just got accepted :)

Picture of me with a bottle and small glass of Jeppson’s Malort

Photo of me, in my office, holding Quinn Slobodian’s new book, “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right”.

Picture of maple sap being boiled into maple syrup.

Dead zones of the imagination
On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor
The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2006
David GRAEBER, Goldsmiths, University of London
The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise
intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the
nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence
as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create
lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor
required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around
them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than
the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on
the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of
social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through
structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.

Picture from an anti-Trump rally in Burlington.

Picture of two fresh-baked quiches

Jon,

We want to take a moment to recognize outgoing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison.

Chair Harrison served honorably for four years, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for his tireless work on behalf of our Party. So, when you get a chance, take a moment and sign our thank you card today:

Photo of me holding up Fabian Muniesa’s ‘Paranoid Finance’

Document summarizing the impact of stop work orders for PEPFAR

slide titled 'social murder' with a quote from Engels and the NYTs story about cutting off HIV meds through PEPFAR stoppages.

slide that is titled 'social murder' with a quote from Engles and a screen cap from the NYT article titled, "Trump Administration Halts H.I.V. Drug Distribution in Poor Countries"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/health/pepfar-trump-freeze.html