Mallory Harris, PhD

@malar0ne.bsky.social

7399 Followers 1798 Following

thinking about infectious diseases, information, and behavior Postdoc UT Austin 🤘 https://mjharris95.github.io/

May 22, 2020 Global -4,900,000/325,000; USA – 1,600,000/95,000 Turmoil in OWS – Peter Marks drops out. Upset with how he is being treated with the arrival of Moncef. Moncef has met with pharma companies involved in the harmonized protocols and as expected they expressed doubt about the possibility that we (NIAID/USG) could pull the trials off. Deep down, they want the money and they want to do it on their own. I will set up teleconference next week with Francis, me, Larry Corey, John maslcola, Cliff and the CEIO’s of the companies tomstraighten this out. Trump getting out of control in pushing to open up the country and get the economy back before election day. He is desparate. This is all about re-election.
Tweet by Secretary Kennedy from today: Dear Diary....if I plead the Fifth, will I still be famous. Below it is an AI-generated image of Dr. Fauci at his Senate hearing today. Behind him, on one side is RFK Jr brandishing handcuffs and on the other is Jay Bhattacharya holding a beagle
Tweet by Jay Bhattacharya from November 2022: The Biden administration is hostile to basic civil rights guaranteed in the first amendment. The most important source of health misinformation is the Biden Administration itself. It's far past time to end the American censorship regime. Quote tweeting: The White House says they are keeping a “close eye” on Twitter under Elon Musk
Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at the Hoover Institution and was special adviser to President Donald Trump on fall 2020
Q. Let me ask you a new question then. A. Sure. Q. Are you familiar with the social media platform Reddit? A. Reddit? Q. R-e-d-d-i-t? A. I'm heard that term, but -- Q. Are you aware that Reddit also censored the Great Barrington Declaration, along with Google? MR. KIRSCHNER: Objection. Lack of foundation. BY MR. SAUER: Q. If you know. A. Again, I'm not even sure what Reddit is, and so I don't think I could be aware of its censoring. If I did -- was aware at one time, I certainly didn't register it as something that I would want to remember.
Thread by Paul Thacker. Includes screenshot from Dr. Fauci's deposition saying he doesn't have an account on Twitter and doesn't know how to access a tweet. Followed by screenshot of a Twitter report stating Dr. Fauci did an account takeover for WHCOVIDResponse.
I appreciated this conversation, but I wish he would've been more open to listening before responding rather than talking over and cutting you off so frequently. I powered through, but it was a difficult listen.
Sunset and rainbow over a parking lot
Jay Bhattacharya tweets from May 2022: What are citizenship rights worth if your country refuses to let you come home, even though you've broken no law? Courts that should have pushed back against two years of covidian tyranny are finally waking up. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/quarantine-lottery-breached-rights-zealand-court-rules-84338982
DONATE NOW The consultants were, too, and so were the bureaucrats. They dusted off their lockdown plans. Seventeen Americans were pushed into a 42-day quarantine merely for having contact even though they tested negative and had no symptoms. They complied but what if a few had not? Interesting to consider. All the forces have lined up. To be sure, we have some Brownstonians in high places who are leaning against the pressure, hoping to dial back the panic. There is nothing good that locking down accomplishes, they correctly say. It only wrecks commerce and social functioning.
The situation in nursing homes, where infections can spread swiftly, has also been problematic. While vaccination rates among older Floridians as a whole have been good, the rate of nursing home residents who are fully vaccinated — an average of 73.1 percent in each home — is lower than every state but Nevada, according to the C.D.C. About 47.5 percent of nursing home staff members were fully vaccinated as of Aug. 15, the lowest of any state but Louisiana.
Dr. Bhattacharya: I think that, in epidemiology, we’re going to want to continue to track cases, but to tell the public at large that one case is exactly like another, when in fact they’re not—if you’re older and unvaccinated, you’d be more concerned about the case, those are the kind of cases you might want to track. If a child gets a case positive, but with very few symptoms… why should we be telling the public or panicking the public over that? So it’s not a question of should we track or not track. To me, it’s a question of putting these numbers in context: we have protected the vulnerable—by vaccinating the older population, we have provided them with enormous protection against severe disease and death. That’s why you see, even as the cases have risen in Sweden in the past wave, or in the UK in this past wave, and in Florida in this past wave, the number of deaths have not risen proportionally. Why? Because we protected the vulnerable. The key thing to me is hospitalizations and deaths from COVID. While we’ve done an incredible job at decoupling the cases from the deaths, the public focus on cases at this point, I think, only serves to panic people without actually serving any other public health purpose. We should absolutely continue to protect the vulnerable. And certainly there’s reasons to have public interest in that, but to track cases for its own sake, I think, is now counterproductive.
Timeline of Covid deaths in the US from Our World in Data with an arrow indicating October 2020, right before the largest wave of deaths. Next to this is a tweet by Alex Azar timestamped October 5, 2020 that says: Today I met with Dr. Atlas and three distinguished infectious disease experts to discuss COVID-19 science and data from around the world, as part of our commitment to ensure we hear broad and diverse perspectives. In the conversation with Martin Kulldorff, PhD (Harvard), Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD (Stanford), and Sunetra Gupta, PhD (Oxford), we heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration's strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.
Tweets from Jay Bhattacharya in January 2024: Effective pandemic preparedness. Step 1: Fire all the people currently responsible for pandemic preparedness. They likely caused the pandemic, locked you down, kept your kids out of school, demolished economies, and want more power to do it again. There may be more steps needed, but they will need to be devised by people not captured by pharma or the pandemic industrial complex.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent suppression of vaccine effectiveness data is consistent with the anti-vaccine positions that have defined his career.
Bhattacharya said that if he had a young child, he would give them “many” of the vaccines on the schedule, but added that “there’s uncertainties about all of them.” He also noted, “There are ones where I’d be more skeptical.” “‘HPV is generally sexually transmitted. Why give it to a baby?’ Someone could easily ask that,” Bhattacharya said. “Do I need to give it to my son who’s not ever going to get cervical cancer? Hepatitis B is another virus that babies, unless they’re exposed from the mother in utero, are not going to get the disease until they’re an adult. Could we wait? I personally would do it, but I could totally understand a parent saying ‘no, let’s wait on this.’”
So including for instance elevating elevating the ideas of early career scientists We have a problem, we have a major problem, right For for the last 30 years it's gotten worse and worse Where where you have the time to first- like the age at which you get your first large grant, the age has gone up from the mid-80s was about 35 years old to now it's like in your mid 40s. We have a biological research ecosystem where you need 1,2,3 postdocs Early career scientists are the ones who have the newer ideas and so, like, when you when you elevate the new ideas you allow- essentially empower the institutes to have newer ideas funded, you're automatically organically going to fund early career scientists. You just are.
Screenshot of SCIMaP scorecard for FY2027, Texas District 37. Projected losses are $133M, $32M from NIH and $101M from NSF. The top institution driving losses for both agencies locally is UT Austin with $23M in NIH losses and $91M in NSF losses.
Tweet from Jay Bhattacharya in February 2022: I've long respected the CDC's MMWR as a source for important epidemiological facts. I am sad to see that the CDC has used the journal to publish articles to support its predetermined conclusions (e.g. on immunity after covid recovery), rather uphold its pre-covid high standards
Space.com headline Deja vu: Trump proposes cutting NASA science funding by 47% again News By Samantha Mathewson published 21 hours ago The proposed budget would cut NASA's overall funding by 23% and nearly halve its science portfolio.
At a meeting in January, Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral researcher at the NIH and a steward of NIH Fellows United-UAW 2750, stood up to ask about a dramatic rise in the costs of health insurance for early-career scientists employed by NIH. With a new baby on the way, he’s worried about making ends meet with his federal job. “What can we do to actually support early-career researchers like myself who are struggling to get by?” he asked, while other employees applauded. Bhattacharya, who has said multiple times that clearing the path for more innovative early-career researchers is a priority for him, didn’t seem aware of the issue. “Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question,” Bhattacharya said. “Come talk to me, let’s figure it out,” he added, asking Morgan to send an email to schedule a meeting.
Crowd walking through tented booths
As above, but now we show the percent of climate model simulation with extreme precipitation and temperature above 24C. There has been a significant increase (p<0.001) from 2.57% (1865-1914) to 3.84% (1914-1964) to 7.42% (1965-2014).
The CMIP6 period mean for the frequency of extreme March monthly precipitation in northwestern Peru has increased from 12.24% (1864-1914) to 14.89% (1915-1964) to 16% (1965-2014). Annual values show the percentage of 203 climate model simulations exhibiting a given climate condition during each calendar year of the CMIP6 historical forcing experiment for the 1865–2014 period. Based on the quantiles observed in 2023 (see methods), extreme monthly precipitation is defined to have occurred when the March monthly precipitation averaged over northwestern Peru exceeds the 84th percentile (P84) threshold for the recent climate (calculated from the last 50 years of the CMIP6 historical forcing experiment, or 1965–2014). Solid lines show the mean frequency for the preindustrial (1865–1914, blue), early historical (1915–1964, gray), and late historical (1965–2014, red) periods. We also show p values for the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test for the mid- and late periods, calculated relative to the time periods shown in parentheses.
Cyclone-attributable cases per thousand people versus mean temperature during Cyclone Yaku for each district. The red horizontal line indicates no effect of Cyclone Yaku on cases, while the red vertical line indicates 24°C, above which significant attributable cases were observed.
Greater attributable cases per thousand people is associated with more urban infrastructre (less agriculture/pasture) and more flood susceptible (less houshold overcrowding). There was no significant association with nonpublic water source/inconsistent water access. Estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the association between vulnerability indices (rotated components [RCs] of a principal-component analysis of socioenvironmental vulnerability factors) and dengue cases attributable to extreme precipitation per thousand people at the district level from April 22nd to July 14th. Labels at the top of the plot give the names of the variables most strongly associated with each RC (see Table S5 for variable descriptions). The standardized loading is given in parentheses (where | standardized loading | = 1 is the strongest possible association.
Spatial heterogeneity in the number of dengue cases per thousand people attributable to extreme precipitation: In the center, a map of the number of dengue cases attributable to extreme precipitation per thousand people across districts (calculated from April 22nd to July 14th), zoomed into the region of Peru where extreme precipitation occurred during Cyclone Yaku. Each district affected by extreme precipitation is outlined and shaded according to the estimated number of attributable cases, with darker red indicating a larger positive effect and blue indicating a negative effect. The dark outlines show region borders, and lighter outlines show district borders. A scale bar is provided in the bottom left corner of the map. The left and right columns of plots display dengue cases per thousand people attributable to extreme precipitation over time following Cyclone Yaku (in 2023) by region, with lines to the map indicating their geographic location. Within the faceted plots, each line corresponds to a different district within the region, and the horizontal dashed red lines indicate the baseline of zero dengue cases attributable to extreme precipitation.
The difference between observed cases in the districts with extreme precipitation versus their synthetic controls over time, where the period after the dashed line indicates the effect of extreme precipitation during Cyclone Yaku. The gray ribbon corresponds to the bootstrapped 95% confidence interval. The dashed horizontal line indicates no effect, and the dashed vertical line indicates when the cyclone occurred, meaning the only difference in cases to the right of this vertical line is attributable to extreme precipitation during Cyclone Yaku.
Running forward the previous plot, dengue cases over time in cyclone-affected districts comparing the synthetic control (red) to observed cases (black). Observed cases well exceed the synthetic control post-cyclone.
Graph of dengue cases over time from 2016 through right before the cyclone. Red is the synthetic contorl cases and black is observed cases. They line up well.
Graph showing time trends across five latent factors over time.
Historical climate conditions across districts in Peru compared to those during Cyclone Yaku. We show the precipitation anomaly was greatest in northwestern Peru, which tends to be dry and warm. (A–C) The bold outline encompasses districts with extreme precipitation during Cyclone Yaku, and diagonal dashed lines indicate matched control districts with non-extreme precipitation. (A) Precipitation anomalies (mm/day), calculated as the difference between the mean daily precipitation between March 7 and 20, 2023, and the mean daily precipitation during the same time period across the reference years 1973–2022. (B) Average daily precipitation (mm/day) across the historical reference period. (C) Average temperature (in degrees Celsius) across the historical reference period. A scale bar is provided in the bottom left corner.
Comment from Michael: For my prerecorded question, I actually did, in fact, rewrite the grant twice and asked for clarification on what needed to change (with no real guidance hence the guessing game). The proposal was submitted in October 2023, so the request to change everything in July 2025 and again in January 2026 did not really provide me with any clarity on what was a “DEI activity” about my project. Even worse, I am unclear how this isn’t scientific censorship that the Director is famous for critiquing.
Jay Bhattacharya 1:10:08 I think it has to be organic. I think the way that the NIH has addressed the problems of funding early career researchers has been partly like, it makes sense, like training programs, but also partly by essentially, affirmative action, right? So you have a lower score allowed to be funded because, just because they’re early career, it has to be that that’s never going to work. What has to work is you have to say we’re going to make a commitment to funding cutting edge ideas. And typically it’s, it tends to be early career researchers with those ideas. So it’s not an it’s not an affirmative action approach. It’s a selecting the best ideas that you know with a portfolio that that includes, you know, sort of ideas that you know, if they work out, they can be fundamentally transformative, even though some people may think it may not work out, because they’re so close to the frontier, right? I have told the Institute directors that they are now authorized to do make those decisions. I’m not going to hold them accountable that every grant succeeds. What I’m going to hold them accountable for is that the portfolio of grants they have actually advance the health and well being of the American people. As the 20% I mean, that’s, again, there were, there were fewer total grants funded each at a higher rate. So the, it’s just a 20% versus the what the other, what’s the denominator you’re talking about? So it’s the, a lot of the analysis is sort of that I’ve seen done on on the portfolio, is just naive about basic econometrics. Brinda Adhikari 1:11:39 I mean, that came from NIH. So I just wanted to make sure- Jay Bhattacharya 1:11:41 Yeah, but you have to have a control group, like 20% relative to what. So I just, I think you got to be the the key thing is the structures and the incentives and the systems. And we’ve set and put in place structures, incentives and systems to empower the scientists at the NIH to make decisions about their portfolio th…
Brinda Adhikari 51:42 Okay, so Jay, what would you say to Michael Green in that situation? Jay Bhattacharya 51:47 I’d say that he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to rethink his grant. Like, we gave him the opportunity, and he didn’t take advantage of it, right? So he again, I didn’t know this grant specifically, but, like, I’ll tell you, like, based on the title, what I hear is a grant where it has as a premise, something that, in principle, couldn’t have a control group. And so does bad science. So I, you know, I do again- Brinda Adhikari 52:09 So what would have made us better? Jay Bhattacharya 52:11 Just okay for let me just finish Brinda. So I think if, if I say that, I provisionally, because, again, I’ve not read his grant so, but based on that 90 second snippet, he had the opportunity to be more specific about his hypotheses, make them actually scientific, give them give make arguments for control groups. We gave him that opportunity, and he didn’t take it. That’s what I’d say.
Dr. Bhattacharya: I think that, in epidemiology, we’re going to want to continue to track cases, but to tell the public at large that one case is exactly like another, when in fact they’re not—if you’re older and unvaccinated, you’d be more concerned about the case, those are the kind of cases you might want to track. If a child gets a case positive, but with very few symptoms… why should we be telling the public or panicking the public over that? So it’s not a question of should we track or not track. To me, it’s a question of putting these numbers in context: we have protected the vulnerable—by vaccinating the older population, we have provided them with enormous protection against severe disease and death. That’s why you see, even as the cases have risen in Sweden in the past wave, or in the UK in this past wave, and in Florida in this past wave, the number of deaths have not risen proportionally. Why? Because we protected the vulnerable. The key thing to me is hospitalizations and deaths from COVID. While we’ve done an incredible job at decoupling the cases from the deaths, the public focus on cases at this point, I think, only serves to panic people without actually serving any other public health purpose. We should absolutely continue to protect the vulnerable. And certainly there’s reasons to have public interest in that, but to track cases for its own sake, I think, is now counterproductive.
On August 1st, 2021, Governor Ron DeSantis quoted you as saying, “We have protected the vulnerable by vaccinating the older population.” That same day, the headlines read Florida Reports A Record Number Of COVID-19 Cases. Here are some headlines that followed immediately after this: Florida Leads Nation in Number of COVID-19 Deaths of Nursing Home Residents and Staff, August 2021. School Closures Reported In Five Florida Counties; Districts ‘Drowning’ In COVID, August 2021. 15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days, September 2021. Child Covid Deaths More Than Doubled in Florida as Kids Returned to the Classroom, September 2021. Had Florida protected the vulnerable at that time? Why did schools close while you were advising the state?
Tweet by Jay from December 2021: Bureaucrats who fund the careers of scientists should play no role whatsoever in setting pandemic policy. The conflict of interest created by this dual role has forced countless scientists to stay silent or risk losing their careers.
From Feb 9 article in NYTimes by Sheryl Gay Stolberg: A leader of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement said Monday that his group would spend $1 million to help a congresswoman in Louisiana defeat Senator Bill Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, in a Republican primary this year.
Picture of my speaker badge
Screenshot of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on Ross Douthat's podcast with headline: A plan to restore trust in science from a fringe epidemiologist
Top: map where counties are colored based on how coverage compares to the breakthrough-maximizing coverage (p_hat) and the herd immunity threshold (p_c) corresponding to the estimated mean assortativity across states. 92% of states are between the two values (pink) and fewer than 3% are above the assortativity-adjust herd immunity threshold. Bottom: histogram showing vaccine coverage across counties where solid lines indicate the p_hat and p_c corresponding to estimated mean assortativity
Left plot shows infections at equilibrium in the vaccinated (solid line) or unvaccinated (dashed line) populations on a log scale. Infections in the unvaccinated decline as coverage increases, but the relationship between vaccine coverage and breakthrough infections is unimodal. The right hand plot shows linear-scaled breakthrough infections versus vaccine coverage, with points indicating where breakthrough infections are maximized. Assortativity generally decreases breakthroughs and increases cases in the unvaccinated population.
Set of histograms showing the boostrapped distribution of assortativity estimated for each state ranging from 0.27 in Michigan to 0.6 in Maryland
Conceptual diagram where each school is a circle and it contains students, which are dots in different colors to indicate vaccination status. In the example for no assortativity, every school has 4/5 kids vaccinated. In the example for high assortativity, there is one school where all students are unvaccinated and four schools where all students are vaccinated.
Vaccine coverage (x-axis) vs breakthrough fraction (y-axis). All of the model-predicted relationships are positive, but greater assortativity reduces the breakthrough fraction. The points from state-level data are consistent with moderate to high assortativity above 0.6
On the left, we show the predicted positive relationship between vaccine coverage (x-axis) and the breakthrough fraction (y-axis). We then overlay with the breakthrough fraction in seven states: ND, AZ, SC, UT, MI, TX, NM (in order of increasing breakthrough fraction) to get the model-predicted vaccine coverage, which is below 60% in three states. On the right, we compare model-predicted vaccine coverage (x-axis) to surveyed kindergarten vaccine coverage (y-axis) in a scatterplot, showing that the model underpredicts surveyed coverage in all cases.
Figure 1 from Orenstein et al which shows the expected positive relationship between percentage of cases vaccinated and percentage of the population vaccinated.
"Instagram post by childrenshealthdefensecanada. Doctor Covered in Measles While Treating Hundreds of Kids with Measles The media says the ONLY way to prevent measles is the MMR vaccine… but @drbenedwards got the shot — and still caught measles while caring for sick children in Seminole, TX. And he’s not alone – the same is true for MANY of the residents interviewed by CHD. So…if the MMR vaccine worked like Big Pharma claims, why are vaccinated people still getting sick?"
Mr. Ahmed’s organization had compiled a 2021 report on anti-vaccination content on the internet that the State Department suggested was critical of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who is a vaccine skeptic. Mr. Kennedy also celebrated the travel ban on social media, hailing the United States as “the mecca for freedom of speech!”
Tweet from John Mayer on December 13 2016: tuesday December 13 may be the lamest day of the year, conceptually
Tweet by Jay Bhattacharya: It's the height of irony that the European Commission fined @elonmusk 's @x for not being transparent. The old Twitter handed out blue checks to cronies with no transparency whatsoever. The purpose of the old Twitter blue check system was to suppress dissidents and censor speech. Quote tweets himself saying: Twitter 1.0 placed me on a blacklist & denied me a blue check on the grounds that I am not noteworthy enough. Meanwhile, Twitter 1.0 gave blue checks to every covid alarmist, whatever their credenitals and lack of notoriety. The EU is silencing political opposition.
Screenshot of Hoeg's slide. What do we owe to our children? Recommendations based on data and not politics · · Manipulating data for political reasons can be deadly Neo-Lamarkism/acquired genetics Silencing of opposing views Resulted in the death of potentially millions in the Chinese famine
BMJ’s Coverage of Kennedy’s Vaccine Reforms Amounts to Character Assassination by Peter C. Gøtzsche Abstract: The reactions to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s initiatives to improve vaccine safety have been almost uniformly negative. I studied how the narratives were framed in a cohort of 33 articles in the BMJ of which 30 were written by journalists or the editor. I focused on whether the reporting was balanced and informative, and whether the articles saw any merit in Kennedy's reforms in his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services or supported the status quo. The reporting in the BMJ was highly biased. Much of the information provided in Kennedy's disfavour was misleading, and some was wrong. All initiatives at improving vaccine safety were condemned, without any analysis of their merits in an evidence-based fashion. Instead, the BMJ cited people who had their own agendas and who condemned Kennedy without providing any evidence in their favour while expressing faith in vaccines, with the industry mantra that they are safe and effective, although all drugs will harm some people. The BMJ did not take any interest in the widespread and lethal corruption in US healthcare institutions - one of Kennedy's focus points - but toned it down. Despite the constant ad hominem attacks, Kennedy has succeeded to introduce important changes and plans related to vaccine safety, guidance about how vaccines are used, and about avoiding neurotoxic metals in vaccine adjuvants.
My hand with wicked press-on nails that are green-black hombre
Trump tells the American people vaccines cause autism while Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, RFK Jr, and Mehmet Oz look on.
Tweet by Jay Bhattacharya from October 28th: I just read the current grokopedia article on the Great Barrington Declaration. It's balanced & almost entirely factually accurated (though it still has me as Stanford prof). Wikipedia, by contrast, is baised, bordering on libelous. Thank you @elonmusk.