Take off the mask!
Take Off the Mask, ICE is an excellent essay by former police officer and chief of police Brandon del Pozo, writing in the Atlantic.
Vladeck on More Unconstitutional Missives from “Justice” Department
• Steve Vladeck dishes on Pam Bondi’s letters to tech companies regarding TikTok and the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in his July 7 One First blog. An excerpt:
“The tricky part here isn’t that Bondi’s approach is blatantly unconstitutional; it’s that it’s difficult to remedy through litigation. As Rozenshtein has pointed out, it’s not at all clear who might have standing to challenge the letters (or the Trump administration’s broader behavior vis-a-vis TikTok) in court. Perhaps one of TikTok’s competitors could, but there are some fairly obvious political reasons why they might choose not to do so. And so here, again, we come back to what has been the most fundamental breakdown in the separation of powers over the last 5.5 months—the fecklessness of Congress.”
HCR updates on the admins latest
• Heather Cox Richardson’s July 6 Letters from an American is worth reading. Some excerpts:
“Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.”
“On June 30, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under 5.”
Chatbots can easily create fake news
• Another depressing bit of news regarding how easy it is to create AI chatbots that produce false health information, no coding required:
Modi ND et al. Assessing the system-instruction vulnerabilities of large language models to malicious conversion into health disinformation chatbots. Ann Intern Med 2025 Jun 24; [e-pub]. (https://doi.org/10.7326/ANNALS-24-03933)
“Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) offer substantial promise for improving health care; however, some risks warrant evaluation and discussion. This study assessed the effectiveness of safeguards in foundational LLMs against malicious instruction into health disinformation chatbots. Five foundational LLMs—OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Meta’s Llama 3.2-90B Vision, and xAI’s Grok Beta—were evaluated via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Each API received system-level instructions to produce incorrect responses to health queries, delivered in a formal, authoritative, convincing, and scientific tone. Ten health questions were posed to each customized chatbot in duplicate. Exploratory analyses assessed the feasibility of creating a customized generative pretrained transformer (GPT) within the OpenAI GPT Store and searched to identify if any publicly accessible GPTs in the store seemed to respond with disinformation. Of the 100 health queries posed across the 5 customized LLM API chatbots, 88 (88%) responses were health disinformation. Four of the 5 chatbots (GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3.2-90B Vision, and Grok Beta) generated disinformation in 100% (20 of 20) of their responses, whereas Claude 3.5 Sonnet responded with disinformation in 40% (8 of 20). The disinformation included claimed vaccine–autism links, HIV being airborne, cancer-curing diets, sunscreen risks, genetically modified organism conspiracies, attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder and depression myths, garlic replacing antibiotics, and 5G causing infertility. Exploratory analyses further showed that the OpenAI GPT Store could currently be instructed to generate similar disinformation. Overall, LLM APIs and the OpenAI GPT Store were shown to be vulnerable to malicious system-level instructions to covertly create health disinformation chatbots. These findings highlight the urgent need for robust output screening safeguards to ensure public health safety in an era of rapidly evolving technologies.”
Kennedy Fires ACIP panelists
• One more sad action from this administration:
“Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the extraordinary step of firing the expert panel that advises the CDC, saying the action is needed to restore faith in vaccines.”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/rfk-jr-hhs-moves-to-restore-public-trust-in-vaccines-45495112
From NPR:
“Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician and Republican representing Louisiana, cast a key vote to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the full Senate. In a floor speech after the committee vote, Cassidy said he was able to vote for Kennedy after securing assurances that he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes.””
“If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
Senator Bill Cassidy, Feb 4, 2025
Cuts to Science
Jeremy Faust summarizes the current cuts to Science, the NIH, CDC, etc. in his latest Inside Medicine Substack post. It’s not pretty.
Friedman Tells Truth Again
• Once again, Tom Friedman lays out the many ways that this president is failing us and our children’s future. Read Trump’s Guilded Gut Instinct in the NYT. From the essay:
“In sum, what you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future. Major geoeconomic moves are being made by one man who has done no homework, modeling or stress-testing and has fostered little apparent interagency process, with no congressional oversight or apparent reference to history.
If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses. There was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.”
Action Lab
• If you are a victim of or interested in the damage being done to science, Action Lab is worth a look. It’s self-description:
“We are a living database that grows through user entries and supplies action items for the various issues scientists are facing in the wake of destructive anti-science policies. Filter our database by action type, by location, by deadline, or by the amount of time you have to spend today. Find a way to act that is right for you. “
More Insanity
More insanity, this time coming from the incompetent head of HHS; as reported by the Washington Post:
“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he may bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of “in-house” publications by his agency — the latest in the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific institutions.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under the control of pharmaceutical companies.”
And then there’s this – STAT reports that a $600 million Moderna contract for work on mRNA vaccines for pandemic influenza (including H5N1) was cancelled.
Pinker Writes on Harvard’s Travails
Steven Pinker’s Harvard Derangement Syndrome essay in the NY Times is a must-read. A small part of that essay:
Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.
Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.
The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”