• Are mRNA Covid-19 vaccines safe?  More strong evidence that the answer is YES:

From: Semenzato L, Le Vu S, Botton J, et al. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(12):e2546822. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.46822

“Design, Setting, and Participants  This cohort study used data from the French National Health Data System for all individuals in the French population aged 18 to 59 years who were alive on November 1, 2021. Data analysis was conducted from June 2024 to September 2025.

Exposure  Exposure was defined as receiving a first mRNA dose between May 1 and October 31, 2021. Individuals who were unvaccinated by November 1, 2021, were assigned a random index date based on vaccinated individuals’ vaccination dates.

Results  A total of 22 767 546 vaccinated and 5 932 443 unvaccinated individuals were followed up for a median (IQR) of 45 (44-46) months. Vaccinated individuals were older than unvaccinated individuals (mean [SD] age, 38.0 [11.8] years vs 37.1 [11.4] years), more frequently women (11 688 603 [51.3%] vs 2 876 039 [48.5%]) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities (2 126 250 [9.3%] vs 464 596 [7.8%]). During follow-up, 98 429 (0.4%) and 32 662 (0.6%) all-cause deaths occurred in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, respectively. Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause. Mortality was 29% lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination (relative incidence, 0.71 [95% CI, 0.69-0.73]).

Conclusions and Relevance  In this national cohort study of 28 million individuals, the results found no increased risk of 4-year all-cause mortality in individuals aged 18 to 59 years vaccinated against COVID-19, further supporting the safety of the mRNA vaccines that are widely used worldwide.”

• Katelyn Jetelina writes (with Hayden Rooke-Ley) in her Your Local Epidemiologist blog on the wildly disproportionate cost/delivery ratio of health care in the United States; read  “5 ways our health care system has become utterly insane” to get a summary of that sad story.  One tidbit – wages may have kept pace with inflation over the last 15 years, but they have decidedly NOT kept pace with health insurance costs.  And then there’s this:

“One in three Americans has medical debt, and more than half worry they’ll fall into debt any time they use the health care system. That fear changes behavior: people delay appointments, skip medications, or avoid care altogether…Medical debt is now the most common form of debt in collections ahead of credit cards, utilities, or personal loans. Nearly 60% of those in medical debt have insurance.”

• Brian Lee PhD, one of the authors of the 2024 JAMA sibling study suggesting that there is no causal relationship between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment disorders talks about this study in this free interview in JAMA.

He mentions a more recent 2025 Japanese study that came to the same conclusions:

“A nationwide Japanese study with about 200 000 persons looked at this exact same question and also did a sibling analysis. The use of acetaminophen in this population was roughly 40%. And they found the exact same thing that our Swedish study did, where there’s an apparent statistical association initially, but it completely disappears when you do the sibling control analysis. And so, the evidence is pointing a certain way that is going to be challenging for other studies to try and overcome.”

• Frank Bruni outdoes his usual excellence in this week’s NYT newsletter “The Unchecked, Unbalanced Reign of King Donald.” His For the Love of Sentences is especially good as well. Some examples:

Frank’s own, nominated by me:

“But the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have instead surrendered all control to Trump, whose vanquishing of Democrats and potential wrath speak more loudly to them than ethics, a word I feel silly typing. They’re dutiful handmaidens and gushing cheerleaders who have given him whatever he wants, including a roster of senior administration officials who are, incredibly, yet more dutiful and gushing than they are. Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he were extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them were calling dibs on a different toe.”

and from others:

In The Pickup, John Paul Brammer took issue with a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States in a very flat state: “It’s difficult to communicate just how dramatically its completion would transform the Oklahoma City skyline, but picture, if you would, a pancake with a yardstick plunged into it.”

In her newsletter, Mary Geddry experienced Trump’s ramblings to journalists in the Oval Office last Monday as “less a press conference than a slurred soliloquy of decay, staged under the chandeliers of American decline.”

• David French, writing in the Times, explains why this one sentence in Article II of the Constitution is now such a problem: “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.”  His proposed remedy:

“There is a constitutional answer to this national challenge. We can — at long last — heed the warnings of the antifederalists, and we can do it simply enough, by changing the first sentence of Article II. Instead of declaring, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” it should read, “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.””

• Dr. Jessica Steier does an excellent job of illustrating why RFK Jr.’s choice of David Geier as the leader of an investigation into the cause of autism is a terrible one.  Read The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism in the NY Times.

• From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball:

“TRUMP’S BLS PICK E.J. ANTONI IS — SHOCKER — A CRACKPOT HACK ★

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. […]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.”

• Carl Zimmer writes in the NY Times (“Scientists Are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life“) about how scientists are working on simplifying the process of translation by reducing the number of redundant codons in a reconstructed E. coli genome.  This was a major feat of genetic engineering – one that serves as a reminder of how much we still need to learn about how the mechanics and control of DNA an RNA encoding, transcription, and translation work.

Matt Yglesias, writing  in his latest Substack post Trump’s insane war on renewable energy:

“All Trump will accomplish by throttling renewables is making costs higher and the air dirtier than if he just let Americans use technologies that really are quite cheap at the current margin. He’s letting culture war prejudice, special interest politics, and polarization get in the way of his stated goals of lower costs and energy dominance.”

• Kristen Panthagani M.D. PhD. runs through the sad timeline of the damage done to Science and Public Health by the current administration here in her You Can Know Things blog.