• 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.

• RFK Jr apparently believes (against all evidence to the contrary) that pediatricians profit from vaccine administration. He either mentally resides in an alternate universe or is lying in an attempt to further line his pockets when he thankfully leaves his post at HHS, a post for which he is totally unfit.

• 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.”

• 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.”

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)

• 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