How to Make It Through Cold and Flu Season
You may not be able to prevent catching a cold or the flu, but you can greatly reduce your chances and decrease the likelihood that you’ll have a severe case if you do get sick. The well established advice meant to keep you healthy also protects others by reducing the spread of these diseases. Get […]
How to respond to dangerous changes to U.S. public health
A dangerous idea is on the table: ending universal hepatitis B birth-dose vaccination in the United States. For many years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that every baby born in this country receive the vaccine, preventing infections and deaths from a disease that causes liver cancer and deadly cirrhosis. (Most other […]
How to talk to strangers at a bar about Covid
This essay was adapted from Jess Steier’s newsletter, “Unbiased Science.” For the last few weeks of summer, my mom visited from Florida. It was amazing, as it always is, to have her here spending time with the family doing lots of things and nothing at all. Going to the lake with the kids, playing board […]
How to become a trusted scientific messenger on social media
It’s a strange reality when more people recognize you from your videos on social media than from your peer-reviewed papers or “professional” work. During grad school, I could never have predicted that a casual one-minute video about immunology would rack up orders of magnitude more views in an hour than my published research papers would […]
How to Think About COVID-19 Vaccines in the Era of R.F.K., Jr.
On Tuesday, in a fifty-eight-second video posted on X, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, made a remarkable announcement: under his watch, he said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer advise healthy children and pregnant women to get vaccinated against COVID-19. For decades, the C.D.C. has […]
Measles cases more than tripled this year. Here’s how to help protect your kids as school starts.
As kids head back to school, federal health officials are emphasizing the importance of getting routine vaccinations against diseases like measles. Over 200 cases of measles have been reported this year in more than two dozen states and Washington, D.C., which is more than triple the number of cases reported last year. Most are in children under 5 […]