So. This "underlying health conditions" / "pre-existing health conditions" framing is understandably upsetting b/c amid the COVID public health emergency, it became a way of discounting the morbidity or mortality of chronically ill & disabled people. The people behind MAHA leveraged this framing.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d ago

Breaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.

A fellow disabled public-health professional (who turned off quotes for super legit reasons) noted that it's bad public health practice not to clearly communicate who is at additional risk of harm in an outbreak or emergency, while also noting that at this point people are rightly wary of... (1/12)

We need to an *Inequality-Informed PPR* The IHRs require all states to build core capacities to reduce systemic pandemic risk. Inequity IS a systemic risk. So we build out a set of achievable inequality-informed measures that could counter inequality instead of having it fuel disease… /fin

Taylor Farms and other large produce corporations have long exerted political power to weaken food safety regulations. The consequences are now hitting home in the largest foodborne illness outbreak in three decades. @clairek.bsky.social

The Bigger the Corporation, the Bigger the Diarrhea Outbreak

Taylor Farms and other large produce corporations have long exerted political power to weaken food safety regulations.

barnraisingmedia.com

It's Medicaid's 61st birthday! I wrote a piece lifting up the perspectives of people who rely on it. Here's what they told me: cuts hurt people, paperwork requirements burden families, fraud is a red herring, & elected leaders are out of touch. Read more here: www.syracuse.com/opinion/2026...

Historic Medicaid cuts are a body blow to vulnerable Americans (Guest Opinion by Jamila Michener)

Cornell researcher's team interviewed dozens of enrollees. They said H.R. 1 will create impossible burdens and reflect a double standard between how rich and poor are treated.

syracuse.com

Yes! Read David Michaels's books. You'll never look at epidemiology the same way again. For quicker reads, here are some of the readings I assign to my students when I teach about manufacturing doubt. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34139265/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16030337/

Anne Sosin@annesosin.bsky.social · last wk.

We should all take the time to learn from others who have done rigorous work to understand the well-worn playbooks being deployed to manufacture doubt and mistrust and undermine science.2/ @drdavidmichaels.bsky.social www.drdavidmichaels.com/books

Simultaneously, public health leaders DO need to reach ordinary people who have been led astray by MAHA That far larger population of parents etc are caught in fact deserts & rightly dismayed by corporate influence on healthcare We should focus on them, not fracture in #PublicHealth dialog

Office Fist Bump

ALT: Office Fist Bump

static.klipy.com

you absolutely don’t need a coalition with MAHA to form a populist public health that fights for economic justice. you just need courage, principles and some fight in ya

We need to see MAHA as the product of a political economy designed to sow doubt and undermine public institutions, rather than a solution to the structural forces that have created a sense of abandonment and dislocation in too many communities and left them vulnerable to bad faith actors.

The Atlantic@theatlantic.com · 2w ago

A lot of people in public health believe that MAHA is “nothing more than a subversive anti-vaccine, anti-science syndicate,” but the movement is an opportunity that the public-health sector “cannot afford to squander,” Craig Spencer argues:

"The tragedy might have had a different outcome if the hospital in Belzoni, a five-minute drive from Ball-Stribling’s home, hadn’t closed 13 years ago. Today, Humphreys County has no hospital, no emergency room, no urgent care clinic, and no county health department."

Pregnant Woman’s Roadside Death Triggers Push To Reopen Mississippi Delta Hospital - KFF Health News

The deaths of Harmony Ball-Stribling and her unborn daughter five years ago have galvanized local leaders determined to reopen a Mississippi Delta hospital. But once a rural community loses a hospital...

kffhealthnews.org

This analysis is highly endorsed by Sam the rural health advoCATe. Dr. Shepherd @mshepruralpolitics.bsky.social has done a great job of setting out the structural barriers to health care faced by rural communities. #PowerOfRuralCats www.milbank.org/quarterly/ar...

Rural Health at a Crossroads: How Policymakers Have Failed Rural America and What Can Be Done for a Healthier Tomorrow | Milbank Quarterly

Rural and urban areas have diverged significantly in health care access and health outcomes over the last four decades.

milbank.org

“As cases of Cyclospora-related diarrhea explode, the focus has been on identifying a particular food or ingredient that might be the source of the outbreak. But that narrow focus is short-sighted,missing that there are deeper factors that jeopardize us all.” Insights from @drjudystone.bsky.social

It’s The Water, Not Produce, Likely Driving Cyclospora Outbreaks

Contaminated irrigation or processing water is more likely the source of the Cyclospora outbreak. There are many systemic failures, outlined here.

forbes.com

🚨New Book Alert 🚨 Thrilled to announce the publication of my first book: Rural Pain, Republican Gain by @uchicagopress.bsky.social ‼️ Officially released in one month but at the warehouse and ready to ship to you and yours! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Rural Pain, Republican Gain

An eye-opening look at how Republican policies have affected health outcomes in rural communities and why poor, rural white voters are turning to the Republican Party—not despite this harm, but becaus...

press.uchicago.edu

Apropos of nothing, here's a quick (and by no means exhaustive) list of books and other work elevating voices, lived experiences, and analyses that have been conspicuously absent from the current coverage and narratives on Maine and its political landscape. Photo: Lubec, Maine, 2025.

How (not) to design the future of global health architecture @jirairratevosian.bsky.social & colleagues www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-de...

How (not) to design the future of global health architecture

Inspired by Rahman-Shepherd et al.’s satire on how (not) to organise a panel at a global health conference, here is how (not) to design the future of global health architecture, written by Nelson Agho...

linkedin.com

Africa’s response to Ebola must be defined by Africa itself www.ft.com/content/d6b2...

Africa’s response to Ebola must be defined by Africa itself

International support matters when it aligns with strategies built alongside regional institutions and governments

ft.com

We will look back at the medical abuses in ICE detention as a modern day #bioethics failure akin to Tuskegee & Japanese internment during WWII New one with @krutikakuppalli.bsky.social & Katie Peeler at @healthaffairs.bsky.social www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...

A year before he passed away, I interviewed Dr Paul Farmer @pih.org about his book on Ebola So relevant right now, especially the dangers of “control-over-care approach” - i.e. isolation & quarantine, but fails to ensure adequate clinical care to the sick www.forbes.com/sites/madhuk...

Ebola, Covid-19 And The Elusive Quest For Global Health Equity

Published during this pandemic, Paul Farmer’s new book, “Fevers, Feuds, And Diamonds,” is important, as it presents a critical dissection of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the lessons we can l...

forbes.com

📣📣New publication w/ @ymurad.bsky.social 📣📣 We argue that the racial wealth gap is as much a gap in financial resources as it is a gap in power. Turning attention to power, we posit tenant organizing as pathway to fundamentally alter wealth inequality. Read here 👇🏾 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Tenant Organizing as a Pathway to Decoupling Wealth and Power

In the United States, property is wealth, and wealth is power. Racial wealth inequalities are (in part) the enduring result of this confluence. But today, as accelerating financialization transform...

tandfonline.com

Those of us in public health don't just have to become better storytellers, we need go out into our communities and co-create a better future for all of us. The story of public health in the 21st century should be one embedded in communities that need us most. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Grimly shared by Sam the rural health advoCATe. "Innovation" cannot replace gaps caused by decades of systematic underfunding for the basics of rural health care. And $50B does not replace $130B in Medicaid cuts. #PowerOfRuralCats www.gpb.org/news/2026/03...

A $50 billion fund to help rural hospitals could actually lead to closures and cuts

States are rolling out plans for their share of a $50 billion fund established by Congress to improve rural health care. In some states, the money may provoke rural hospitals to cut services.

gpb.org

A great write-up on brand-new research I was involved in. We used a really different approach from the ones that we & many others have used previously to estimate how many Covid deaths there *really* were--almost 20% more than known. Our results broadly accord w others but add new demographic detail

Mike Stobbe@mikestobbe.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The COVID-19 pandemic’s early death toll was much higher than the official U.S. count, according to a new study that spotlights dramatic disparities in the uncounted deaths. apnews.com/article/covi...

I've organized & will moderate a webinar on the health & policy crisis of ICE detention centers April 30, 1-2pm ET, open to all Register/submit questions at: childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/blog/event/t... I'd be grateful if you could circulate this Thx to @joshuasweitz.bsky.social for support

In 1996 Clinton won 48% of rural counties. In 2024 Trump won 93%. "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" explains why & what's to be done to heal the divide. I interviewed lead author @smettler.bsky.social for @barnraiser.bsky.social 1/ barnraisingmedia.com/a-strategy-t...

A Strategy to Heal America’s Rural-Urban Divide

Suzanne Mettler has combined five decades of county-level analysis to understand why rural and urban America are so divided—and how we can heal.

barnraisingmedia.com

If there’s no society, there’s no obligation to regulate pollution, guarantee food security or access to healthcare. There are only individuals tasked w/ optimizing themselves. Read why I think #MAHA isn’t about health. It’s healthism. My latest in Adverse Reaction. open.substack.com/pub/adverser...

MAHA Isn’t About Health. It’s Healthism.

RFK Jr. pushes diet and exercise while millions of Americans face hunger, poverty, and worse.

open.substack.com

When did public health stop asking who's pushing people in in the river? The upstream-downstream metaphor was always about corporate power. Somewhere along the way, "pushed" became "fell" - and that shift lets the 'manufacturers of illness' off the hook journals.plos.org/globalpublic...

“Who the hell is upstream pushing them all in?” Reclaiming public health’s defining metaphor to counter the commercial determinants of health

Public health policy and practice are often described by means of a metaphor that depicts interventions as “upstream” efforts to prevent people from falling into a river, from which they must be rescu...

journals.plos.org

This right here 👇. And this is (another reason) why we also need social science training in ph & med, nursing & allied disciplines to recognize these patterns of attack & advocate effectively

public health guy@publichealthguy1.bsky.social · 5mo ago

the problem is the misinformation getting piped into everyone’s screens + lack of political will to fight anti-vaccine policy/legal attacks. public health cannot fix these issues alone. need politicians to lead

From Hardwick, Vermont to the streets of Minneapolis then back again. This is a story about a song that's giving a lot of people comfort, and some courage. www.rumblestripvermont.com/episodes/hol...

Hold On. — Rumble Strip

From Hardwick to Minneapolis then home again. A story about a song that’s doing good work.

rumblestripvermont.com

#Measles in an ICE facility is a public health failure. In my latest for @statnews.com, I argue this outbreak was avoidable and the result of policy choices that concentrate risk without basic prevention. V This is both a health and human rights failure. www.statnews.com/2026/02/04/m...

Measles in an ICE facility is a public health failure

A marginalized population, a highly contagious disease, no systemic vaccination safeguards — no wonder there’s measles in an ICE detention facility.

statnews.com