September 11, 2021 — It seems that anger goes far these days. In fact, it crops up in just about every part of the ideological spectrum on a wide variety of topics. On masks, vaccines, racism, and of course, politics, we find people who see things in very polarized ways. The only thing they have in common is anger. […]
August 22, 2021 — Make no mistake about it, public health is a righteous cause. Overwhelmingly, people choose careers in public health because they believe in the mission and they want to make a difference in the world. But righteous causes can bring a loss of objectivity. It happens because strong, human feelings come into play. When we hear […]
July 21, 2021 — People are dying again. Deaths from COVID-19 are rising in the U.S. for the first time in months. This follows an upward trend in COVID cases that began in early July. Hospitalizations started rising soon after that. And all of this is happening most in places where vaccination rates are low and among people who […]
July 3, 2021 — When the words are a challenge, then dealing with a health issue is a challenge. Ask anyone working in mental health or addiction medicine. There was a time when people could not even talk about breast cancer. Betty Ford brought these subjects into public discourse. But obesity remains something that people are not really ready […]
May 13, 2021 — Food systems are a key ingredient in the problem we face with obesity. But working toward healthier food systems is a challenge that goes well beyond the cartoonish ideas that surface in some public health campaigns. For example, marketing practices can be a vexing problem. Food security is a dimension of the problem that came […]
April 22, 2021 — Call us quaint. But we believe medical journals should publish research grounded in facts and evidence. Not speculation. Especially in the midst of a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than three million people around the world. BMJ, though, has a different approach. This week the BMJ group has a paper promoting magical […]
March 28, 2021 — Are we entering a new golden age for obscurantism? Truth seems elusive at times in public discourse. But the pursuit of it is receiving a great deal of attention. So we have social media enterprises exploring ways they can slow the spread of misinformation. In response, folks who persist in spreading it are becoming more […]
March 1, 2021 — This is a classic headline versus study problem. Except the problem goes beyond the headline. It starts with a preprint of a study. The study has not yet gone through peer review. It goes deep into the weeds of the immune response to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. But the Guardian doesn’t want to lose its readers […]
February 17, 2021 — Misinformation about COVID-19 spreads so fast that real information has a hard time keeping up. But what we face now is extra hard, because two other difficult subjects are in the mix – obesity and vaccines. So naturally, we’re seeing a mess in messaging about COVID-19 vaccines and obesity. As a matter of fact, the […]
January 25, 2021 — This has become annoying. Casual misinformation about COVID vaccines is spreading through otherwise reputable news sources. “Experts” who haven’t bothered to look at the data are helping. Perhaps it comes from innocent ignorance. Or maybe from unconscious bias. But that really doesn’t matter. It is flatly wrong to keep reporting that COVID vaccines won’t work […]
