HeyJaredMaking sense... of evidence, data, and the stories they tell
Making Sense explores how evidence and data can help us make sense of the world — from the NHS and Covid to science, democracy and politics. Christina Pagel is a Professor of Operational Research at University College London.
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Jul 7, 2026
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What's being withdrawn, and what's being hidden: 3 weeks in Trump’s America (opens the original)
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As promised, here’s the update in written versionHello. It has been three weeks since my last update, so there is a lot to get through, and I am going to concentrate on two themes. First, science and health. Then immigration.Science and healthSo let me start with vaccines.On the 18th Sept, in the Oval Office with his health secretary RFK Jr beside him, Trump said the administration would demand that vaccine makers split some childhood vaccines into five separate doses, each a fifth of the amount
Trump's supervillain AI images, and the rest of a disturbing week (opens the original)
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I’m back after a busy and good summer! And here we go with the first week of September… Trump has been posting AI images of himself as a red-eyed, robot-flanked supervillain, and it’s genuinely one of the stranger things I’ve logged in the last 18 months. But it’s not the only thing worth your attention from the last week. Here are three stories you might have missed. Elections: a hunt for voter fraud that doesn’t exist, ICE at polling places, North Carolina’s new spoiled-ballot rules, and the m
Trump and RFK Jr need to shut up about the MMR vaccine (opens the original)
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Last week, Trump signed an Executive Order that among other things recommended that MMR (a combined 2-dose vaccine that offers children life-long protection against Measles, Mumps and Rubella) be given as three separate, single-disease shots, at separate visits. This effectively would mean parents taking their children to 6 appointments instead of 2 for full coverage. Since one of the biggest reasons that children don’t complete their current immunizations is the burden of ma
Last month in Trump’s America: a story of power and how it’s used (opens the original)
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I’ve logged over 200 actions since the 1st July on my TrumpActionTracker. The machinery of the state is being subverted to reward the president’s allies and punish everyone else. In this post, I’ll demonstrate through that pattern across several domains: the abuse of law and truth against perceived enemies, the rise of propaganda alongside the withholding of real information, blatant corruption, the retreat from evidence in science and health, and the continued dismantling of social protections.
We are learning the wrong lesson from Covid school closures (opens the original)
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On The News Agents podcast yesterday, John Sopel and Lewis Goodall turned their attention to Covid while discussing the show-trial of Dr Fauci in the US senate. I wasn’t really planning on writing about Covid any time soon, but they offered two increasingly standard media pandemic takes that are simply not justified by the evidence and undermine both science and future pandemic preparedness.Goodall and Sopel discussed school closures and the lab leak theory: “<a href="https://podcasts.musixmatch
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