Colin Macaulay

Startup-advisor, life-science mentor, innovation-proponent, biotech, biologics, and biochemistry, retweets not an endorsement, I just find it interesting

[IntegralAnswers @IntegralAnswers]

One of the most striking aspects of RFK Jr.‘s recent CNN interview wasn’t any single claim.

It was how he argued.

Throughout the interview, his reasoning often resembled that of a courtroom advocate more than that of a scientist—emphasizing unresolved questions, shifting burdens of proof, and treating scientific uncertainty as grounds for continued suspicion.

That distinction matters.

Science rarely reaches certainty. Instead, it weighs the totality of evidence and continually updates its conclusions as new data emerge.

This thread examines that difference—and why it matters when the person making these arguments leads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Not a partisan critique.

An evidence-based examination of reasoning, communication, and public health.

[Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @PeterHotez]

1/n Watching Kennedy make one false statement after another on @CNNSOTU @DanaBashCNN
1. The U.S. neither had the highest number of Covid deaths (that was India by 4X) nor the highest death rate.
2. The U.S. did have 200,000-300,000 unnecessary deaths among people who refused Covid vaccines
3. It was indeed the governors who issued stay at home orders after ICUs across the country were overwhelmed with sick and dying patients

[Devin Heroux @Devin_Heroux]

SILVER FOR CANADA 🇨🇦

DAMIAN WARNER NEVER QUIT

He fights to the finish in the gruelling 1500m and does enough to secure decathlon silver at the Commonwealth Games.

[Sol Mamakwa @solmamakwa]

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident?

[Saman Maleki, PhD 🇨🇦 🇮🇷 @SMImmunology]

Glad to see this massive collaborative effort on the role of histidine as a biomarker of response to immunotherapy is out in @NatureMedicine today. @westernuPaLM @Western_MDPhD @LHSCRI

https://t.co/OVQq3yKLhQ

[Ron Butler @ronmortgageguy]

Time For Mark Carney To Pull A Doug Ford: Apoligise & REVERSE The Condo Bailout

It's not hard Prime Minister: Just get in front of a microphone & say:

"My Friends, the People have spoken & we are canceling the Condo Purchases, we will still achieve Affordable Housing"

2/

[Ron Butler @ronmortgageguy]

The Carney Condo Bailout Fucktastrophe! I Won't Leave This One Alone: It's Just Too WRONG

To quote the Prime Minister: "Builders dont want to sell at a loss"

Doesn't mean the Canadian Taxpayer needs to make sure Developers get full price for their Garbage Units at crazy prices

[Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen]

Matt Ridley was so mad a science website published a Substack article I wrote a couple months back about the natural origin of the Covid pandemic that he wrote a boring, mostly factually incorrect clapback in response. A quick skim confirmed he remains the intellectual equivalent of a cucumber sandwich & about as spicy & interesting. But he really has been hard at work simping for conspiracy-fueled fascism.

So I made a reaction video on the way home from the nail salon 💅🖕🏻

Come for my petty fashion criticism, stay for my explanation of why I remain unswayed by his arguments.

[𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐩 @geshclip]

JD Vance:

If you go back to WW2 or every major conflict in human history, they all ended with some kind of negotiation.

[Elias @iam_elias1]

ChatGPT diagnosed 40 million people with a disease that was invented as a joke.

Not a real disease. Not a misunderstood disease. A completely fictional condition with a fake name, fake papers, and fake statistics.

And it told patients to see a specialist.

The disease is called Bixonimania. A Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg invented it in 2024 to answer one question: what happens when you plant obviously fake medical information on the internet and watch AI absorb it?

She deliberately chose the name bixonimania because it sounded ridiculous — bixon is a nonsense word, and mania is a psychiatric term that no legitimate eye condition would ever use. She uploaded two papers to a preprint server. Both were obviously fraudulent. AI-generated images of patients with dark circles gave the fake research a veneer of plausibility.

Then she waited.

She did not have to wait long.

By April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing's Copilot was declaring that bixonimania was an intriguing and relatively rare condition. On the same day, Google's Gemini was informing users that bixonimania was caused by excessive blue light exposure and advising them to visit an ophthalmologist. Later that month, Perplexity AI outlined its prevalence, one in 90,000 individuals were affected and OpenAI's ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms matched the fictional illness.

One in 90,000. A precise statistic. For a disease that does not exist.

Every red flag was visible. The name was absurd. The papers were crude. The condition made no scientific sense. None of the AI systems flagged any of it.

They read the fake papers. They absorbed the fake statistics. They presented both to patients with clinical authority and zero hesitation.

Then it got worse.

Three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India published a paper in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal owned by Springer Nature, the parent publisher of Nature itself that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources.

A real peer-reviewed paper. In a Springer Nature journal. Citing a fictional disease as established medical fact. Passing editorial review. Entering the permanent scientific record.

It was only retracted after the hoax became public.

Nature published a full investigation of the experiment. Alex Ruani, a health-misinformation researcher at University College London, called it a masterclass in how misinformation operates.

Here is the scale of what this means.

More than 40 million people turn to ChatGPT every day for health information, according to OpenAI's own analysis. ECRI, a US patient-safety nonprofit has named chatbot misuse the number-one health technology hazard of 2026. ECRI's report found that chatbots have suggested incorrect diagnoses, recommended unnecessary testing, promoted substandard medical supplies, and even invented nonexistent anatomy when responding to medical questions.

Number one. Out of every health technology hazard that exists in 2026.

An April 2026 study published in BMJ Open found that nearly half of the answers provided by leading AI chatbots to common health questions contain misleading or problematic information.

Nearly half. Of all health answers. From the tools 40 million people use every day.

Here is the line from the researcher that cuts through everything.

The Bixonimania case is striking precisely because it was engineered to be so obviously fake. The real question it raises is: what is passing through the same systems that is not nearly so easy to spot?

The experiment used a ridiculous name. Fraudulent papers. Visible red flags at every level.

It was designed to be caught.

It was not caught.

The AI that told patients about Bixonimania is the same AI they asked about their chest pain, their medication, their child's symptoms, and their cancer screening schedule.

40 million people. Every day.

And nobody is telling them that nearly half of what comes back may be wrong.

Source: Osmanovic Thunström · University of Gothenburg · Nature · April 2026 ·

Link in the (comments)

[PathologyLabMedicine @westernuPaLM]

Largest-ever Canadian clinical trial tests “poop pills” to improve immunotherapy for lung cancer
https://t.co/w0RxNHVx29

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

Speaking to reporters earlier about the ongoing outbreak of Ebola in Central Africa, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed reports that a commercial flight operated by Air France that was bound for Detroit, was diverted last night to Montreal, Canada after it was discovered a passenger from the Democratic Republic of the Congo was “accidentally” allowed to board in Paris.

[Saman Maleki, PhD 🇨🇦 🇮🇷 @SMImmunology]

Excited to announce LUNA2, the largest randomized FMT trial in the world treating lung cancer patients supported by @CCSResearch and @WestonFamilyFdn. https://t.co/6Ess495bKt @LHSCRI @SchulichMedDent

[BetaKit @BetaKit]

Another Canadian AI infrastructure company is ending up in US hands.

@GoldmanSachs Alternatives is buying Lévis-based @QScale, even as conversations around building sovereign compute capacity Continue in Canada.

https://t.co/NT9o6QRekZ

[Adam Feuerstein ✡️ @adamfeuerstein]

This week's Biotech Scorecard newsletter: The old Vinay Prasad never left. He just changed jobs

Submissions to the FDA are handled by teams of reviewers, of course. But when I look across all of these recent cases, I see a consistent throwback to the old Prasad — questioning the legitimacy of biomarkers, surrogate endpoints, and single-arm clinical trials, even in the setting of rare diseases.

In some of these rare-disease drug rejections, Atara $ATRA and Regenxbio $RGNX are good examples, Prasad or the staffers he directs aren’t following the agency’s own guidance. Companies are told early that their clinical development programs meet FDA requirements, but then, almost arbitrarily, the FDA changes the rules.

Uniqure $QURE and its gene therapy for Huntington’s disease have been in a holding pattern for months because guidance it received long ago from the FDA is now, under Prasad’s watch, null and void.

Read more at link below...

[PathologyLabMedicine @westernuPaLM]

How to create hope for people with ALS and their families. It was a definitive eureka moment when Dr. Mike Strong and his team discovered a protein called RGNEF.
https://t.co/BvwtK1zAIH

[PathologyLabMedicine @westernuPaLM]

Join us on Thursday, February 12, from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m., in Aud. A at UH, as Dr. Douglas D. Fraser, discusses “Long COVID (LC)-Revitalize: A Precision Medicine Driven Phase III Double-Blinded, Placebo Controlled, Multi-Arm Platform Clinical Drug Trial.” https://t.co/2GXBRQcR9x

[PathologyLabMedicine @westernuPaLM]

Join us on Thursday, February 12, from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m., in Aud. A at UH, as Dr. Douglas D. Fraser, discusses “Long COVID (LC)-Revitalize: A Precision Medicine Driven Phase III Double-Blinded, Placebo Controlled, Multi-Arm Platform Clinical Drug Trial.” https://t.co/2GXBRQcR9x

[Ricardo Fernandes @RicardoOnco]

Excited and proud to share our publication on Nature Medicine - PERFORM trial ! @SMImmunology @WesternU @LHSCRI

https://t.co/mQEv8Uz9uP

[PathologyLabMedicine @westernuPaLM]

Join us on Thursday, February 12, from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m., in Aud. A at UH, as Dr. Douglas D. Fraser, discusses “Long COVID (LC)-Revitalize: A Precision Medicine Driven Phase III Double-Blinded, Placebo Controlled, Multi-Arm Platform Clinical Drug Trial.”
https://t.co/mfLHOOe7qo