Pawel Michalak

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

The strongest evidence-based tool for preventing Alzheimer’s and dementia may already be sitting in your shot record.

104 million people. 8 vaccines. All showing protection against brain diseases they were never designed to prevent.

Ranked by how much they lower Alzheimer’s and dementia risk:
→ Shingrix (shingles): 47% lower Alzheimer’s risk. Meta-analysis, 104 million people (Age and Ageing 2025). A separate Wales natural experiment (Nature 2025, n=280,000) confirmed a 20% dementia reduction independently.

→ Pneumococcal: 36% lower Alzheimer’s risk. People carrying the APOE risk gene saw a 25-30% reduction in a separate study of 5,146 people.

→ Tdap: 33% lower dementia risk. Same 104-million-person meta-analysis.

→ RSV (Arexvy): 29% lower dementia in 18 months. This vaccine was approved in 2023. It’s one of the newest vaccines in existence, and it’s already generating a brain-protection signal nobody predicted.

→ Influenza: 26% lower Alzheimer’s risk with 1+ year of consecutive annual shots (JAMA 2024).

→ Hepatitis A: 22% lower dementia risk. Same 104M meta-analysis.

→ Hepatitis B: 19% lower Alzheimer’s risk. Observational, n=50,000+.

→ HPV: 31% lower infection-associated cancer risk (JAMA 2023, n=1.4 million women).

All insurance-covered. Most free at any pharmacy.

The hypothesis connecting all eight is that every infection leaves behind a trace of inflammation. Over decades, that chronic low-grade fire accelerates neurodegeneration. Vaccines reduce the number of infections your brain has to weather across a lifetime.

Your vaccine schedule was already an Alzheimer’s prevention protocol. Nobody framed it that way until now.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@HousebotGuy Not crows—storks. Israel sits on one of the world’s major migration corridors, and right now (spring) tens of thousands of white storks pass through. Crucially, it’s also one of the safest stretches of that route—unlike parts of the region (e.g. Lebanon) where they’re still shot.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@shoukointech And yet, in the end, he fell prey to noise, pseudoscience and quackery.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@RuksanaAnsar 100.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@r0ck3t23 PLURIBUS

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@A_M_R_M1 How convenient the pictures capture signs with the city and street names! 😀The problem is that the sign Hebrew writings are nonsensical and don't match the English names. It's fake.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@DrNeilStone Got my 6th booster just today. Never felt better!

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

mRNA vaccines are safe and effective

[Daniella Greenbaum Davis @DGreenbaum]

80 years ago today, April 15th 1945, my grandmother Masha Greenbaum was liberated from the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army.

She never got over the sight of the first British soldier whose tank rolled into the camp. He got out, stared at the pile of dead and dying bodies, and began to weep.

"He came from the fight, he came from the struggle, but he had never seen anything like Bergen Belsen."

The footage and reports from Belsen shocked the world and revealed the full extent of Nazi brutality.

Masha died earlier this year - its the first April 15th i'm commemorating without her. It's also the first Passover I had since her death. Our seders were always led by the men of the family - first my grandfather, then my dad. But when we got to the section "Avadim Hayinu" - we were slaves in Egypt, my grandmother would take over.

She would tell us how 2 weeks before liberation, she and her mother, and her sister, sat in the filth of Belsen, no books, no wine, no matzah, but they would sing whatever they remembered from memory. And when they got to "we were slaves" they kept singing, even though they were slaves, and God had not yet freed them.

Many survivors were quiet from the time of liberation until the Eichmann trial, which in many ways was the dam breaking - it normalized survivor testimony and thousands who had been silent began speaking. But Masha began documenting her story and educating people about the Shoah right away. Her earliest writings appeared in the Yiddish journal "Unzer Shteime" - which was put together by the survivors of Belsen in the British-run DP camp.

Masha went on to get a masters degree in Jewish history-- a subject she knew and lived. She authored three books- "A Window into Hell," "Hope at the Edge of the Abyss," and "The Jews of Lithuania."

Approximately 90–95% of Lithuanian Jewry was killed during the Holocaust.

Before World War II, there were around 220,000 to 250,000 Jews living in Lithuania. By the end of the Holocaust, only about 10,000–15,000 remained. This makes Lithuania one of the countries with the highest percentage loss of its Jewish population during the Holocaust.

Three of those survivors were my grandmother Masha, her sister Shoshana, and her mother Judith. One of the Lithuanian Jews killed during the holocaust was my great-grandfather, Masha's father, Sholem Ralsky. He was in his forties.

Passover is the holiday of liberation. Fitting that this year, the first Passover without her, the anniversary of her freedom comes during the holiday.

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Today marks the beginning of OpenRxiv, which replaces bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world's largest preprint platform for life and medical science @openrxiv

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@elicalebon Thank you, Elica!

[internet hall of fame @InternetH0F]

Dad receives a last message from his son who passed 😢 💔

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@nicksortor Pathetic fear mongering. Crime rate in Colorado is much lower than in Alabama or other Republican-governed states. Total crime index, CO 110, AL 135. Violent crime index: CO 118, AL 136, etc.

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@NoContextHumans Waze navigation, Polaris pool system, Uzi

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@EylonALevy 💪🙌🇮🇱

[Pawel Michalak @Opiniomics]

@PawlowskiMario @InnerVoltRock @GaryPetersonUSA The sad thing is there is essentially no difference between his parody and real MAGA. What's the point then?

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

"I’m sorry to inform you that unfortunately we will have to cancel the event on Friday...Many of the members in the committee did not feel comfortable giving Dr. Coyne and Dr. Boudry a platform given their stances on the Palestine/Israel conflict. Another fear is how it would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC. We understand the irony of this considering this is the very issue that Dr. Coyne wrote his article about, however the group decided we can’t host this event given the current political climate." Damned in Amsterdam: A Bizarre Deplatforming https://t.co/6B9WFv0IVE

[Sri Kosuri @srikosuri]

Fauci being brought to Congress, Alina Chan in the nytimes, all in pod talking angrily about conspiracy. No facts on the ground have changed. We continue to just play this game of being stupid over and over again.

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

Vaccines are a modern day miracle, a triumph of capitalism, and something worth celebrating.