Freelance journalist specializing in medicine, public health, and health policy. English prof when the whim hits. Literature and medicine always.

United States
Joined January 2010
Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Deservedly scathing op-ed by the NYT: “If Democrats retake both houses of Congress, and more state governments than they now control, it will tell the world that Mr. Trump does not represent most Americans. It will demonstrate that a country that starts to slide toward autocracy can move back to normalcy, as happened in Hungary this spring. Most important, it will create a desperately needed check on Mr. Trump during his final two years in office. … In a 21-month span, he has done more harm to democracy and the rule of law than any other president in the modern era and perhaps longer than that. He has broken his oath to defend the Constitution by trying to rewrite it on his own. He has refused to honor Congress’s power of the purse and misused national security laws for political ends. He has defied federal court orders on Medicaid funding, deportation orders and more. He has dismantled the Justice Department’s legacy as an impartial enforcer of federal law, turning it into an instrument of retribution against his adversaries while canceling investigations into his allies. He has appointed inept sycophants to oversee crucial government functions, including law enforcement, national defense and public health. He has sought to disenfranchise large numbers of voters, claiming fraud that cannot be found, and championed an extreme new approach to partisan gerrymandering. He has physically besmirched the White House by demolishing the East Wing and financing a garish renovation with donations from wealthy allies.” nytimes.com/2026/10/27/opini…
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
The Pentagon just quietly gave $41 million dollars to a Singaporean Pharmaceutical Company to produce an emergency Ketamine wafer. This is $41 million dollars from The DOD’s budget because Pete Hegseth says they can be used by medics. They don’t even have FDA approval for them.🤬
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
📸 Kharkiv, 27 Oct — after the Russian strike The site after the strike. The strike, its casualties and sources are in the Hub strike log. Photo: State Emergency Service of Ukraine (CC BY 4.0) · link in bio
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was at least one actually pure website? One without the usual gotchas. No asking for your email. No parts paywalled. No ads. No data collection. I think so, which is why I created teddyrookbook.com Homeschool families get every K–12 course free (with teaching guides and practice that checks answers), plus a lesson planner that builds a week-by-week plan. Science labs. Languages. Music. Etiquette. Logic. Meal planning. Trades and farming. And much more! I’m building this for my family to use and sharing with others because I’m open to feedback on how it can be better.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
This paper answers why you can't think straight even when you're not touching your phone. Researchers from UT Austin and UC San Diego published a paper that explains every unfinished task, every reread paragraph, and every afternoon that vanished. It's called "Brain Drain." they took 520 people and gave them tests of memory and problem solving. the only difference was where their phone was. on the desk, face down. in their pocket or bag. or in another room. every phone was on silent. no buzzing. no notifications. And the results are wild. the people whose phones were in another room did significantly better than the people whose phones sat face down on the desk. the closer the phone, the worse they scored. then they ran it again and made half of them turn their phones completely off. it didn't matter. off and face down on the desk still drained the brain. the paper revealed a brutal paradox: most people said they weren't thinking about their phone at all. 75.9% said its location didn't affect their performance "at all." they were wrong. your brain spends energy just to not pick it up. a quiet, constant effort to ignore the most interesting object in the room. that effort comes from the same tank you use to think. and the more dependent people were on their phones, the bigger the hit. you are not distracted because you're weak. you are distracted because the most powerful attention machine ever built is sitting three inches from your hand. the fix is almost insultingly simple. put it in another room.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Monday night and Russia has just launched a ballistic missile strike on the dormitories of Kyiv's State University of Trade and Economics. Students are dead.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Looking for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance resources around the world? 🌍 I’ve brought the resources I previously shared together in one easy-to-use map. Explore it via the link below - and let me know what’s missing or could be improved! dpz.eu/infektionsbiologie/fo…
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So... what's the CO2 level in your kid's classroom? It's time to find out.
PMC COVlD Update, Oct 26, 2026 🔥44 states with COVlD outbreaks (see Alt) 🔥Double wave peaks, both at an estimated 950,000 new daily infections 🔥6th week in a row of massive CDC upward retroactive corrections going back to early July THREAD (1/4)
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
A new paper by John Catanzaro, Nicolas Hulscher, and Peter McCullough proposes that mRNA COVID vaccines may produce persistent biological effects and potentially transfer vaccine-derived material between people. The accompanying article goes further, calling for an immediate halt to mRNA technology. Those are extraordinary claims. But the paper also cites several genuine scientific observations that deserve to be understood rather than dismissed. So what does the evidence actually establish? And where does a plausible biological mechanism become an unsupported conclusion? Let’s examine the science.
🤖 Made with AI
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
NEW: Trump is a Russian asset. And the UK government is finally waking from its decade-long slumber Read this. And order a wind-up radio. 🔗below
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Take a minute... or an hour... to read and reflect. Then act.
Today, I lectured on the economic history of fascism in my Global Economic History course. It is not a pleasant topic to discuss, but as I have mentioned before, I find it increasingly relevant. Tariffs as tools of statecraft, nationalist economic policies, the push for self-sufficiency in strategic goods, and the creation of closed economic blocs are back in the discussion. The slides are here: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/GEH_1… The situations are not equivalent (and far be it from me to make facile comparisons), but one cannot deny the parallels either. For example, is it a good idea for a regional hegemon to build an economic bloc and close it to trade with the rest of the world? Should a country seek to control the supply of critical inputs (oil and rubber in the 1930s, rare earths and advanced chips today) rather than buy them on world markets? What balance between power and rules should hegemons seek in international relations? How important are economies of scale in modern economic growth? The last question is particularly salient. Many alternatives to the liberal international order, from the 1930s to today, argue that economies of scale are crucial for a developing state and that achieving them “playing by the rules” is hard. For example, AI is the ultimate increasing-returns-to-scale technology, and nations without control of frontier models will run their economies, culture, and knowledge production on an “operating system” someone else designed. In a world like that, what is the optimal economic strategy of a middle-sized nation? As always, my goal in the lecture is not to provide answers, but to force students to think about these questions on their own.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Things heating up in Serbia as the election hasn't gone as the Russian-backed Vucic regime planned, now pouring troops onto the streets, here readying (in true soviet fashion) to seizing the city's TV station.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
⚡️Alice AfD wannabe Merciful Sovereign runs cold. “The tone is cool - whether with suspected party friends or strangers. In many messages, a command tone sounds through - regardless of whether they are addressed to suspected accounts of strangers or long-time companions… …the tone in the mails that are said to have been sent by Alice Weidel's accounts coincides with many public appearances by the AfD co-leader, especially on public television. It is not yet certain whether the messages and documents of the leak are real…”
⚡️AfD Models as Merciful/ Merciless Sovereign. 1.        Inner/Outer Realm sleight-of-hand: Inner Realm = Germans (her constituency). Outer Realm = “the bear” (Russia framed as predator). Ukraine — the actor actually defending itself — is disappeared from the analytical frame entirely. This deletion-of-the-victim-from-the-analytical-space is itself a recurring signature. 2.        Agency inversion: “Germany helping Ukraine drone-bomb Russia” makes Germany the active party. Ukraine becomes the receiver of help rather than the attacked party defending itself. The original aggressor (Russia) is reframed as the passive recipient of aggression. Three-step agency reversal. 3.        War Magic operation in “making Germans insecure”: declaring Germans insecure performatively manufactures the insecurity. Same substrate-summoning mechanism Buchanan’s “Cultural War” speech enacts. The statement is the act. 4.        Axis-of-Misogyny coalition tell: AfD is documented Axis-of-Misogyny coalition member. The Putin/Buchanan trans-civilizational adoption pattern (Cultural War memo) predicts AfD will deploy “don’t poke the bear” specifically because their coalition partner’s continued ability to wage war benefits from Western non-intervention. The framework can flag this as coalition-signature, not just individual-statement. 5.        Stealth Genocide enabler signature (Ch 10): refusing Ukraine self-defence enables continued Russian atrocity production. AfD positions as Merciful Sovereign FOR GERMANS while structurally enabling Merciless Sovereign acts AGAINST Russian-speaking Ukrainians — the very people Putin claims to be protecting. The doubly-inverted-Merciful-Sovereign nesting is the deepest detection signal here. AfD’s “protection” creates more Mariupol Drama Theatres. 6.        WWII-Restart signature (yesterday’s canonical memo): Germany ratified the UN Charter precisely because the previous regime initiated WWII. AfD framing argues against the very legal apparatus Germany committed itself to upholding after 1945. AfD ↔ Russian-state framing is convergent on dismantling Article 51 / UN Charter. 7.        “Drone-bomb” verbal conversion: “bombing” rather than “targeting military infrastructure / refineries / supply lines” verbally converts Ukrainian lawful self-defence into something morally indistinguishable from aggression. Article 51 right of self-defence rhetorically erased. 8.        Outer-Realm Mask signature (yesterday’s memo): Germany is IE-Germanic substrate; Russia is IE-Slavic substrate — sister-branches. AfD reactivating Germanic-vs-Slavic Othering reactivates exactly the deep cultural template Germany formally committed to never reactivating after 1945. The Mask is performing distance from a substrate Germany is in fact cognate to. 9.        Reflexive Control conditioned-response: Russia has spent years training Western publics to internalise “we should not be Russia’s enemy” logic. AfD leader is performing the reflexive-conditioned response the training was designed to produce. She is the operation’s output, not its independent observer. 10.        “Bear that retaliates if poked” sustained by FEAR not by demonstrated retaliation: Russia has not actually retaliated proportionately against Germany for past arms supplies. The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence. AfD leader’s statement sustains the fear-archetype that makes future Russian aggression rhetorically permissible. 11.        Tool 11 (Insight) antidote — the temporal-stratification check: The framing of “the bear” requires forgetting Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Kharkiv. The framing’s coherence depends on amnesia. The framework’s Insight tool surfaces what’s been disappeared from the temporal record. 12.        Tool 12 (Cryptotypic Literacy) — bear-archetype reinforcement: The AfD leader is reinforcing Russia’s preferred self-archetype. Cryptotype-ride. 13.        anyone amplifying this AfD framing is transmitting Disinfolklore.
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Grateful to @NPR for the chance to talk about how stress and infections like COVID can stir dormant viruses in our bodies, and what that may mean for our immune system. Still much to learn, and I’m thankful to my team and colleagues for their work 🎧 npr.org/2026/10/23/nx-s1-598…
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
The age-old question still stands: which car is trying to suffocate you the most? We're on a mission to find out. First one - the EV.
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Words matter.
A post I uploaded recently discussed my opinion of the use of the word “retard” on social media. Let’s revisit a thread I created not so long ago on the words used by authoritarians.
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In case you haven't heard... COVID = brain damage.
More of the 🧠 Daily Feed of Brain Damage 🧠 @evelio_prieto 🙏🏻 For those up the back... Here's "Mild@ Cövid from 2022 👇🏻👇🏻 doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.…
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
The Right’s Fascistic Fever Dreams Are a Sign of Weakness MAGA wants us to believe that Trump can simply declare “martial law” and wipe away the system - but it’s just not true. A threat assessment before the midterms. Thoughts from my new piece: 🧵 steady.page/en/democracyamer…
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Renee Despres, PhD, MPH retweeted
Just added the full 1916 “Harvard Classics, fifteen minutes a day” reading plan to my site, including all of the texts, with a brief intro for each. My New Year’s resolution for next year is to read them all.
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