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J. Offir, PhD

@joffirphd.bsky.social

13K followers 1.1K following 13K posts

Ph.D. in social psychology. Former researcher in pandemic behavioral risk reduction (non-pharma intervention). Only here to keep up. @[email protected]

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · Aug 23

Updated 📌 list of my essays on the psychology of public health (inc. topics like covid, HIV & reproductive health). As of 8/22/25, there are *31* long-form pieces in this 🧵.

The list starts in reverse chrono. order, but in Oct. 2024 starts rolling forward, so oldest posts are in the middle. Doh.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · Oct 21

In The Bad Place, I have a pinned thread of my covid essays & threads, w/ short descriptions of ea. Here's one for This Place, though w/o descriptions, b/c I'm tired. As is true there, I've put them in reverse chrono order, but anything new will post at the end. I flagged ones people liked best:

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 8h

"More than 23 million Americans are currently enrolled in Obamacare plans, and nearly all of them will face higher health care costs next year if extra federal funding for subsidies expires, as scheduled, on Dec. 31."

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Obamacare Enrollment by State: Most Enrollees Live in Republican Areas

Millions of Americans depend on Obamacare. Here's where they live.

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by J. Offir, PhD

Angie Rasmussen @angierasmussen.bsky.social · 1d

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health.

Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble.

rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 15h

Oh no! Did the glass crack?

It's not a hard recipe, but the temperature & timing can be a little tricky. The part I hate is getting it out of the pan (even using buttered foil to line it; the foil can stick) & then breaking up the honeycomb with a hammer. It's all a bit physical for my liking.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 16h

Yes! It's made (or at least, I make it) by heating sugar, corn syrup & vinegar, & then adding baking soda for the chemical reaction that makes it poof up. It's a simple recipe (basically: sugar), but you have to transfer it quickly while it's expanding, w/o knocking air out, or you get hard toffee.

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 16h

The one I had in Galway was excellent - and it was just out of one of those slide-top freezers at a gas station. I really enjoyed it, while I was sitting on the curb waiting for my laundry to dry.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

6/ was fine, once all was said and done, but was too much work (& too much sugar), I think. Plus, it's almost time to switch to homemade soups, anyway - I've got some good ones. Stay tuned.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

5/ didn't freeze well in the churner. So I chucked it in the freezer. There, the non-powdered crumbles I'd also added melted, but that turned out to be good; it made a nice ribbon of honeycomb syrup that made the flavor more what it should be. So I just added more crumbles on top, et violá.

It...

Homemade honeycomb ice cream with crumbles of honeycomb candy on top.

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

4/ locally available but not as good Violet Crumble bars. (Sorry, Australian friends; not enough honeycomb there.)

It would have been less of a PIA to make it myself than to peel the chocolate off the VCs to powder them. Then, b/c I'd added more honey than usual to the base to boost flavor, it...

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

3/ mixed in; that's not the thing.

So I decided to make my own honeycomb (I know how b/c it was in a cookbook that came with my microwave in 1987; we used to host honeycomb tea parties, lol). My plan was to powder that, then add it to the base.

But then I had an exhausting week, so I opted to get

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

2/ similarly blessed; we have Van Leeuwen, but I'd tried it & wasn't impressed. (Even getting Crunchie bars here is a challenge; I heard a rumor once that Hershey's has pushed to keep them out.)

So I thought I'd make my own, but the recipes online were just for vanilla ice cream with honeycomb bits

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 17h

Last week's ice cream experiment (I'm running behind): Honeycomb.

You can get good honeycomb ice cream all across the UK & Ireland. I even had a great Cadbury Crunchie ice cream bar once at a Galway gas station where I'd stopped to do laundry. (They had machines outside.)

But the US is not...

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 18h

I'm assuming they haven't fired the smallpox security team. That would be ridiculously bonkers.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 18h

With what funding? As long as states are still paying into the federal coffers, they don't have a lot of cash that's not already being spent on state essentials. There is no foundation or state (or group of states) that can match the funding power of the United States.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

2/ Oops, shifted the sentence a bit and lost the grammar. Sorry for the comma that should have been a period. (I hate that stuff.)

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

MMWR staff are *gone.*
Wow. (And yes, I know the EIS staff losses are potentially more dangerous, but the MMWR is how a lot us keep up with what the heck goes on in this country.) Here's more reporting: www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

The merch is really good, if you'd rather buy than make a straight donation, they've got all the stuff: lawn signs, t-shirts, hats, mugs, magnets, onsies, buttons, water bottles, etc.

I'm itching to buy those mugs.

cdc-mutual-aid-network.printful.me

Lawn signs: "Save Public Health" & "Save the CDC," with scan codes to support the CDC Mutual Aid Fund.

Tshirts come in a range of colors: Public Health Protects Us All, with text under an umbrella

Lots of car magnets: Save HHS, Save FDA, Save the NIH, In Vaccines We Trust, etc.

Great mugs: one says FAFO is not a goof public health strategy; another says "That wasn't very data-driven of you."

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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

9/ “The enforcement struggle is real....The concerning thing about identifying mifepristone in wastewater is that it could potentially lead to a much more robust set of cases, which would lead to a much more robust set of prosecutions.”

Yes, it's pure Gilead stuff, but they're going to go for it.

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

8/ 🔹️They're very motivated to start using the tech this way b/c its been so hard to identify women & those assisting them for prosecution, in states doing that. Mary Zeigler is one of the top legal experts on abortion rights in the US; I've posted & written about her before. She says:

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

7/ "Legal experts who specialize in abortion noted that wastewater testing technology could potentially be used to help surface cases necessary for enforcing abortion laws, allowing anti-abortion activists and district attorneys to identify particular areas where abortion pills have been used."

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

6/ "said he immediately questioned the potential consequences of the technology he had spent years developing. Speaking [anonymously] out of fear of retribution, he described a 'sinking feeling' that he and his colleagues had 'accidentally built the Death Star.'"

🔹️Experts are concerned:

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

5/ & someone will use it for purposes you didn't mean or want them to. That's why some epidemiologists were worried about the implications of developing this tech, even though there are obvious legit reasons to, as well.

🔹️They think its possible to get it done: One EPA scientist who left last year

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

4/ the coronavirus pandemic to measure the spread of the virus — with scientists able to pinpoint specific areas with high levels of infection."

And no, not not with the to-the-residence accuracy that they're talking about now; but they want to. That was always the risk of this tech: build it, ...

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

3/ specialized tool to measure their mass — a precise number that is typically shared by only a handful of chemicals out of millions of possibilities. This kind of wastewater surveillance technology has been used to assess how much fentanyl is circulating in a community. It was also used during...

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

2/ been huge support for doing this, prior to now; now there is. (And a congressional allocation to the EPA would ensure more resources than Marc has been able to utilize, as a uni prof, even though he's worked diligently.)

🔹️How it's done: "To identify chemicals in a water sample, scientists use a

J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 19h

They don't have it ready to go, for mifepristone, but the concern is that they could/can. Here's more info from the article:

🔹️Rubio & 11 MoCs asked the EPA in 2024, but "This year’s version of the letter was more pointed,...specifically asking what resources the E.P.A. would need."

There hasn't...