“Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, said in an interview with the New York Times that he personally instructed the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change its longstanding position that vaccines do not cause autism.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Generally speaking they are not—hence trying to inject a local flavour

They’ve been going after the ABC for years. I guess this post was giving a local angle to the BBC troubles and *also* going after the ABC, so double happiness

Highway robbery. As if a cent of that goes to the actual academics doing the work

That punishes the academics though. Only publishing in open access journals might help a bit, but the ranking system is stacked towards companies like Elsevier. It just seems…impossible?

Absolutely broken! Researchers who leave academia can lose access to their own research. Not to mention the research that others do.

It’s a deeply ingrained system, and it is tied in to international research ranking systems. It’s been going on for years and is profoundly wrong

In 2011 a brilliant young programmer called Aaron Swartz had hell rained upon him by the US government when he tried to crack this system open. We remember. I remember.

Research should not be hidden behind for-profit paywalls. Universities should not have to pay $30 million for work we’ve done for free.

I’m a bit worried that if the Liberal party destroys its own relevance like this it’ll create a power vacuum for something else, something worse.

But we definitely need to talk about Roblox.