Melody Schreiber
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melodyschreiber.com
Melody Schreiber
@melodyschreiber.com
Health contributor/reporter at Guardian US, contributing editor at the New Republic, freelance elsewhere. Arctic obsessive and book enthusiast.

Email: [email protected]
Signal: melodyschreiber.06
Newsletter: notadoctor.news
Pinned
NEW: The entire US childhood vaccine schedule is now open for scrutiny. My latest:
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Experts fear for US childhood vaccine schedule after hepatitis B guideline change
Pediatricians say panel’s decision will create confusion and access issues, and condemn ‘parody of public health’
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
December 24, 2025 at 5:05 AM
This is so upsetting
This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.
Congratulations to Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, whose book In Covid's Wake has been recognized as:

⭐ A @newyorker.com Best Book of the Year
⭐ An @economist.com Book of the Year
⭐ A @wsj.com Best Book of the Year

Learn more about this eye-opening book: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
December 24, 2025 at 5:29 AM
I'm glad leaf blowers are getting banned! They are a menace!!!
Let’s air those grievances. I want to hear your pettiest gripes on this the holiest of days.
December 24, 2025 at 3:38 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.
December 23, 2025 at 9:18 PM
There's an outbreak of salmonella in raw oysters: 64 cases in 22 states, with 20 hospitalizations, per CDC. It's not clear yet if there is a certain region or distributor implicated
December 23, 2025 at 11:11 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
This means the VA won't cover abortions EVEN in the case of rape, incest, or serious threat to the health of the patient.

The DOJ memo was authored by Josh Craddock, one of the chief legal advocates for fetal personhood, i.e. imposing a nationwide abortion ban through the courts.
🚨🚨 SCOOP @ms.now : The Department of Veteran Affairs has quietly implemented its abortion ban following a DOJ memo issued last week.

This will affect 9 million veterans and their dependents, and has been a long time coming: It was outlined in Project 2025.

Read/share 👇
Department of Veterans Affairs quietly implements abortion ban
A VA spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW that the ban was in place following a Department of Justice memo issued last week.
www.ms.now
December 23, 2025 at 7:18 PM
I started my writing career as a book critic and I wish I could do more of it. It is its own art form and it's basically impossible to make a living.
“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller)

more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?, by Adam Morgan
What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.
worldliteraturetoday.org
December 23, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
🚨🚨 SCOOP @ms.now : The Department of Veteran Affairs has quietly implemented its abortion ban following a DOJ memo issued last week.

This will affect 9 million veterans and their dependents, and has been a long time coming: It was outlined in Project 2025.

Read/share 👇
Department of Veterans Affairs quietly implements abortion ban
A VA spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW that the ban was in place following a Department of Justice memo issued last week.
www.ms.now
December 23, 2025 at 4:37 PM
We clearly need independent journalism now more than ever
Hello, a moment for earnestness this holiday season:

It was miraculous when we scraped together enough money to launch a newsroom 16 months ago. I had a clear vision of what @thebarbedwire.com could be, but it required a lot of things to go right. Many did not!

thebarbedwire.com/2025/12/23/2...
Gutsy, Fearless Journalism Isn’t Dead. Don’t Let Bari Weiss Convince You It Is.
Gutsy, fearless journalism is alive and thriving. Look back with us at the hopeful and heartbreaking reporting from The Barbed Wire in 2025.
thebarbedwire.com
December 23, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.
December 23, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. But is still led to cuts that closed offices, canceled programs and deprived people of food, medicine and other aid.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...
How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?
www.nytimes.com
December 23, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
With flu cases increasing, it’s not too late to get vaccinated. Find vaccines near you at VaccineFinder.org.

Protect yourself and your loved ones by washing your hands thoroughly, increasing ventilation indoors, and staying home if you feel sick.

Learn more at boston.gov/respiratory-protection.
December 23, 2025 at 4:25 PM
The CDC grant to study hepatitis B vaccines in Guinea-Bissau "reeks of a modern day resurrection of Tuskegee, complete with additional corruption and cronyism," @gorskon.bsky.social writes.
sciencebasedmedicine.org/every-accusa...
Every accusation is a confession (or a statement of intent): MAHA’s new Tuskegee experiment
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s CDC just funneled a $1.6 million dollar grant to researchers to carry out an unethical and scientifically unjustified randomized clinical trial of the birth dose o
sciencebasedmedicine.org
December 23, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
"[RFK jr.] may as well have shot the bullets himself [...] and I hold him and his colleagues personally responsible for that violence and the death of that officer", says Daskalakis.
Their rhetoric dehumanizing people who do public health created the environment that led to the attack, he says.
December 23, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
Political appointees in Washington want to align U.S. childhood vaccine policy with its peers. Good news! It already is.

By age 5, most industrialized countries vaccinate against at least a dozen serious diseases. The U.S. leads the pack. Denmark brings up the rear, protecting against far fewer.
December 23, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Narrator: he could not, in fact, pull states' funding
Sean Duffy on blue states: "What I can do is I can pull their money. That's the leverage I do have ... I guarantee you that the federal taxpayer is not going to fund their roads and bridges and their systems when they are putting illegals on the roads."
December 23, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
Since Ioannidis is quoted in Science today, I'd like to share something many of us probably (mercifully) missed.

Six months ago he published the most insane under-estimate of Covid mortality averted by vaccination I've seen:

2.5 million deaths globally in 2020-24

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Lives and life-Years Saved From COVID-19 Vaccination
This comparative effectiveness study analyses the number of lives and life-years saved worldwide among those who had been vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020-2024 years.
jamanetwork.com
December 23, 2025 at 1:13 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
"'In the face of the US canceling all this funding for vulnerable countries, and then it’s still going to pay for this research to be done – that is really worrying,' @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social said..." 1/2

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
US plan for $1.6m hepatitis B vaccine study in Africa called ‘highly unethical’
Experts decry ‘neocolonialist’ Guinea-Bissau study after Trump administration changed advice for US babies
www.theguardian.com
December 22, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
with alt text
December 23, 2025 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
Detainee they are interviewing was a college student in Columbia. Waited in Mexico until he had a 2024 immigration interview in CA - a scheduled appointment - where he was told he was a danger to society. Claims he has no criminal record, never even got a traffic ticket. Was immediately detained
December 22, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
When I teaching the Holocaust I note the Holocaust museum’s definition of a concentration camp is a prison whose inmates are denied due process. These are by definition concentration camps.
These are concentration camps. No other way to describe them. Truly horrific, and none of it surprising in the least.
30 minutes. Some deportees described sexual assault. Detainee describes the guard sexually assaulting most detainees. Lights left on all day. Prisoners not given clean water.

Now the DHS tour. Nobody spoke to the detainees. Noem's video was in a different area of the prison.
December 23, 2025 at 12:39 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
2025 Headline of the Year nominee (April)
December 23, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
Bill Clinton releasing a statement saying 'release the Epstein files, you cowards' was not on my bingo list.
December 22, 2025 at 10:22 PM
You've gotta hand it to Bari Weiss -- she's got people excited about watching 60 Minutes again
December 23, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Melody Schreiber
It's the least important element to this, but I find it fascinating on an aesthetic level too.

Americans are watching a bootleg broadcast that someone in Canada recorded off their TV. And people are copying it to various platforms (however imperfect visually) to get it out as widely as possible.
December 22, 2025 at 11:18 PM