As the United States rolled out COVID-19 vaccinations, state health departments attempted to communicate quickly evolving information about vaccines amid political conflict and misinformation. In October 2021, one state health department shut off comments for their social media to deplatform misinformation. To analyze this health department's Facebook page as a discursive space, our study examines user activity on the page through quantitative analysis of engagement metrics and topical clusters and qualitative analysis of user comments from January to October 2021. Our findings show that the common idea of vaccine proponents valuing data while vaccine skeptics prefer anecdote is not represented; antivaccine comments are pervaded with suspicion toward institutions, while provaccine comments largely use unproductive tactics; the two sides largely showed different sets of concerns; engagement was high during critical moments in the pandemic, and a few top influencers tended to dominate comment threads.

Though persistent failure of clinical trials poses a challenge for multiple conditions, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is especially difficult to study because of its heterogeneity, complexity, unpredictable outcomes, and resistance to definition and classification. This article analyzes published discourse among researchers about the failure of two large trials for progesterone as a traumatic brain injury (TBI) treatment. The analysis specifically examines how researchers respond to trial failure and how TBI functions as a diagnostic construct. I draw on theories of kairos and multiple ontologies to argue that, while evidence-based medicine constructs TBI as a coherent entity in order to study it through randomized controlled trials, this entity breaks down in practice into multiple temporalities and spaces that are not sufficiently coordinated.

This article outlines an approach to teaching a Writing for the Health Professions course and situates this approach within the aims of and tensions between the medical humanities, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and disability studies. This analysis provides a pragmatic walkthrough of how assignments in such courses can be linked to programmatic outcomes (with SOAP [Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan] note and patient education assignments as extended examples) as well as an interdisciplinary framework for future empirical studies.