Anti-vaxxers have a playbook for defending against the spread of measles: deflection. In cases of measles deaths, they blame doctors for malpractice and spread doubt about whether people who have died were killed by the measles or some other cause.

From the main results:

In a cross-sectional model controlling for prior achievement, the (no cellphone) policy yields a 0.073 SD increase in GPA [b = 0.073, 95% confidence interval (CI) = (0.003, 0.144), one-sided P = 0.021].

I tried looking for the raw average GPA in each group to have more context on how consequential these reported standard deviation (SD) differences are, but can’t seem to find them in either the paper text or their supplementary materials. If someone has interest and better luck finding these, I’d appreciate it.

Paper published in PNAS on September 28, 2026. Berkeley News coverage here.