Lynn Conway was the bravest person I ever knew.

It wasn’t merely her struggle to make her way in the male-dominated computer engineering world of the 1960s and 1970s. It was that she did so, with spectacular success, while contending with her own psyche, her family and her bosses at IBM to complete her transgender transition.

Conway died Sunday, according to her husband, Charles Rogers, at home in Jackson, Mich., of a heart condition.

As I recounted in 2020, I first met Conway when I was working on my 1999 book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” for which she was a uniquely valuable source. In 2000, when she decided to come out as transgender, she allowed me to chronicle her life in a cover story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine titled “Through the Gender Labyrinth.”

That article traced her journey from childhood as a male in New York’s strait-laced Westchester County to her decision to transition. Years of emotional and psychological turmoil followed, even as he excelled in academic studies.

He won admission to MIT, but flunked out due to a lack of social or medical support. What would have been Conway’s MIT graduation day found Conway in San Francisco, living on the fringes of the gay community, searching for how to fit in as a male. But he did not see himself as a gay man attracted to other men, but as a woman attracted to other men.

In 1961 he enrolled at Columbia University, acquiring bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering in only two years. That led to a position on a team at IBM secretly designing the world’s fastest supercomputer, a pet project of IBM President Thomas Watson Jr. Conway moved with the team to Menlo Park, Calif., in the years before the surrounding landscape was dubbed Silicon Valley.

By then Conway had gotten married and was raising two daughters. But family life intensified his inner turmoil, and in 1968 he decided to undertake gender reassignment surgery.

As I wrote in 2000, Conway had visualized a nearly seamless transition. IBM was supportive, at least at first. It was willing to change the name on company records and execute a transfer to another lab, giving the employee henceforth known as Lynn Conway a fresh start.

But even as the $4,000 operation was still in the planning stage, it became clear that IBM executives could not understand how a transgender employee could fit into a corporate culture that was “still white shirt, blue serge suits and wingtip shoes,” as Conway’s IBM supervisor told me. “This simply wasn’t the IBM image.” The company fired him.

Decades later, Conway was philosophical and nonjudgmental about IBM’s decision. Gender transition and sex reassignment surgery were alien concepts at the time.

“Christine Jorgensen was the last time anything had come out about stuff like this,” Conway told me in 2020. Jorgensen’s transition, which had made front-page news in 1951, had been reduced to a historical curiosity nearly two decades later. T.J. Watson Jr., the president of IBM, “was thinking there would be endless publicity, and I can understand that.”

The family went on welfare for three months. Conway’s wife barred her from contact with her daughters. She would not see them again for 14 years.

Beyond the financial implications, the stigma of banishment from one of the world’s most respected corporations felt like an excommunication.

She sought jobs in the burgeoning electrical engineering community around Stanford, working her way up through start-ups, and in 1973 she was invited to join Xerox’s brand new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC.

In partnership with Caltech engineering professor Carver Mead, Conway established the design rules for the new technology of “very large-scale integrated circuits” (or, in computer shorthand, VLSI). The pair laid down the rules in a 1979 textbook that a generation of computer and engineering students knew as “Mead-Conway.”

VLSI fostered a revolution in computer microprocessor design that included the Pentium chip, which would power millions of PCs. Conway spread the VLSI gospel by creating a system in which students taking courses at MIT and other technical institutions could get their sample designs rendered in silicon.

Conway’s life journey gave her a unique perspective on the internal dynamics of Xerox’s unique lab, which would invent the personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet, and other innovations that have become fully integrated into our daily lives. She could see it from the vantage point of an insider, thanks to her experience working on IBM’s supercomputer, and an outsider, thanks to her personal history.

After PARC, she was recruited to head a supercomputer program at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — sailing through her FBI background check so easily that she became convinced that the Pentagon must have already encountered transgender people in its workforce. A figure of undisputed authority in some of the most abstruse corners of computing, Conway was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989.

She joined the University of Michigan as a professor and associate dean in the College of Engineering. In 2002 she married a fellow engineer, Charles Rogers, and with him lived active life — with a shared passion for white-water canoeing, motocross racing and other adventures — on a 24-acre homestead not far from Ann Arbor, Mich.

In 2020, she received an unexpected gift: A formal apology from IBM for firing her 52 years earlier. At an emotional ceremony witnessed by 1,200 IBM employees signed on to a company website, Diane Gherson, an IBM senior vice president, told her, “Thanks to your courage, your example, and all the people who followed in your footsteps, as a society we are now in a better place…. But that doesn’t help you, Lynn, probably our very first employee to come out. And for that, we deeply regret what you went through — and know I speak for all of us.”

At Michigan, she is remembered for her “positive outlook, warm encouragement, creativity and ‘singular vision,’” the university observed in a retrospective posted Tuesday. “Conway described herself in 2014 as a perennial beginner, never afraid to take on learning how to do new things.”

Her role as a leader in the transgender community may be even more important than her role in the extraordinary advances of the technology revolution of the late 20th century. She fought not a few battles over anti-transgender discrimination and what she called “the systemic psychological pathologization of gender variance.”

On her personal website she reflected with well-deserved pride of having used the website to offer “gender transitioners … information, encouragement and hope for a better future.” When she began to do so in 2000, she recalled, “trans women especially were considered sexually-deviant and mentally-ill by prejudiced psychiatrists and psychologists. By compiling stories of those who went on to fulfilling lives after transition,” she wrote, she tried to provide “role models and hope for the many people then in transition.”

She added , “Fortunately, those dark days have receded. Nowadays many tens of thousands of transitioners have not only moved on into happy and fulfilling lives, but are also open and proud about their life accomplishments.”

It’s a reproach to our society and our politics that Lynn’s confidence that the “dark days” of transgender discrimination and prejudice were past has proven to be premature. I hope that she didn’t allow herself to be too discouraged by the cynicism and hypocrisy of the political leadership in some of our most benighted states, and that she never forgot the extraordinarily positive impact she had on all the communities, professional and personal, of which she was a member.

Lynn Conway faced more challenges in her life than most of us can contemplate. She should be remembered as someone who, to paraphrase William Faulkner, not only faced them, but prevailed over them. And in doing so she enriched us all.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a rule that would remove medical bills from credit reports, a ban that would prevent lenders from considering those debts when making decisions about whether to issue loans.

The proposed rule change, announced Tuesday, would also increase privacy protections, help raise credit scores and prevent debt collectors from using the credit reporting system to coerce people to pay.

“The CFPB is seeking to end the senseless practice of weaponizing the credit reporting system,” Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement. “Medical bills on credit reports too often are inaccurate and have little to no predictive value when it comes to repaying other loans.”

If finalized, the rule would remove as much as $49 billion of medical debts that currently lower the credit scores for 15 million Americans, the bureau said.

How did we get here?

Congress in 2003 restricted lenders from obtaining or using medical information, including medical debts, through the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act. But federal agencies subsequently issued a special regulatory exception to allow creditors to use medical debts in their credit decisions.

Now the bureau is proposing to close that regulatory loophole. It began the rulemaking process in September.

Wasn’t medical debt already erased from many credit reports?

Yes. In March 2022, the CFPB released a report estimating that medical bills made up $88 billion of reported debts on credit reports and announced that it would assess whether credit reports should include data on unpaid medical bills.

After that, the three nationwide credit reporting conglomerates — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — announced that they would voluntarily remove many of those bills.

And FICO and VantageScore, the two major credit scoring companies, have decreased the degree to which medical bills affect a consumer’s score.

If that’s the case, why is there a need for the proposed rule?

Despite the voluntary industry changes, Americans still have billions of dollars in outstanding medical bills in collections appearing in the credit reporting system, the bureau said. The complex nature of medical billing, insurance coverage and reimbursement, and collections means that medical debts that continue to be reported are often inaccurate or inflated, it added.

Additionally, the changes made by FICO and VantageScore have not eliminated the credit score difference between people with and without medical debt on their credit reports.

By how much would credit scores improve?

Americans with medical debt on their credit reports would see their credit scores rise by 20 points on average if the proposed rule goes into effect, according to an estimate by the bureau.

How would this help homeowners?

If finalized, the rule would lead to the approval of about 22,000 additional mortgages every year, the CFPB said.

It said an internal analysis showed that medical debts penalize consumers by making underwriting decisions less accurate, leading to thousands of denied applications on mortgages that consumers would otherwise have repaid.

What happens next?

The proposed rule is open for public comment through Aug. 12.

The paper published by the respected British Medical Journal earlier this month was eye-opening, to say the least. It questioned why excess deaths in Western countries remained unusually elevated during the COVID-19 pandemic even after vaccines were introduced in 2021.

The implication seemed clear: Rather than reducing cases and deaths, the COVID vaccines had fueled the tragic tide.

That finding was picked up within 48 hours by the Telegraph, a conservative British daily. It leaped across the Atlantic Ocean to the New York Post, a part of the Murdoch media empire, one day later.

Since then, it has been widely spread on social media by the anti-vaccination camp. The repetitions have become increasingly febrile, with some tweets blaming the vaccines for tens of millions of deaths.

Here’s what you need to know: There is no truth to this finding, or to the anti-vaccine camp’s interpretation of the BMJ paper.

The journal, which posted the paper on its Public Health webpage on June 3, has acknowledged that. In a public statement issued June 6, after the faulty interpretation began to spread worldwide, the journal observed: “Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link.”

On the contrary, the journal wrote, “Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.”

Alas, the journal’s warning came too late. As I write, the Telegraph’s June 4 tweet hawking its misleading story has received 1.5 million views on X (formerly-Twitter), but the BMJ’s warning notice, only 388,000 views.

These figures are proof positive of the old saw (attributed to Winston Churchill, among many others) that “a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

Some researchers argue that the original paper, by a team of Dutch scientists, was so shoddy and inconsequential that it should not have been published at all.

Among the critics is Ariel Karlinsky, an Israeli economist and statistician whose data constituted the core of the Dutch paper. Karlinsky has written that the BMJ should retract the paper and “open an inquiry into what happened there with editors and reviewers.” The journal hasn’t responded.

The use that anti-vaccine propagandists have made of the BMJ paper underscores the dangers of disinformation in public health today.

A recent study in Science analyzed the impact of what its authors labeled “vaccine-skeptical” published content on vaccine refusal. The authors examined anti-vaccine posts on Facebook during the first three months of the COVID vaccine rollout in early 2021.

They found that posts flagged by third-party fact-checkers as false received a relatively minimal 8.7 million views in that period. Posts that were not flagged by fact-checkers but “nonetheless implied that vaccines were harmful to health — many of which were from credible mainstream news outlets — were viewed hundreds of millions of times.”

The flagged posts were more likely to inspire vaccine resistance, the authors wrote. Although unflagged posts individually had less impact on vaccine sentiment, the volume of those posts was so immense that cumulatively they did more damage to vaccine rates.

A single vaccine-skeptical article in the Chicago Tribune — headlined “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why” — was viewed by more than 50 million users on Facebook, more than 20% of the platform’s U.S. user base. That was “more than six times the number of views than all flagged misinformation combined.”

It’s also true that articles that may be innocuous or inconclusive at their core can be distorted and magnified into explicitly anti-vaccine messages by being passed through the anti-vax network.

Something of the kind happened with the BMJ paper. Its language alluding to “serious concerns” about the impact of vaccines and “containment measures” such as lockdowns on excess deaths was transmogrified into the Telegram’s headline stating that “Covid vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” and similar language in the New York Post.

The anti-vaxx camp, in repeating these claims, did so after removing or minimizing most of the qualifying language. The headline on a report published by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, stated that the COVID vaccines “likely fueled rise in excess deaths,” attributing that conclusion to “mainstream media.”

The CHD report cited a blog post by anti-vaxx crusader Meryl Nass, republishing the Telegraph article. The Nass post was headlined “The Dam Has Broken,” suggesting that major news sources were now accepting the dangers of the COVID vaccines.

Nass, by the way, is a Maine physician who has had her license suspended and been fined $10,000 for having prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two medicines known to be useless in treating COVID-19, to patients.

Put it all together, and the evolution of the BMJ paper into a brief claiming that the COVID vaccines are harmful to health plays into the most extreme anti-vaccine disinformation in circulation — such as the incredibly ignorant and dangerous recommendation by Joseph Ladapo, the anti-vaccine quack appointed as Florida surgeon general by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that no one under 65 take a COVID vaccine.

The medical and immunological communities have overwhelmingly concluded that the COVID-19 vaccines have massively reduced hospitalizations and death from the disease. A December 2022 report card by the Commonwealth Fund concluded that after two years of administration, the vaccines had prevented more than 18 million additional hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths.

This is the progress placed at risk by the torrent of anti-vaccine propaganda purveyed by RFK Jr.’s organization and other vaccination opponents.

That brings us back to the BMJ paper and its manifest flaws.

“Excess deaths,” the metric purportedly examined by the Dutch authors, is simply the number of deaths in a country during a given period over and above those that would have been expected “under normal conditions,” based on historical patterns.

In more than 40 Western countries during the three peak years of the pandemic, the authors reported, there were 1.033 million excess deaths in 2020, about 1.26 million in 2021 and 808,000 in 2022.

The authors expressed perplexity about why excess deaths actually rose in 2021, despite the arrival of the vaccines and the implementation of social anti-pandemic measures, and remained elevated the following year. “Government leaders and policymakers,” the authors wrote, “ need to thoroughly investigate underlying causes of persistent excess mortality.”

The authors further commented that “consensus is also lacking in the medical community regarding concerns that mRNA vaccines might cause more harm than initially forecasted.” That’s a gross misrepresentation.

The consensus in the medical community is indisputably that the vaccines are safe and effective. Although they do cause occasional side effects (as do all vaccines), the health threats caused by COVID-19 itself are immeasurably more hazardous.

The truth is that the factors causing elevated excess mortality throughout the pandemic are not mysterious, but well-understood. Statistical data scientist Jeffrey S. Morris of the University of Pennsylvania put his finger on some of the most important.

One is that far more people were exposed to COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020. By the end of 2020, according to the World Health Organization, there were about 10,000 cases and about 238 deaths per million population; one year later, there 35,186 cases and 683 deaths per million. Furthermore, the COVID variants that appeared in 2021 — the Delta and Omicron waves — were far more transmissible and virulent (causing more hospitalization and death) than the initial variants.

Also in 2021, many of the most stringent anti-pandemic measures implemented in 2020 — school closings, lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates — were getting lifted by local authorities. This raised the level of exposure to the virus in the general public.

As for the vaccines, the Dutch authors seemed to conjecture that vaccination happened as if with the turning of a switch in January 2021. Of course that’s untrue.

Figures compiled by the independent statistical clearinghouse Our World in Data — which were used by the Dutch researchers — show that the vaccines were rolled out only gradually through 2021. By mid-year, only about 20% of the population of countries that submitted figures had received even a single dose; by the end of 2021, nearly 50% were still unvaccinated.

“Even with a 100% effective vaccine, we would have seen high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in 2021, leading to high number of excess deaths,” Morris observes.

Statisticians have shown that the peaks and valleys of excess mortality during the pandemic coincide almost exactly with the emergence and peaks of Delta, Omicron and other variants of concern, indicating that excess deaths are almost certainly the result of COVID, not the COVID vaccines.

One other data point: As the British actuary Stuart McDonald points out, of the 47 countries surveyed by the Dutch researchers, the 10 with the lowest rates of excess deaths are those with the highest vaccine uptakes, such as Canada (83% vaccination rate in 2022 and only 5% excess deaths in 2020-22) and Germany (76% vaccinated and 6% excess deaths). By contrast, those with the lowest vaccination rates tended to have the most excess deaths, including North Macedonia (40% vaccinated at 28% excess deaths) and Albania (45% vaccinated, 24% excess deaths).

Is there a remedy for claptrap like the BMJ article? Sadly, very little. Qualified scientists and epidemiologists have risen up almost as one to expose the flaws of the BMJ paper. But the first line of defense against disinformation must be scientific journals themselves. In this case, if not for the first time, the BMJ has failed its responsibility for being a gatekeeper of sound science.