MEDIA MENTIONS – THE LANCET AND PAPER IN VACCINES JOURNAL
November 25, 2025
Mike Honey's work on SARS-CoV-2 variants informed a recent piece in The Lancet: "Epidemiological and virological update on the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.3.2".
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The authors were kind enough to mention him, and the Variant Hunters Ryan Hisner and Federico Gueli.
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Mikes dataviz on SARS-CoV-2 variants includes a “Sankey diagram” page. The authors of a review published in the Vaccines journal used that dataviz to produce their Figure 3 for the Review: "SARS-CoV-2 Evolution: Implications for Diagnosis, Treatment, Vaccine Effectiveness and Development".
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At the start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Mike and other Manga Solutions staff joined the CoronaWhy project, which gathered data, scientists and technical specialist in an effort to analyse the firehose of scientific papers that emerged at that time.
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This Kaggle notebook presents some of my contributions to that effort. Please be patient as there are a lot of complex dataviz frames to load.
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Those projects got us more interested in scientific papers. We were often struck by the opportunities for improvement in their data visualization.
Recently, Mike took on one paper "Comparitive pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 variants" that included an open dataset as an Excel file - within 2 hours I had a quite presentable interactive dataviz.
We hope that over time the use of modern dataviz tools becomes more common-place in scientific publishing. They can be very effective at first capturing attention in an engaging way, and then also allowing the reader to gain deeper insights than a static figure or detailed table.
Manga Solutions is an IT Consulting Services company based in Melbourne, Australia. We are data integration, analytics, and visualization specialists with well-established partnerships across multiple industries. We actively promote environmental change, health awareness, and social good.
MANGA SOLUTIONS RELEASES "POWER BI USAGE ANALYSIS VIA MEASURE KILLER"
October 10, 2025
Manga Solutions have launched a new open-source project, to analyse the usage and dependencies between Power BI objects. This is very handy as a quick reference to the connections between Reports, Pages, Visuals, Tables, Fields and Measures in any Power BI solution. The analysis data is generated using the Measure Killer application.
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The solution itself is a Power BI report (PBIX file), so it can be published and shared, for a "business analyst" audience. They can quickly browse the content and get an understanding of the connections, without needing to access the source file or use Power BI Desktop or Measure Killer.
There are several other tools around now to help with similar tasks, and some of them have more features. This article by SQLBI gives a handy summary and describes each one. Measure Killer is one of the leading solutions IMO. But those tools are mostly specific apps that must be installed and/or licensed, and they usually require some preparation work using Power BI Desktop before any results can be reviewed. Most are quite technical in style, not aimed at a "business analyst" / non-technical audience. None can be extended, customised or shared as easily as a PBIX file. So we believe there is still a niche for this solution.
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We've made this solution freely available in a GitHub project, so anyone can quickly get started to review their own Power BI reports. There are more notes there, including the "How-To" steps to connect to your source Power BI solution. Let us know if you get stuck on anything, or raise an issue in GitHub.
Acknowledgements
Manga Solutions is an IT Consulting Services company based in Melbourne, Australia. We are data integration, analytics, and visualization specialists with well-established partnerships across multiple industries. We actively promote environmental change, health awareness, and social good.
MEDIA MENTIONS - MIKE HONEY
by Mike Honey | October 16, 2024
I have been keeping an archive of my media mentions, and recently loaded that into a dataviz.
As you can see, over the last few years I have gotten 1 or 2 some months, none for many others.
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But something has changed in the last couple of months. For September and October so far, I have over 30.
The topics I've been mentioned or quoted about have changed a bit over the years, but for the last 2 years they have all been about my variant analysis. I've been posting at a fairly consistent rate about that, certainly not a huge increase recently.
The data hasn’t changed very dramatically recently. For something like the tenth time over those 2 years, a new variant is emerging: XEC. It will surely drive a new wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths, like all the other new variants. I've posted about that in a similar style to the others.
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I am certainly riding on the coattails of Eric Topol, MD, who has been sharing my work to his audience, e.g. this X/Twitter post on the XEC variant.
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But (optimistically), I sense a change in media coverage on this topic. There seems to be a general increase in volume of pieces, and they seem more widespread across geographies and the types of outlets.
I see the media industry as heavily data-driven now, so I assume their audiences are showing interest in this topic.
As is my habit, I have published this dataviz in an open-source project, as well as an online interactive dataviz that I will keep up-to-date. Anyone can explore the interactive dataviz, or download the project and freely adapt it to their own needs. The tool used is Power BI, which is quite easy to extend by adding more categorisation, e.g. groups of media outlets.
https://github.com/Mike-Honey/media-mentions?tab=readme-ov-file#readme
Manga Solutions is an IT Consulting Services company based in Melbourne, Australia. We are data integration, analytics, and visualization specialists with well-established partnerships across multiple industries. We actively promote environmental change, health awareness, and social good.