Top FDA Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy's ‘Misinformation and Lies'
The Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, abruptly resigned Friday, saying in a searing letter that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
'It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,' Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency's acting commissioner.
Dr. Marks resigned under pressure, according to a person familiar with the matter who said an official with the Department of Health and Human Services told Dr. Marks on Friday that he could either resign or be fired.
Hours earlier in West Virginia, Mr. Kennedy asserted that Covid did not kill healthy people, contrary to research showing that 30 percent of those who died early in the pandemic did not have underlying conditions. Mr. Kennedy has also extolled the value of vitamin A as a treatment during a major measles outbreak in Texas, while downplaying the value of vaccines. On Thursday, he announced that he was creating a new office to study vaccine injuries.
Dr. Marks noted in his letter that measles, 'which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,' because of complications, 'had been eliminated from our shores.'
He added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy's concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with a series of public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.
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Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
Atlantic
33 minutes ago
- Atlantic
‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘Unrecognizable and highly toxic': NIH staffers speak out ahead of Senate hearing on budget cuts
Related : Advertisement The uncertainty over her future and the future of US scientific research led her and 341 other NIH workers to send a letter to NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Monday morning urging him to stop politicizing research and to restore grants that were cut or delayed for ideological reasons. '[W]e dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,' said the letter, which was addressed to Bhattacharya, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. Advertisement The letter was timed to Bhattacharya's Tuesday morning testimony before the Senate Committee on Appropriations, which will take up the President's Fiscal Year 2026 budget request for the NIH. The request calls for a major restructuring of the agency, including a roughly 40 percent cut to the NIH budget. 'This restructuring will create efficiencies within NIH that will allow the agency to focus on true science and coordinate research to make the best use of federal funds,' according to a recently released summary of President Trump's Since Jan. 20, the NIH has terminated more than $3.7 billion in grants across all US states and DC, according to Some of the grants were cut because they allegedly violated Trump executive orders barring funding for research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and 'My workplace has become unrecognizable and highly toxic,' said one NIH program officer who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. Advertisement After months of telling herself that things would get better and to hunker down and mitigate harms from the inside, the NIH program officer said she's had enough. 'I feel like I've reached my personal limit for the duck and cover approach,' she said. 'I just don't think we're able to effectively uphold the science anymore.' Multiple times a week, she and other program officers are asked by the grants office to review grants that have been flagged to make sure they're in compliance with Trump executive orders and new 'agency priorities,' she said. 'I get a list of grants and they ask, 'Should we terminate this? Is it DEI or related to a gender identity of vaccine hesitancy?' If I say 'No, it's not,' they come back, 'Well, why did it get flagged, then?' It seems like they're not even taking our scientific assessment at face value.' Around a quarter of the two dozen active grants she shepherds have been flagged, terminated, or ordered to be revised, she said. 'I have grants that are meritorious but can't be funded because they had the word 'vaccine' in them, or it is from Northwestern or another university we can't give money to,' she said. A job she once enjoyed has become soul crushing, she said. 'I can find another job, but I don't have another soul,' she said. 'If I don't speak up, I can't live with myself. I just can't.' The NIH workers modeled their letter, which they call the 'Bethesda Declaration,' on Bhattacharya's " Advertisement 'Academic freedom is a core scientific principle, and we deeply appreciate your public commitment to it,' they wrote. The letter continued, 'We hope you will welcome this dissent.' Ninety-two workers signed their names to the letter and the rest signed anonymously. The signatories speak for 'countless others at NIH who share our concerns but who—due to a culture of fear and suppression created by this Administration—chose not to sign their names for fear of retaliation,' according to the letter. In parallel to the Bethesda Declaration, the group Stand Up for Science Monday morning circulated Friedman said she and her colleagues are fearful of losing their jobs for speaking out but decided the risk was worthwhile. 'I'm terrified, but I really want to have a career in medical research, and I think if no one does anything, we won't have much medical research in this country,' she said. 'If I get a PhD and then there's nothing else for me to do with this knowledge that I've acquired, then what's the point?' Anna Kuchment can be reached at
