Latest news with #BethesdaDeclaration
UPI
17 minutes ago
- Health
- UPI
In letter, more than 300 scientists rebuke Trump research cuts, NIH director
June 9 (UPI) -- Hundreds of scientists via the National Institute of Health signed a published letter in protest to NIH leadership and recent cuts by the Trump administration. "We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political moment over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources," more than 300 scientists wrote Monday to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya in a so-called "Bethesda Declaration" published by Stand Up For Science in rebuke to Trump administration research funding cuts and staff layoffs. They added in the letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress overseeing NIH that they "dissent" to Trump's policies that "undermine" the NIH mission, "waste" public resources and harm "the health of Americans and people across the globe." In the open letter, they said the current endeavor to "Make America Healthy Again" referred to "some undefined time in the past." "Keeping NIH at the forefront of biomedical research requires our stalwart commitment to continuous improvement," the letter's writers said, adding that the life-and-death nature of NIH work "demands that changes be thoughtful and vetted." According to the letter, the Trump administration terminated at least 2,100 NIH research grants since January, totaling around $9.5 billion and contracts representing some $2.6 billion in new research. "We urge you as NIH Director to restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue," the letter added in part. "This undercuts long-standing NIH policies designed to maximize return on investment by working with grantees to address concerns and complete studies," it said. It further accused the White House of creating a "culture of fear and suppression" among NIH researchers. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor and health researcher, called the agency the "crown jewel of American biomedical sciences" and said he had the "utmost respect" for its scientists and mission during his confirmation hearing in March. On Tuesday, Bhattacharya is scheduled to testify before the Senate's Appropriations Committee on Trump's 2026 NIH budget proposal which seeks to cut roughly 40% of NIH's $48 billion budget. "This spending slowdown reflects a failure of your legal duty to use congressionally-appropriated funds for critical NIH research," the scientists penned to Bhattacharya. The letter goes on to characterize it as "dissent" from Trump administration policy, quoting Bhattacharya during his confirmation as saying "dissent is the very essence of science." "Standing up in this way is a risk, but I am much more worried about the risks of not speaking up," says Jenna Norton, a program officer at the NIH's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. "If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe," Norton said in a statement, adding that if others don't speak up, "we allow our government to curtail free speech, a fundamental American value."
The Hill
an hour ago
- Health
- The Hill
NIH scientists condemn Trump research cuts
Hundreds of staffers from across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are speaking out against the politicization of their research and termination of their work while demanding that the drastic changes made at the agency be walked back. In a letter addressed to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, more than 2,000 signatories stated, 'we dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.' The letter was titled 'The Bethesda Declaration' in reference to where NIH's campus is located. The signatories cited Bhattacharya's stated commitment to academic freedom that he made in April and called on him to push back against the changes Trump administration has implemented at NIH under his leadership. 'Academic freedom should not be applied selectively based on political ideology. To achieve political aims, NIH has targeted multiple universities with indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,' they wrote. They pointed to U.S. law and prior research that has shown that the participation of diverse populations in studies is necessary for NIH's work. The NIH staffers further blasted the canceling of nearly completed studies. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million,' they wrote. The researchers called on Bhattacharya to restore foreign collaborations with the global scientific community, put independent peer reviews back in place, bring back terminated NIH staffers and rethink the 15 percent cap on indirect study costs that the Trump administration enacted. 'Combined, these actions have resulted in an unprecedented reduction in NIH spending that does not reflect efficiency but rather a dramatic reduction in life-saving research,' they stated. 'Some may use the false impression that NIH funding is not needed to justify the draconian cuts proposed in the President's Budget. This spending slowdown reflects a failure of your legal duty to use congressionally-appropriated funds for critical NIH research.' NIH research is not solely centered in Bethesda. The agency is responsible for funding research projects across the country and abroad. Numerous lawsuits have been filed to combat the pulling back of billions of dollars in NIH funding. Last week, a federal judge allowed a suit filed by university researchers and public health groups challenging the cuts to move forward. Bhattacharya responded to the letter on the social media platform X. 'We all want @NIH to succeed and I believe that dissent in science is productive. However, the Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions NIH has taken in recent months,' he wrote. Bhattacharya said the actions taken at NIH have been to 'remove ideological influence from science' and further argued the agency hasn't halted international scientific collaboration but is instead 'ensuring accountability.' 'Claims that NIH is undermining peer review are misunderstood. We're expanding access to publishing while strengthening transparency, rigor, and reproducibility in NIH-funded research,' he wrote. 'Lastly, we are reviewing each termination case carefully and some individuals have already been reinstated. As NIH priorities evolve, so must our staffing to stay mission-focused and responsibly manage taxpayer dollars.'
Los Angeles Times
3 hours ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
NIH scientists publish declaration criticizing Trump's deep cuts in public health research
WASHINGTON — In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. 'Dissent,' he said, 'is the very essence of science.' That commitment is being put to the test. On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging 'policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.' It says: 'We dissent.' In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. An additional 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names. The four-page letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the administration's approach to federal research and said President Trump is focused on restoring a 'Gold Standard' of science, not 'ideological activism.' The signers went public in the face of a 'culture of fear and suppression' they say Trump's administration has spread through the federal civil service. 'We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,' the declaration says. Bhattacharya responded to the declaration by saying it 'has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months.' 'Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive,' he said in a statement. 'We all want the NIH to succeed.' Named for the agency's headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world's premier public health research institution over the course of mere months. It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants. In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients. In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,' it says, 'it wastes $4 million.' Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what's happening at the NIH. At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration. 'I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,' Norton told The Associated Press. The signers said they modeled their indictment after Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School. His declaration drew together likeminded infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who dissented from what they saw as excessive COVID-19 lockdown policies and felt ostracized by the larger public health community that pushed those policies, including the NIH. 'He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,' said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH's National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration. As chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch, Kobrin provides scientific oversight of researchers across the country who've been funded by the cancer institute or want to be. Cuts in personnel and money have shifted her work from improving cancer care research to what she sees as minimizing its destruction. 'So much of it is gone — my work,' she said. The 21-year NIH veteran said she signed because she didn't want to be 'a collaborator' in the political manipulation of biomedical science. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the declaration. 'We have a saying in basic science,' he said. 'You go and become a physician if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become a researcher if you want to save billions of patients. 'We are doing the research that is going to go and create the cures of the future,' he added. But that won't happen, he said, if Trump's Republican administration prevails with its searing grant cuts. The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes nor the NIH. Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants. The letter asserts 'NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety' and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who 'braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.' The Trump administration has gone at public health research on several fronts, both directly, as part of its broad effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion values throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its drive to starve some universities of federal money. At the White House, Desai said Americans 'have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago.' This has forced 'indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,' the declaration says. Some NIH employees have previously come forward in televised protests to air grievances, and many walked out of Bhattacharya's town hall with staff. The declaration is the first cohesive effort to register agency-wide dismay with the NIH's direction. The dissenters remind Bhattacharya in their letter of his oft-stated ethic that academic freedom must be a lynchpin in science. With that in place, he said in a statement in April, 'NIH scientists can be certain they are afforded the ability to engage in open, academic discourse as part of their official duties and in their personal capacities without risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or workplace retaliation.' Now it will be seen whether that's enough to protect those NIH employees challenging the Trump administration and him. 'There's a book I read to my kids, and it talks about how you can't be brave if you're not scared,' said Norton, who has three young children. 'I am so scared about doing this, but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it's only going to get harder to speak up. 'Maybe I'm putting my kids at risk by doing this,' she added. 'And I'm doing it anyway because I couldn't live with myself otherwise.' 'In recent years, Americans have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago,' spokesman Kush Desai said. 'The Trump administration is focused on restoring the Gold Standard of Science — not ideological activism — as the guiding principle of HHS, the NIH, and the CDC to finally address our chronic disease epidemic.' Woodward and Ellgren write for the Associated Press. AP writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
An Uproar at the NIH
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Updated at 10:26 a.m. on June 9, 2025 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. In an emailed statement, Bhattacharya said, 'The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.' A spokesperson for HHS also defended the policies the letter critiqued, arguing that the NIH is 'working to remove ideological influence from the scientific process' and 'enhancing the transparency, rigor, and reproducibility of NIH-funded research.' 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. 'It's nice to have free speech,' he said, before carrying right on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Health
- 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.'
