Connexion
At a recent meeting of the board that oversees the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center Research Hospital, chair Jack Leslie opened with cheerful introductions and gregarious chatter—then diverted from the agenda of the regularly scheduled meeting. He spent the next six minutes delivering a pointed rebuke of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, warning that his anti-vaccine activities could tarnish the venerable hospital, often called the "house of hope" for patients with rare conditions or those who have exhausted all other options.
Leslie took issue with a recent stunt Kennedy had pulled at the hospital, which involved making a surprise appearance for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open his signature vaccine injury clinic. The ceremony included a panel with people claiming to have been injured by vaccines. They sat behind placards reading "vaccine injured" and spoke with Kennedy and other high-ranking Trump administration officials.
Leslie prefaced his comments by noting that some might prefer he not speak out against Kennedy's efforts. "But I think that that would be a failing as an advisory board if we were silent," he said. Leslie also noted that he has no concerns about studying potential injuries from vaccines. "Serious reactions are rare, but real," he said, and people who believe they've been injured should "be taken seriously."
On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight.
This initial leak has been confirmed and expanded on by outlets such as The New York Times and Politico. It now appears that the administration is drafting an executive order that would give Vought veto power over every individual grant awarded by the NIH.
The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, and its $47 billion budget is larger than that of the next 10 research funders combined. Its funding, distributed largely through grants to academic researchers at universities, supports everything from basic biological research to clinical trials and has helped the biotechnology industry flourish.
Tides of Annihilation a tapé dans l'œil des amatrices et amateurs d'action depuis sa toute première bande-annonce, diffusée lors d'un State of Play de Sony. J'ai pu y jouer lors de la gamescom 2026, et je suis conquis.
Five leading scientists were ousted from the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans on Friday. Their crime: handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care on April 29, sharply criticizing the Trump administration's ongoing attacks on scientific research.
Those ousted were Steven Kahn, professor of medicine at the University of Washington and editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, who co-authored the published editorial; former ADA President Desmond Schatz of the University of Florida, Gainesville; Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota; Justin Ryder of Northwestern University; and Irl Hirsch, also of the University of Washington. The five were handing out reprints of the editorial outside a room where NIH director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to speak. Bhattacharya canceled and another NIH official spoke in his stead.
"They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting," Kelly told MedPage Today, which first reported the incident. "They're taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real. America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up."
On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA, but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document is laced with blatantly political language and resurfaces grievances that have been the subject of right-wing ire for years.
If all of this sounds familiar, it's because the document is largely a retread of last year's proposal, which Congress largely ignored in providing relatively steady research budgets. By choosing to issue a similar budget, the administration is signaling that this is an ongoing political battle. And the past year has shown that, even if Congress is unwilling to join it in the fight, the administration can still do significant damage to the scientific enterprise.
Nearly everybody is in for a cut. The hardest-hit agencies, like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will see their budgets slashed in half. But even agencies that might be otherwise popular, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is overseen by Trump allies, will see $5 billion taken from its $47 billion budget. Agencies that have seemingly avoided political controversies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), would also see their budgets cut by over half.
On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it's calling "Scientific Freedom Lectures," with the first scheduled for March 20. The "freedom" theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.
The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.
Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.
Anti-vaccine activist and current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked hard to villainize infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, even writing a conspiracy-laden book lambasting the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
But a year into the job as the country's top health official, Kennedy—who has no background in medicine, science, or public health—still holds less sway with Americans than the esteemed physician-scientist.
In a nationally representative survey conducted in February by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 54 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Fauci, while only 38 percent had confidence in Kennedy. Breaking those supporters down further, 25 percent of respondents said they were "very confident" in Fauci, while only 9 percent said the same for Kennedy.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 