Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum to talk about what’s happening at the agency.Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press
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, a frontal challenge to “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. Another 250 of their colleagues across the agency also endorsed the declaration, without using their names.
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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.
The White House defended its approach to federal research. “In recent years, Americans have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized health care 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.”
The signers went public in the face of a “culture of fear and suppression” they say President Donald 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.
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 abrupt 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 multidrug-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.
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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 modelled their indictment after Bhattacharya’s own Great Barrington Declaration of October, 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School.
His declaration drew together like-minded 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. But sudden 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 “I don’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 cuts to grants.
The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes or the NIH.
Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centres gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.
The letter asserts that “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and that 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.”