Trump Shuts Down All Science Until He Figures Out What The Hell Is Going On
If you want cancer research, pay for it yourself.
The Trump Administration has put virtually all federally funded health science research on hold for no apparent reason this week, imposing wholesale restrictions on the National Institutes of Health, America’s top research agency, including “the abrupt cancellation of meetings such as grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.”
The sudden halt to most NIH activities has “generated extensive confusion and uncertainty” throughout the agency and the wider research community, with one senior NIH employee saying “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating.”
Only Wokes Need Science
The attack on health started Tuesday with an order mandating an immediate, indefinite pause on health agencies issuing “regulations, guidance, announcements, press releases, social media posts and website posts” until those communications and others have been cleared by political commissars appointed to ensure that the administration is OK with them.
On Wednesday, Science reports,
officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
In some cases, meetings were cancelled while already in progress.
On the other hand, now those snooty elitist “health researchers” will know what it feels like to have their lives and work completely disrupted, as punishment for making people wear masks, not cough directly on complete strangers, and even take vaccines that will turn them into mutant zombies.
Haha, take that, cancer patients!
No More Critical Race Medical Research!
In addition, the journal Nature reported yesterday that “the Trump team appears to have deleted entire webpages about diversity programmes and diversity-related grants from the agency’s site.”
Similarly, the FDA has scrubbed its research guidelines that were aimed at ensuring clinical trials include people from a wide variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The Biden administration had urged researchers to enroll more women and people of color in clinical trials after it became clear that COVID hit poor and minority populations far more severely than the rest of the population. No more of THAT wokeness under the new regime.
After all, all human bodies are the same, so any health research into anyone other than white cisgender heterosexual men is discriminatory and divisive. Especially if that research suggests that just being Black in the United States is a risk to your health. Presumably, now we will never hear another official word about Black women dying from pregnancy complications at FOUR TIMES THE RATE of white women. Happily, the ban on any mention of race in research will likely prohibit researchers from even tracking pregnancy complications and deaths by race, thereby eliminating any possible disparities.
See? Problem solved, just like Trump said in July 2020 that we should do half as much COVID testing, which he explained would cut in half the number of cases of the deadly “Kung Flu” outbreak, haha.
The pause on health science research and communication is expected to last at least until February 1, but could go longer, who knows? Nature notes that the pause on advisory committee meetings means “the NIH cannot issue research grants, temporarily freezing 80% of the agency’s $47-billion budget that funds research across the country and beyond.”
Further, Science reports that NIH’s top travel honcho, Glenda Conroy, emailed senior officials Wednesday to let them know that there was an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel to conferences, visits to other branch offices, and other professional meetings, apart from allowing NIH staff who were already away to fly home from their now-cancelled presentations. The memo warned that “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved.”
Beyond essentially bringing medical grant funding and communication to an abrupt halt, there are fears that as the pause continues, ongoing research will be made useless by a lack of funding. Splinter editor Dave Levitan reports on Bluesky that according to an insider at NIH,
for all internal research (of which there is like $10 billion worth or so), ALL purchasing shut down as of yesterday. That means gloves, reagents, anything involved with lab work, which means a lot of that work will stop.
Levitan also said that one rumor circulating among scientists is that the freeze will remain in place until Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is confirmed. That’s just speculation, of course, but it’s also the sort of rumor that starts in the absence of any actual word from the administration about why they’re doing this shit.
With funding and much research at a standstill, Sandy Chang, Yale’s former assistant dean of STEM education and a professor of laboratory medicine, told Yale Daily News, “I’m just worried that this trend continues, that we’ll lose a whole generation of scientists.” He added that “Without NIH grants, we’re dead.”
One Bird, Two Bird, Red Bird, Flu Bird
One of the most immediate effects was the suspension of the normally scheduled release of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” Thursday, a particularly important publication because it included multiple updates on the avian flu epidemic that has decimated poultry flocks, driving up egg prices, and which is also causing infections in of other animals, including cattle herds.
Oh, yes, and the virus has also killed at least a dozen domestic cats in California since late November. The cats, in several different cases, died after drinking raw milk that was infected with the H5N1 virus. Raw milk is an especially nasty vector for bird flu and other diseases, and the CDC warns against drinking the stuff, ever. In November the agency issued guidance to farmers that workers could become infected if they’re splashed while handling milk from an infected cow. Of course, that was during the woke Biden administration, which hated freedom.
And yes, of course, RFK Jr. is also a big fan of raw milk, and in December invited Mark McAfee, the CEO of a California raw milk company, to please come work for him in Washington. McAfee’s products have repeatedly been recalled after being contaminated with H5N1. Kennedy will be such a great health guy for America!
Oh, and by complete coincidence, at least two of the cats that died (and a third who was blinded and lost the use of his hind legs) drank milk from Raw Farms, a McAfee-owned brand. McAfee disputes any possibility that his milk harmed the cats, so we should shut up and take his word for it.
Before being silenced, the CDC emphasized that there are so far no signs that the bird flu virus can be transmitted between humans, and that the risk to the public remains low. Should that change, we’re fully confident the Trump administration will do everything it can to prevent being blamed, or to even harm the economy by trying to stop the disease from spreading.
Trumpworld Speaks! ‘Good!’
Reaction among Trump supporters has been difficult to gauge, as few believe in science anyway. An unscientific, non-control grouped sample of replies to a Twitter post about the funding freeze included comments like these:
Show me something that was brought to market from a research grant. That actually helped. And hadn’t already been figured out. And doesn’t have a safer/easier version in nature.
Good. The government has no constitutional authority to fund research. Time for the gravy train to end.
This guy just wants the cookie jar back so he can stuff his pockets
Excellent! NIH has been spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on DEI grants. NIH should get back to its mission to “use scientific research to improve health, extend life, and reduce illness and disability.”
That's what happens when your institution becomes corrupted.
No more dogs, cats or rats to torture. Good!
I don’t think the funding suspension needs to be brief. We have seen too many BS medical grants and gain of function research out of this agency.
Maybe now the market for dead baby body parts will dry up.
The Biopharma/medical complex brought this upon themselves.
Good, we don't need any new manufactured viruses
So in general, we do not need medical research, because it caused COVID, which was both a deadly pandemic and only a bad cold, so let’s all go drink raw milk and take the kids to a measles party.
[Science / Nature / AP / STAT News / NYT / PBS / CDC / Guardian]
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All part of the plan. Demoralize and depress everyone with such a firehose spray of shit that we give up.
"Show me something that was brought to market from a research grant. That actually helped. And hadn’t already been figured out. And doesn’t have a safer/easier version in nature."
This is just exhausting.