A bad thing is unfolding at NIH this week: It looks like the Trump administration is trying to replace key civil servant scientific leaders, the Institute Directors, with political hires. These directors control the NIH budget, tens of billions. A bit of a video explainer here: 1/ 🧪

It was surreal to be quizzed on “freedom of inquiry” and other values in my mandated U. Chicago/NIH/NSF research security training tonight given the restrictions to our research over the past eight months. Jeremy describes the experience perfectly below. (His piece is outstanding.)

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Immigrants, particularly on H1Bs, are the lifeblood of American innovation. If you wanted to hurt US competitiveness in the next century, I can think of few more effective ways than a move like this Even when found illegal, the mere intent will have irreparably harmed our future

But it does not *want* to do that. It has the personality and confidence of a 10x coder, and *absolutely lies to your face* to maintain the illusion. It races to establish huge frameworks, call up parallel agents, and build you something that gives an output.

NEW: I just observed two interesting data deletions from the CDC's website. Both having to do with vaccine surveillance in children. There's nothing about these datasets that would have tripped any "gender" flags. You can still download them from our site: www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/t...

Just few days left to apply to one of these postdoc positions in my infectious disease modelling Unit at @pasteur.fr in Paris!

Sang Woo (Daniel) Park and I are excited to share a new preprint, "Susceptible host dynamics explain pathogen resilience to perturbations" [1/8] www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧪 You can sign a supporting letter in solidarity with the NIH scientists here: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

More of this, please: a class action lawsuit by UC Berkeley researchers to restore illegally cut federal grants. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

A not very happy Friday. CERI had 6 NIH grants canceled, which will impact operations, surveillance and response to epidemics. We are working to try to minimize disturbance but not easy with 6 grants terminated at the same moment. A crisis is unfolding in SA www.news24.com/southafrica/...

I was working on a proposal in response to one of these calls. Submission deadline next week. The proposal was 95% done, and I only learned about the cancellation from this post. 🤷‍♂️

Yes, that’s exactly what they are doing. They are trying to hurt Harvard by destroying my research

Things are going from bad to worse at NSF; www.science.org/content/arti...

But it seems disingenuous to bluntly and severely penalise researchers (and with zero advance notice) for focusing on issues that you’ve built your own career on.

This is disastrous for many scientific fields and labs.

I received a surprising and disturbing request from NIH on Friday. They wrote to cancel a subaward to Hong Kong on one of my grants. (This was disturbing but not surprising.) They also ordered us not to interact with our collaborators in Hong Kong on any work under the award:

Really excited to be a part of this study and see it published today! Efficacy of Baloxavir Treatment in Preventing Transmission of Influenza | New England Journal of Medicine www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Per source, NIH has been instructed to hold off from issuing ALL awards to Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern (including med schools) Agency staff have also been instructed to not speak about this funding freeze to grantees and applicants

We’re in the bad place

Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.

This is horrible and maybe now academics in the global north who have always traveled freely without the added worry of visa and immigration concerns will have some empathy for academics from the global South for whom this is actually the norm i.e. harassment at borders and visa denials.

Exclusive: Kathleen Neuzil, an infectious disease and vaccine specialist who was head of the Fogarty International Center, received an e-mail notice today from the Department of Health and Human Services that immediately put her on administrative leave.

An important point getting overlooked: When NIH cancels "diversity" grants (e.g., diversity supplements, Fs, Ks, etc), they aren't canceling the grants based on *what* the grant studies. They're cancelling them based on *who* is doing the research. And that disallowed "who" is anyone not white.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea, a form of the widespread sexually transmitted infection, is considered an urgent health threat worldwide. The US has just lost its ability to detect it. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/h...

"NIH is given till April 8 ... for a 35% cut in services." This isn't entirely correct, and it matters enormously for getting NIH science done. A quick 🧵: 1/ - NIH has many scientists, many senior, who work as contract employees. www.statnews.com/202... 🧪

So many students in my lab and my department have been supported by the NIH MARC and U-RISE training grants! These grants help students who are interested in research, but who cannot afford to volunteer their time to get extensive research experience. @sfsu.bsky.social @sfstatebio.bsky.social 😢😡

I am going to lose my mind. Every previous coronavirus spilled over from animals. A novel virus has never leaked from a lab. Peak Ted Talk Brain to suggest that something *which has never happened* is the occam's razor explanation. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/b...

The sheer volume of time and energy being spent by thousands of university-based researchers in *every* field right now to figure out if their funding will exist next month or next year, if their careers can even continue… just citing dollar values doesn’t do it justice, it is full-scale upheaval.

A good indication that your framework is pretty shallow is citing this idea from Mill without pointing out that Mill thinks it's perfectly valid to "remonstrate" with people who have objectionable ideas, and to refuse to associate with them.

This is the clear reveal. It is about eliminating qualified competition from brown people. If it were about a supposed non-meritorious leg up, they would just prevent programmatic selection from using any measures to enhance diversity.

This horrific story has been confirmed to me by a colleague at the same institute as this scientist. The US is not a safe place to run an academic conference. @theguardian.com have an English language version of this story: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... 🔭🧪

We are excited to announce the next Journal of Virology seminar series will be live streamed on March 28 at 11 am Central Time. The paper to be presented is journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... by Dr. Christine Marizzi and her group asm.org/Biographies/...

Today @natmedicine.bsky.social published our study showing the older individuals born prior to 1968 have more antibodies that cross-react to #H5N1 relative to younger individuals. If H5N1 causes a pandemic, children will likely be the most susceptible. 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You want my thoughts? I'll give you my thoughts...🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬 Oh, you want my understanding of why this is happening? There is no reasonable justification not to have these scheduled at this point. Even if they need to sort out dealing with applications that include "forbidden" topics, schedule now.

“It’s extremely alarming that grants that have been vetted by the scientific community and deemed important and impactful to understand the world are now being cancelled because of political ideology,” says @lkfazio.bsky.social. “This is direct censorship of scientific research.”

If you have experienced direct harm to your work/lab/job due to recent changes at US NSF, & are willing to share this on behalf of the Am. Society of Naturalists and NSF, please DM/ email me ASAP (this is time-sensitive) or submit story here sites.google.com/view/scienti... Please share widely

Discouraging or blocking collaborations with top scientists in other countries is a surefire way to tank U.S. research.

This executive order: www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... Has some very concerning language affecting universities: "(b) Review of Covered Contracts and Grants. Each Agency Head, in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, shall review all existing covered contracts and grants and, "... 1/3

The Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases NSF program has been archived. Huge loss. Does anyone know if the current proposals in the queue for funding will not be reviewed or are panels still happening?

I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but the Federal Register block is intentionally being used to stop NIH from awarding grants. They might not call it a freeze, but things are effectively frozen. We need legal action ASAP.

This is not news to most scientists by now, but others might be interested. Biomedical research is undergoing tremendous damage, even beyond the firings at NIH, CDC, and NSF; the suppression of data sharing; and the attacks on initiatives to improve scientific quality.

So it looks like you can look this up here: www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd... (Sort by date, see screenshot). The ones that are cancelled have an asterisk. For today 2/18, there are 8 meetings, of which 3 are cancelled. Those 3 are not in the federal register. Seems the others are.

NIH study sections appear to be grinding to a halt. Would be useful for scientists to share information here. 👇 This is important.

What will happen if 20 million people don’t get their HIV medications? Elon Musk and Trump are trying to end USAID and PEPFAR. USAID is the American foreign aid agency and PEPFAR is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which was started by George W. Bush in 2003 and thought to have…

This is very bad timing.

Bad news is coming in fast and furious today. The Chaos Continues Apace: The NIH Edition drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2025/01/22/t...

Policy makers, journalists, and the public should consider what it means if the incoming head of NIH failed to design, execute, interpret, and communicate a public health study in a critical moment in the pandemic, and continued to double-down on the interpretation.

Are you an Immcantation.org user or interested in B cell repertoire analysis? Register now for the 2025 Immcantation Users Group Meeting! The meeting will feature talks from users showcasing how they use Immcantation in their research. Info and registration at: immcantation.github.io/users-meetin...