In October 2020, two months before the Covid-19 vaccine was made available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues issued an open letter calling for an opposite approach to managing pandemic risks.
They called it the Great Barrington Declaration for the town of Massachusetts that they signed. The repulsion against it was quick. The World Health Organization’s director called for the idea that a dangerous new virus would allow unprotected populations to be cleaned “unethically.” Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it and he soon became a target of suppression and censorship by those major scientific institutions.
Now Bhattacharya is the person in charge, and the staff of his agency, the National Institutes of Health, has released their own letters of objection, and is facing problems with what is considered a politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration for the NIH location.
“I hope you’ll welcome this dissent, and this shows that it was modelled on your great Barrington Declaration,” the staff wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research institute. Many employees signed anonymously because of fear of retaliation, but almost 100 people, from graduate students to department chiefs, signed by names.
That’s the day before Bhatacharya is scheduled to testify once more before Congress, a budget hearing to be held by the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday. This is the latest indication of a conflict from within the NIH, with several staff members performing strikes at Bhatacharya and Town Hall in protesting working conditions and unable to discuss with the supervisor.
“If we don’t speak up, we will allow for continued harm to research participants and public health in the United States and around the world,” said Dr. Jenna Norton, program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes. She emphasized that she speaks in personal abilities, not on behalf of the NIH.
The letter, which stated that staff also sent to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of the Congress overseeing NIH, told Bhatacharya “thrusts to restore grants or termination to grant or end life sciences to continue, citing local work including health oversights, cooperatives and health impacts.
They cited the findings by two scientists who said that around $9.5 billion in NIH grants have ended since the start of the second Trump administration. The NIH budget is around $48 billion a year, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it by about 40% next year.
NIH staff wrote that the conclusion of the investigation would “throw years of hard work and millions of dollars.” “If you finish a $5 million survey survey when 80% is completed, you won’t be able to save $1 million and you’ll waste $4 million.”
They also urged Bhatacharya to reverse a policy aimed at implementing a new, lower 15% rate due to the indirect costs of research at universities that support shared lab space, buildings, equipment and other infrastructure, as well as what is called destruction for the layoffs of mandatory NIH staff and cooperation with foreigners.
“The Bethesda Declaration carries some fundamental misconceptions about the policy direction the NIH has taken over the last few months, including continued support for the NIH for international cooperation,” Bhattacharya said in a statement Monday. “Nevertheless, respectful opposition in science is productive. We all want to make the NIH a success.”
A spokesperson for HHS added that the agency is “actively working to remove the ideological impact from the science process,” adding that “if the project fails to meet these criteria, it has been abolished so that resources can be redirected to rigorous and impactful science.”
A spokesperson said it “has not been stopped from legitimate international cooperation,” questioning why some universities would receive more than 15% from the NIH if funders, such as the Gates Foundation’s cap fee, have reviewed cases of staff termination and revive some. “Nevertheless, as NIH priorities evolve, so should our staffing model be the one that is central to our mission and a great custodian of taxpayer dollars,” the spokesman added.
Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were signed by members of the public, including a Dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists, in the second letter joined by outside supporters and rose to science on Monday.
“We are urging the leadership of the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and abandon strategies that use it as a tool to achieve political goals that are not related to its mission,” they write.
The letter was asked to create grants to be implemented by scientifically trained NIH staff led by strict peer reviews, not “anonymous non-NIH individuals.”
He also challenged the claims Kennedy had proposed. Kennedy often compares today’s health outcomes in the early 1960s to when his uncle John F. Kennedy was president.
“Since 1960, the heart disease mortality rate has been reduced by half, from 560 deaths per 100,000 to about 230 deaths per 100,000 people today,” they write. “From 1960 to the present, the five-year survival rate of childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10 times, exceeding 90% in certain forms. In 1960, the measles infection rate was around 250 cases per 100,000 people, but up until recently, it was around 250 cases compared to the zero rate.”
They admitted there is still a lot of work to do, including dealing with obesity, diabetes and opioid addiction. “But,” he wrote.
He argued that support from the NIH has made the United States an “an internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training” and has led to significant advances in improving human health.
“No one has ever heard of anyone saying, “I’m very frustrated that the government is spending a lot of money on cancer research or trying to deal with Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who previously served as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Medicine.
“Health concerns are universal human concerns,” Berg told CNN. “The NIH system was not perfect due to the widening of imagination, but it was incredibly productive in terms of producing specific disease progression.”