This week in public hell—umm, health.
But also a couple of good news updates, just to keep you sane.
Each week I think, “Okay, politically driven public health and medicine news will finally slow down and I’ll get to work on some longer pieces and maybe even get back to covering some exciting new medical research”—like a piece of good news just published in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy) appears to be working against liver disease. (For those of you who started reading this newsletter in 2025, you may not know that I’m unusually optimistic about this class of medicines, which are much more than weight loss drugs.) Then I go and read the internet, and here we are again.
Today’s newsletter covers ten relatively quick-hits on the latest in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign to burn it all down—or at least, lots of things that matter. Fair warning: I’m in a spicy mood today, so hang on tight.
But first…
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RFK Jr. says vaccines will need to be tested against placebo. Most already were…
The Washington Post reported that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to require placebo-controlled studies for new vaccines. First of all, virtually all the vaccines we have were tested that way, and the ones that weren't were usually tested against earlier vaccines already known to be effective in order to establish equivalence or superiority. So, acting like the vaccines we have didn’t pass high standards—when in fact they did— undermines them inappropriately. I know. You’re shocked.
The nuance here is whether annual flu and Covid-19 shots (whose exact composition changes to match recent strains) are considered “new” vaccines or not. I would argue they are not. But, more to the point, it would be impossible to test seasonal shots against placebo because by the time you got the data, it would be too late to roll them out. (There’s also the issue of whether it would be ethical; it’s dicey but there are some situations in which it might be, and others where it clearly would not be, because you can’t deprive volunteers of a vaccine that we already know will help them some and replace it with placebo). So, Sec. Kennedy is either not thinking clearly or this is an end-around to end seasonal vaccines. I know. You’re shocked.
By the way, I think you could study seasonal vaccines in the fall to optimize the effectiveness of a second dose for high-risk people later in the season—an idea I pointed to in an opinion I wrote for The New York Times last fall—but that’s different from denying high-risk patients their first doses in time for the shots to work.
This is the kind of fight we are gearing up for and it’s not great.
RFK Jr. repeats absurd falsehood about measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unearthed and repeated an old lie about the MMR vaccine, claiming it contains fetal “aborted fetus debris.” He did this in public whilst being the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and in the midst of the largest US measles outbreak of the 21st century.
This is a kind of blood libel that stems from a complete misunderstanding of vaccine history. Here’s an article about that, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which is one of the most prestigious pediatric research and teaching hospitals in the known universe.
This tweet was pretty good too:
In other RFK Jr. news, he told Dr. Phil that parents should “do their own research” on vaccines. I guess by “research” he means “Google stuff randomly,” because funding for actual vaccine research (and campaigns that support them) has been cut by this administration.
RFK Jr. agency pauses Ebola research, but won’t say why or for how long.
Wired reported that one of the most important infectious disease research facilities has been instructed by the Trump administration to stop doing anything. The lab, one of twelve BSL-4 (biosafety level 4) facilities in the United States capable of doing so, studies highly dangerous viruses like Ebola. Without labs like these, we’ll never make progress against that virus. As usual when this administration acts to stops science, a vague excuse was made for what is being called a “pause.” Per Wired, “This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.”
This could either be reasonable or not. It’s just hard to take the administration at its word when its top official said he wanted to “give infectious diseases a break” late last year, and when disingenuous excuses about fraud and inefficiency have been used to justify ending our previously heroic global health campaigns that have kept millions of people from dying.
NIH to end overseas collaboration funding—another “own goal.”
Collaboration is a major part of science. Overseas collaborations are often exceedingly important, whether it is to get adequate sample size for research, expertise we don’t have, or to increase efficiency (i.e., getting high-quality research for less money). That’s why the US government, until yesterday, funded $500 million in biomedical science research conducted outside of the United States.
You can kiss that goodbye.
According to Nature, “a new policy from the [NIH] will end billions of dollars of funding to laboratories and hospitals outside the United States, imperiling thousands of global-health projects and clinical trials on topics such as emerging infectious diseases and cancer.”
The policy “cites national security and a lack of transparency as the rationale for the change,” the report says. Well, there’s another “own goal” for the Trump administration. Collaborating with global partners enhances national security, both by gathering intel and making any kind of oversight and monitoring possible.
National Science Foundation grant funding stopped.
In another exclusive for Nature (which was on fire yesterday), it was reported that the National Science Foundation (an independent federal agency) has stopped awarding any new grant funding “until further notice.” It’s unclear why, but the news came days after staff were told not to fund “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”—a.k.a. the usual Project 2025 censorship nonsense. The news added more fresh hell for scientists associated with the NSF. “In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated roughly 1,040 grants that would have awarded $739 million to researchers and their institutions,” Nature added.
Senator Collins is concerned about deep research cuts in the proposed budget.
On Wednesday, the US Senate Appropriations Committee held a hearing entitled “Biomedical Research: Keeping America’s Edge in Innovation.” In her opening remarks, Senator Susan Collins said that she believes the United States needs to maintain its commitment to medical and scientific research, saying, “I think it’s better that Congress make it really clear in our legislation, in our appropriations bills, that we want the funding to be there, that we don’t want arbitrary caps, and that we want to be more efficient. There may be some savings that make a great deal of sense, but we’ve got to be careful.”
Senator Collins called on her fellow Republicans to resist the kinds of draconian moves and proposals that the Trump administration and DOGE have favored in the first 100 days of the new administration.
HHS set to cut funding for naloxone, the life-saving opioid overdose antidote.
Opioid use disorder is a terrible medical condition and a leading killer of young Americans. One former sufferer from this very challenging and dangerous problem is HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself. Now, according to CNN, a subagency funded by Kennedy’s HHS (SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) is set to eliminate a $56 million per year grant that supplies and delivers naloxone kits to first responders. The grant also trains these frontline workers and others on how to use the opioid reversal agent that saves lives.
I’m very glad that Secretary Kennedy’s opioid use disorder is in remission. But being at the helm whilst the administration cuts naloxone access is a one-two punch of this administration’s approach: cruelty and hypocrisy.
CDC cuts advisory committee on infections in healthcare settings.
It looks like the CDC’s Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) will be eliminated, according to MedPage Today reporting by Kristina Fiore. This is ironic because the new FDA Commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, has written extensively about medical errors in the past, statistics for which often include infections spread in medical settings.
In general, advisory committees are at risk of being deep-sixed at the CDC. Of the many expert groups, only two are mandated by law: the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the Advisory Committee to the Director.
The others could technically be eliminated on a whim at any time.
Some good news!
Let’s end the week with two favorable pieces of news from the week. Whew!
Some terminated grants are back
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, some of the approximately 800 research grants summarily eliminated by the Trump administration have been restored, including some that involve work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s neither clear why—including to the spared grant recipients themselves—nor how many grants have been restored. But, hey, we’ll take any good news story we can get.
NIH moves to make its own data more transparent.
The NIH announced that it was moving ahead with making results from its own internal science public sooner than anticipated. That sounded like a good thing to me, and apparently it is. It turns out that this policy was actually announced back in 2024, during the Biden administration. So, this is not a Trump administration idea. Rather, they’re just rolling it out five months sooner than scheduled. This is especially welcome because transparency has hardly been a feature of this administration. (One example springs to mind: among the massive terminations at HHS were entire staffs that handle Freedom of Information Act requests. #Transparency). That said, as above, we’ll take the win.
If you have information about any of the unfolding stories we are following, please email me or find me on Signal at InsideMedicine.88.
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