In October 2020, two months before COVVI-19 vaccines became available in the United States, Stanford’s health policy professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and two colleagues published an open letter calling for an opposite approach to manage the risk of the pandemic: to protect the most vulnerable immunity while allowing others to resume normal lifes influences the virus.
They called it the Big declaration of barringtonFor the city of Massachusetts where they signed it. The counterou was rapid, the director general of the World Health Organization calling for the idea of allowing a new dangerous virus to sweep unprotected populations “immoral. “Bhattacharya later testified Before the Congress he – and him – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by the main scientific agencies.
Now Bhattacharya is the one in charge and members of the agency’s staff he directs, the United States National Institutes of Health, has published their own letter of dissent, challenging what they consider to be the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda declaration, for the location of the NIH.
“We hope that you will welcome this dissent, which we have modeled after your Great Barrington declaration,” wrote staff members. THE letter Was signed by more than 300 employees of the Biomedical Research Agency, according to the non -profit organization, Stand Up for Science, which also published it; While many employees have signed anonymously due to fears of reprisals, nearly 100 – students graduates to division leaders – signed by their name.
It happens the day before that Bhattacharya must testify before the Congress, in a budget audience Stop Tuesday by the Senate credit committee. It is just the last sign of conflict from the interior of the NIH, where some staff members have staged a to go out of a stop with Bhattacharya to protest against working conditions and an inability to discuss it with the director.
“If we are not talking about, we allow prejudice to research on participants and public health in America and around the world,” said Dr. Jenna Norton, program agent of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Renal Diseases and a main organizer of the Declaration, in a press release from Stand Up for Science. She stressed that she was talking personally, not in the name of NIH.
The letter, which the staff members declared also to have sent to the Secretary of the United States of the Department of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of the Congress who supervise the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to “restore delayed or dismissed subsidies for political reasons so that vital science can continue”, invoking work in the fields, Cover-19, the impacts of the health of climate change and others.
They cited results By two scientists who said that around 2,100 NIH subsidies for around 9.5 billion dollars have been interrupted since the second Trump administration. The NIH budget had been around $ 48 billion a year, and Trump administration propose Cut it next year by around 40%.
Research layoffs “throw years of hard work and millions of dollars,” the NIH employees wrote. “Ending a research study of $ 5 million when it is full of 80% does not save $ 1 million, it waste $ 4 million.”
They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy which aims to implement a new rate of 15% lower to pay to pay Indirect costs research in universities, which supports the shared laboratory space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the cooking essential staff of NIH.
Those who wrote Bethesda’s statement were joined on Monday by external supporters, in a second letter Posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by public members, including more than a dozen scientists of the Nobel Prize winner.
“We urge the NIH and the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) to work with NIH staff to bring the NIH to their mission and abandon the NIH use strategy as a tool to achieve political objectives unrelated to this mission,” they wrote.
The letter asked that the granting process was led by the staff of the NIH trained scientific, guided by a rigorous peer examination, not by “anonymous individuals outside the NIH”.
He also challenged the assertions contested by Kennedy, which often comparison Today’s health results with those roughly when his uncle John F. Kennedy was president in the early 1960s.
“Since 1960, the mortality rate due to heart disease has been reduced by half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to around 230 deaths per 100,000 today,” they wrote. “From 1960 to the present day, the Five-Year Survival Rate for Childhood Leukemia Has Increased Nearly 10-Fold, To Over 90% For Some Forms. In 1960, The Rate of Measles infection was approximataly 250 Cases per 100,000 people compared with a Near Zero Rate Now ( recently). “”
They recognized that there was still a lot of work to do, in particular by approaching obesity, diabetes and dependence on opioids, “but”, they wrote, “glamor a mythical past while ignoring the significant progress made thanks to biomedical research did not improve the health of the American people.”
The support of the NIH, they argued, made the United States “the international center recognized for biomedical research and training”, which has led to major progress in improving human health.
“I have never heard that nobody say:” I am so frustrated that the government spends as much money for cancer research, or tries to address Alzheimer’s disease, “said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of external support and previously was director of the National Institute of NIH General Medical Sciences.
“Health problems are a universal human concern,” Berg told CNN. “The NIH system is not perfect by any section of imagination, but has been incredibly productive in terms of progress on specific diseases.”