National Institutes of Health NIH

oops see also Collin NIH

GUTTED BY MUSK DOGE?

COLLATERAL DAMAGE TARGET W CDC FAUCI IN COVID PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN? WHO?

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Science-Based Medicine

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org › doge-vs-the-nih-say-goodbye-to-the-greatest-engine-of-biomedical-research-ever-created

DOGE vs. the NIH: Say goodbye to the greatest engine of biomedical ...

Feb 10, 2025A couple of months after Donald Trump won the 2024 election and right after he had nominated conspiracy-mongering antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, I wrote a post entitled RFK Jr. vs. the NIH: Say goodbye to the greatest engine of biomedical research ever created.I admitted at the time that the title might seem a bit overwrought, but I wanted ...

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

https://thebulletin.org › premium › 2025-05 › the-impact-of-doges-funding-cuts-on-biomedical-research-from-the-point-of-view-of-former-nih-director-monica-bertagnolli

The impact of DOGE's funding cuts on biomedical research, from the ...

May 13, 2025The NIH faces cuts of 35 percent, requested by billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Consequently, researchers have had to struggle with getting reimbursed for routine expenses such as lab mice—especially after DOGE put a one-dollar spending limit on the use of government credit cards. Years of work are being put at risk, says former NIH director ...

News for DOGE NIH

Was Rushdie's Attacker Trained by Hezbollah? Plus. . .

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The Memelord Is Leaving. For Now. DOGE Lives On.

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DOGE 'chaos and confusion' is '10 times worse' than people think: NIH scientist

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73d

DOGE Cancels NIH Grants to Prevent Pregnancy in 'Transgender Boys'

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NIH faces renewed DOGE directive to cut staff, putting thousands in line for RIFs

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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

https://www.cbpp.org › research › federal-budget › doge-interference-in-federal-grantmaking-adds-burden-uncertainty-and-risk

DOGE Interference in Federal Grantmaking Adds Burden, Uncertainty, and ...

May 28, 2025The journal Science reported that "NIH only published three NOFOs between 20 January and 26 March, compared with 163 in 2023 and 147 in 2024 between the same dates" and that, as of March 26, NIH had "already pulled offline at least 97 existing NOFOs that related to health disparities, workforce diversity, and research with sexual and ...

Nature

https://www.nature.com › articles › d41586-025-01617-8

NIH killed grants on orders from Elon Musk's DOGE - Nature

May 21, 2025That an outside entity such as DOGE has usurped the decision-making power of the NIH, the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, is a flagrant example of political interference in ...

WIRED

https://www.wired.com › story › doge-is-inside-the-national-institutes-of-health-nih

DOGE Is Inside the National Institutes of Health's Finance System

Feb 24, 2025None of the DOGE-linked NIH employees responded to WIRED's requests to comment. The NIH did not respond to WIRED's request for comment. The NIH is the largest federal funder of biomedical ...

The Hill

https://thehill.com › policy › healthcare › 5143563-nih-leaders-retire-doge-cuts

NIH faces two resignations amid DOGE cuts - The Hill

Feb 13, 2025Two key staff members at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are reportedly leaving the agency amid ongoing efforts by the Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency head ...

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Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › doge-shut-funding-spigot-medical-120300712.html

DOGE shut the funding spigot for medical research overnight ... - Yahoo

Feb 21, 2025The National Institute of Health is up next: Last week, it announced DOGE will cut more than $4 billion from the NIH budget—which equates to 11% of its 2023 budget—impacting major research ...

GovExec.com

https://www.govexec.com › workforce › 2025 › 03 › nih-faces-renewed-doge-directive-cut-staff-pre-covid-levels-putting-thousands-line-rifs › 403593

NIH faces renewed DOGE directive to cut staff, putting thousands in ...

Mar 7, 2025At NIH, DOGE staffer Jeremy Lewin has led the charge on layoff, or reduction in force, plans, a source familiar with his involvement said. Rachel Riley, a former McKinsey consultant, has served as ...

USA Today

https://www.usatoday.com › story › news › politics › 2025 › 02 › 14 › what-is-doge-doing-cfpb-usaid-education-nih › 78390524007

Which agencies are being impacted by DOGE? NIH, USAID, CFPB and more

Feb 14, 2025President Donald Trump and his newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have made quick work in its goals to slash spending and shrink the federal government. DOGE is led by the ...

Washington Examiner

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com › opinion › columnists › 3315099 › after-nih-move-doge-hysteria-spreads

After NIH move, DOGE hysteria spreads - Washington Examiner

Feb 8, 2025AFTER NIH MOVE, DOGE HYSTERIA SPREADS. There was an alarmist report in the Washington Post over the weekend about the Trump administration and the National Institutes of Health.Beneath the ...

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it’s an age for con men, says Intelligencer columnist Sarah Jones.

Quackery is at least as old as the United States, but today’s quacks “have learned to manipulate regulatory loopholes to sell fake cures to the masses,” she says.

Jones points out that a Joe Rogan podcast fan may hear commercials for “Alpha Brain,” created by a “Rogan friend” who got sued last year for deceptive advertising.

Jones said snake oil salesmen now proliferate in U.S. government.

IFrame Content

“Before Mike Huckabee became our ambassador to Israel, he advertised Relaxium, an herbal supplement whose makers falsely pledged it would help a restless nation sleep,” Jones writes. “Other supplement-makers see a champion in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who not only opposes vaccines but has said the Food and Drug Administration should free the nation from the ‘aggressive suppression’ of dubious vitamins and herbal substances.”

She noted Kennedy even hired David Geier to conduct federal studies into “the debunked link between autism and vaccines, though authorities once punished Geier for experimenting on autistic children in a basement laboratory.”

But Kennedy “and his ilk” aren’t limiting themselves to the mere pseudoscience promotion. They’re undermining scientific research at the same time, Jones said.

“Funding cuts and layoffs are weakening major institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, which were established to monitor our food supply and medicines for safety. The administration has canceled research grants to universities, slowing the pace of innovation. Scientists searching for cures and treatments for Alzheimer’s, various cancers, and genetic diseases say their work is in jeopardy,” she said.

And this is delivering results, she added. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found 86 percent of Americans felt confident in the work of the country’s scientists. That figure declined during the pandemic, and remains lower than its pre-COVID levels. Behind those numbers are hucksters who prospered during the pandemic “thanks in part to Donald Trump himself.”

At the height of a pandemic, Jones said Trump told people to inject disinfectant to fight the virus. Grifters hawked horse dewormer ivermectin and an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, which killed at least one Trump supporter after the president touted it at a press conference.

And while parents and some doctors are attempting to treat measles with cod-liver oil, in spite of the evidence against it, Jones said Trump nominated Kennedy ally Casey Means to be surgeon general, though Means promotes a byzantine supplement regime that he claims can reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The New York Timesreports one Illinois couple spent $25,000 treating Alzheimer’s the Bredesen way before figuring out it doesn’t work.

Jones said Trump’s pseudoscience may outlast him if lawmakers refuse to take on what she calls “a predator’s market” of exploitation.

“Without robust public institutions and a health-care system that prioritizes care over profit, mistrust will fester. Americans will lead sicker and shorter lives, and the next pandemic may be even deadlier than COVID,” Jones said.

Parents will blow money on quack treatments “or sacrifice their children to scam artists,” she said.

“Fighting Trump means fighting MAHA and, with it, the quack and the huckster. Rebuilding the federal government and closing regulatory loopholes will cost nostrum-makers some cash, but it’s the only way to make America healthy at last,” she said.

Read the full Intelligencer report at this link.

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The Trump administration’s unprecedented $500 million grant for a broadly protective flu shot has confounded vaccine and pandemic preparedness experts, who said the project was in early stages, relied on old technology, and was just one of more than 200 such efforts.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shifted the money from a pandemic preparedness fund to a vaccine development program led by two scientists whom the administration recently named to senior positions at the National Institutes of Health.

While some experts were pleased that Kennedy had supported any vaccine project, they said the May 1 announcement contravened sound scientific policy, appeared arbitrary, and raised the kinds of questions about conflicts of interest that have dogged many of President Donald Trump’s actions.

Focusing vast resources on a single vaccine candidate “is a little like going to the Kentucky Derby and putting all your money on one horse,” said William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University professor and past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “In science we normally put money on a number of different horses because we can’t be entirely sure who’s going to win.”

Others were mystified by the decision, since the candidate vaccine uses technology that was largely abandoned in the 1970s and eschews techniques developed in recent decades through funding from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department.

IFrame Content

“This is not a next-generation vaccine,” said Rick Bright, who led HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, in the first Trump administration. “It’s so last-generation, or first-generation, it’s mind-blowing.”

The vaccine is being developed at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases by Jeffery Taubenberger, whom Trump named as acting chief of the institute in late April, and his colleague Matthew Memoli, a critic of U.S. covid-19 policy whom Trump picked to lead the NIH until April 1, when Jay Bhattacharya took office. Bhattacharya named Memoli his principal deputy.

Taubenberger gained fame as an Armed Forces Institute of Pathology scientist in 1997 when his lab sequenced the genome of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, using tissue samples from U.S. troops who died in that plague. He joined the NIH in 2006.

In a May 1 news release, HHS called the Taubenberger-Memoli vaccine initiative “Generation Gold Standard,” saying it represented “a decisive shift toward transparency, effectiveness, and comprehensive preparedness.” Bhattacharya said it represented a “paradigm shift.”

But the NIH vaccine-makers’ goal of creating a shot that protects against multiple or all strains of influenza — currently vaccines must be given each year to account for shifts in the virus — is not new.

Then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci launched a network of academic researchers in pursuit of a broadly protective flu vaccine in 2019. In addition to that NIH-led consortium, more than 200 flu vaccines are under development in the U.S. and other countries.

Many use newer technologies, and some are at more advanced stages of human testing than the Taubenberger vaccine, whose approach appears basically the same as the one used in flu vaccines starting in 1944, Bright said.

In the news release, HHS described the vaccine as “in advanced trials” and said it would induce “robust” responses and “long-lasting protection.” But Taubenberger and his colleagues haven’t published a complete human study of the vaccine yet. A study showing the vaccine protected mice from the flu appeared in 2022.

For Operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of the covid vaccine during Trump’s first term, government scientists reviewed detailed plans and data from academic and commercial laboratories vying for federal money, said Greg Poland, a flu expert and president of the Atria Health Academy of Science and Medicine. “If that’s happening here, it’s opaque to me,” he said.

When asked what data beyond its press release supported the decision, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon pointed to the agency’s one-page statement. Asked whether the decision would curtail funding for the Fauci-created consortium or other universal vaccine approaches, Nixon did not specifically respond. “Generation Gold Standard is the most promising,” he said in an email.

Taubenberger did not respond to a request for comment. Nixon and NIH spokesperson Amanda Fine did not respond to requests for an interview with Taubenberger or Memoli.

The HHS statement stressed that by developing the vaccine in-house, the government “ensures radical transparency, public accountability, and freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.” While any vaccine would eventually have to be made commercially, NIH involvement through more stages of development could give the government greater influence on any vaccine’s eventual price, Schaffner said.

If the mRNA-based covid shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech represented the cutting edge of vaccine technology, applying ultra-sophisticated approaches never before seen in an inoculation, the approach by Taubenberger and Memoli represents a blast from the past.

Their vaccine is made by inactivating influenza viruses with a carcinogenic chemical called beta-propiolactone. Scientists have used the chemical to neutralize viruses since at least the 1950s. This whole-virus inactivation method, mostly using other chemicals, was the standard way to make flu vaccines into the 1970s, when it was modified, partly because whole-virus vaccines caused high fevers or even seizures in children.

The limited published data from the Taubenberger vaccine, from an initial safety trial involving 45 patients, showed no major side effects. The scientists are testing the vaccine as a regular shot and as an intranasal spray with the idea of stopping the virus in the respiratory tract before it causes a broad infection.

“The notion of a universal influenza A pandemic vaccine is a good one,” said Poland, who called Taubenberger an excellent scientist. But he added: “I’m not so sure about the platform, and the dollar amount is a puzzler. This vaccine’s in very early development.”

Paul Friedrichs, a retired Air Force general who led the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in President Joe Biden’s White House, said that “giving $500 million upfront with very little data to support it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“The technology for developing vaccines has tremendously evolved over many decades,” Friedrichs said. “Why would we go back to an approach historically associated with greater or more frequent adverse events?”

The government appeared to be transferring the money for the Taubenberger vaccine development from an existing $1.3 billion vaccine fund at Project NextGen, a mostly covid-focused program at BARDA, Friedrichs said. Most of that money was earmarked to support advanced research on covid and other viral vaccines, including those protecting against emerging diseases.

It is “very concerning that we’re de-emphasizing covid, which we may live to regret,” Poland said. “It assumes we won’t have a covid variant that escapes the current moderately high levels of covid immunity.”

Nixon said Project NextGen, for which some funds were earmarked for mRNA research, is under review. Kennedy is critical of mRNA vaccines, once claiming, falsely, that they are the deadliest vaccines in history.

Ted Ross, director of global vaccine development at the Cleveland Clinic, said he was “happy to see them investing in respiratory vaccines, including a universal flu vaccine, with all the programs they’ve been cutting.”

“But I don’t think this is the only approach,” Ross said. “Other universal flu vaccines are in progress, and their success and failure are not known yet.”

His team, part of the NIAID-funded flu vaccine consortium, is using artificial intelligence and computer modeling to design vaccines that produce the broadest immunity to influenza, including seasonal and pandemic strains.

As interim director, Memoli oversaw the start of the administration’s massive cuts at the NIH, with the elimination of some 800 agency grants worth over $2 billion. More than 1,200 NIH employees have been fired, and many researchers, including Ross, are in limbo.

His lab is close to testing a candidate vaccine on people, Ross said, while waiting to find out about its NIH funding. “I’m not sure whether my contract is on the chopping block,” he said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Fox News looks the other way as the Trump administration decimates NIH medical research funding

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Ben Van Bloem & Noah Dowe

Published 02/11/25 MMA

Fox News has barely covered the Trump administration efforts to slash funding at the National Institutes of Health. The network has devoted less than three minutes of coverage to the administration's move to cap indirect funding included in research grants, which would affect research institutions across the country.

President Donald Trump has set his sights on the NIH, targeting federal spending on medical research. This latest move imposes a 15% cap on indirect funding for research projects, which will slash funding for essential medical infrastructure like lab maintenance, utilities, and administrative support. The new policy, announced on February 7, has sparked widespread backlash from scientists, lawmakers, and medical organizations.

Universities reliant on NIH funding could lose billions, with deep red states alone estimated to suffer $1.1 billion in losses. Dismantling this system will undermine the nation’s research capacity, delay treatments and cures, and cede leadership in science to global competitors.

The Association of American Medical Colleges explains:

Make no mistake. This announcement will mean less research. Lights in labs nationwide will literally go out. Researchers and staff will lose their jobs.

As a result, Americans will have to wait longer for cures and our country will cede scientific breakthroughs to foreign competitors. These are real consequences – slower scientific progress, longer waits for cures, fewer jobs.

Despite the serious ramifications of funding caps, from February 7, when a cap on indirect funding for research grants distributed by NIH was announced, through 2 p.m. on February 11, Fox News covered the story for only 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Of that, about 50 seconds came from Jessica Tarlov, the left-leaning co-host on The Five, who described the imminent harm that will be caused as a result of the blanket cuts.

Video

Citation

From the February 10, 2025 edition of Fox News' The Five

Twenty-two states filed a lawsuit against the administration over the policy, arguing it violates federal law and threatens groundbreaking research efforts. A federal judge temporarily blocked the cuts on February 10.

Methodology}:

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...

Targeting Medical Journals

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

ref1

no lnx nyt

Edward Martin wears a gray suit and blue tie as he speaks at a desk with a microphone at the Capitol.

Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent letters to science and medical journals, accusing them of bias.Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press

Teddy RosenbluthRebecca Robbins

By Teddy Rosenbluth and Rebecca Robbins

April 18, 2025

A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.

The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.

Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.

One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.

The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.

In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”

He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”

And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”

The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.

It was not clear how many journals had been targeted. Several prominent medical and science publishers said they had not received letters. Others declined requests for comment. News of the letters was earlier reported by MedPage Today, a medical news website.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington also declined to comment. Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy had any involvement.

Laura DiMasi, a spokeswoman for the American College of Chest Physicians, confirmed that the organization had received the letter but declined an interview request.

Most of what medical journals publish is highly technical, aimed at an audience of specialists. But they and the organizations that publish them have increasingly come under attack. Right-leaning sites like Breitbart have derided them as “woke medical journals.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, has been attacking the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which publishes a journal and runs a variety of reproductive health programs. It has received federal funding for an effort to promote maternal health. The alliance recently urged the Trump administration to cut funding and investigate the group, saying it was pushing liberal ideas about diversity and gender.

Several journals or their publishers have publicly opposed Mr. Trump.

In January, the American Public Health Association, which publishes a journal, was among several groups that sued the Trump administration over a memo freezing federal funding. That policy that has now been rescinded, though the administration has since halted other funds.

In March, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called mass layoffs at H.H.S. an “attack on public health.”

In 2020, The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic — the first time the journal had taken a position in an election in its 208-year history. The journal Nature endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in the 2020 election and spoke out against a second Trump term during the 2024 election.

Medical journals are afforded the same First Amendment protections as any other news media outlet.

Kent Anderson, a consultant for scientific publishers who has written about conservative attacks on medical journals, said that Mr. Martin’s inquiry could have a chilling effect among publishers.

“This is a fishing expedition from a U.S. attorney, and that makes people nervous,” Mr. Anderson said. “It may make them think twice about an editorial about treating women who have a spontaneous abortion or about transgender teens dealing with a health issue, because it may make them think that somebody is going to knock on the door.”

Mr. Kennedy had been nursing grievances about scientific journals for years. Medical and science publishers have long rejected article submissions that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. (Dozens of studies have failed to establish such a link.)

He said in a podcast interview last year that he would seek to prosecute medical journals under the federal anti-corruption statute.

“I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science and stop retracting the real science and publishing the fake pharmaceutical science by these phony industry mercenaries.”

As examples, he pointed to two prominent journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and the scientific publishing giant, Elsevier.

Other top health officials in the Trump administration have also criticized the big scientific publishers. In a book published last year, Dr. Martin A. Makary, the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, accused journal editorial boards of “gate-keeping” and publishing only information that supports a “groupthink narrative.”

Before becoming director of the N.I.H., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publicly chastised the editor in chief of a prominent journal, Science, claiming he had “publicly denigrated scientists” who opposed Covid-era lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya was widely denounced by mainstream scientists during the pandemic for proposing that the virus should allowed to spread naturally through the population.

Dr. Bhattacharya also co-founded a new journal pitched as an alternative to traditional scientific publishing. It has published contrarian views on Covid.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

Teddy Rosenbluth is a health reporter and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

Rebecca Robbins is a reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services Department, Donald Trump

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Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.

That was January 2020.

Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.

For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.

It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.

Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.

As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.

Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.

It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.

That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.

Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.

Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.

A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.

And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.

We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.

We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.

It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.

Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.

Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pullingthe U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.

Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.

Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.

It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.

In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.

They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.

The bill’s clear intent is to having a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression in Ohio’s institutions of higher learning, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.

Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.

America’s love affair with confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need paid. The damage will be extensive.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

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NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2024 › 11 › 12 › nx-s1-5183014 › trump-election-2024-nih-rfk

Trump may overhaul the NIH, with input from RFK, Republican lawmakers : NPR

Nov 12, 2024Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal critic of mainstream medicine, has President-elect Donald Trump's ear. Over the weekend, Kennedy said he'd like to immediately replace 600 NIH employees.

Author:Rob Stein

ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org › article › nih-niaid-trump-kennedy-bhattacharya-vaccines-research

Trump Could Drastically Reshape NIH. Here's What's at Stake. — ProPublica

Jan 15, 2025More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency's ...

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The Hill

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Science | AAAS

https://www.science.org › content › article › trump-won-nih-major-shake

Trump won. Is NIH in for a major shake-up? | Science | AAAS

Nov 6, 2024Republicans had NIH in their sights even before the election, with proposals to restructure it and restrict some areas of research. Trump's embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, has also unsettled researchers. Trump has said he will let Kennedy "go wild on" health, medicines, and food policy.

MSN

https://www.msn.com › en-us › health › other › rfk-jr-suggests-replacing-hundreds-of-federal-health-employees › ar-AA1tUkGM

RFK Jr. Suggests Replacing Hundreds of Federal Health Employees - MSN

NIH employees work in research settings, clinics and in the field worldwide. ... RFK Jr. is an outspoken opponent of Big Pharma and Big Food and has at various times attributed the source of ...

Science | AAAS

https://www.science.org › content › article › researchers-state-panic-after-robert-f-kennedy-jr-says-trump-will-hand-him-health

Researchers 'in a state of panic' after Robert F. Kennedy Jr ... - AAAS

Oct 30, 2024Concerns about what a second Donald Trump (R) presidency could mean for public health and biomedical research ratcheted up this week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters Trump has promised to give him "control" over agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Vox

https://www.vox.com › health › 385541 › rfk-jr-trump-hhs-vaccines-fluoride

RFK Jr. to lead HHS under Trump. Here's how he could reshape ... - Vox

Nov 15, 2024Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks alongside former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Georgia in October 2024. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post. Part Of. ... NIH, FDA, and CDC — and ...

Nature

https://www.nature.com › articles › d41586-024-03736-0

Major biomedical funder NIH poised for massive reform under ... - Nature

Nov 15, 2024Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whom Trump has chosen to run the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — the NIH's parent agency — said in 2023 that he would seek an eight-year pause for ...

STAT

https://www.statnews.com › 2024 › 12 › 27 › trump-rfk-nih-medical-research-funding

How Trump and RFK Jr. could change health funding priorities - STAT

Dec 27, 2024Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a vocal critic of vaccines and mainstream medicine who has vowed to replace 600 employees at the NIH.

Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com › science › 2024 › 10 › rfk-jr-claims-trump-promised-to-put-him-in-charge-of-nih-cdc-and-more

RFK Jr. claims Trump promised to put him in charge of NIH, CDC, and more

Oct 31, 2024RFK Jr. is saying he's been promised power over major health agencies, and Trump officials believe his nonsense. ... CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others. And also the USDA, which is, you know, key to ...

Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com › article › what-rfk-jr-s-health-cabinet-position-under-trump-might-look-like

What Might Happen to Public Health under RFK, Jr.

Nov 14, 2024Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign rally for president-elect Donald Trump at Macomb Community College on November 01, 2024 in Warren, Michigan. ... Republicans want to trim the NIH's ...

===

11 23 thim

something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.

If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.

It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.

Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.

A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.

And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.

That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.

The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).

They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.

This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.

That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetent --> malicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”

Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:

“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”

And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.

None of this is new and none should be surprising.

In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology*published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:

“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”

The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:

“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”

It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.

Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for theJournal of Epidemiological Public Health(JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”

They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”

The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:

“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”

Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.

— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.

— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.

— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.

— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.

— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.

— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.

Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.

And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.

As my colleague Chauncey DeVegapoints out:

“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”

While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.

The Republican Party, as I noted lastyear, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.

This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.

America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.

And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.

===

an 320

Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’Alex Henderson

no lnx

Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’

Written by Alex Henderson March 27, 2020

Far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, like President Donald Trump, has been a frequent source of nonsense during the coronavirus crisis: on his February 24 show, he equated COVID-19 with “the common cold.” And on Friday, the 69-year-old Limbaugh argued that health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cannot be trusted because they are part of “the Deep State” and have an anti-Trump agenda.

In audio that Media Matters has posted on its website, embedded above, Limbaugh can be heard on Friday telling listeners, “We’ve talked about the Deep State all these years since Trump was elected — the Trump-Russia collusion, the FBI — well, the Deep State extends very deeply. And the American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”

Limbaugh added, “And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while — and they’re at the CDC, and they’re at the NIH…. But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”

Limbaugh, who lives in South Florida, went on to criticize social distancing measures in that part of the U.S.

“I’ve been watching people routinely accept whatever the authorities say,” Limbaugh told listeners. “Where I live, the local town government is driving around town, trying to spot people violating the social distancing ordinances. And when they see it, they publish it on their web site: ‘This is very troublesome. We at the town are very troubled by groups of people congregating, violating the social distancing.’ Well, what do you think people are going to do? People are not just going to sit around here and stop living.”

Limbaugh and Trump have both repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus crisis. Back in February, when thousands of people were dying from it in mainland China, Trump insisted that his critics were exaggerating the threat posed to other parts of the world.

On February 24, Limbaugh insisted that the mainstream media were exaggerating the threat posed by coronavirus as a way of attacking Trump, telling his audience, “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

That day, Limbaugh also told listeners, “Thedrive-by media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as, ‘Oh, my God, if you get it, you’re dead’.… I think the survival rate is 98%. Ninety-eight per cent of people (who) get the coronavirus survive. It’s a respiratory system virus.”

Stephen King

@StephenKing

Rush Limbaugh says coronavirus no worse than the common cold. Sage advice from a lifelong cigar smoker who has lung cancer.

In late February, Trump told reporters he had a “hunch” that the death rate from coronavirus was lower than what the World Health Organization (WHO) was reporting. And it was also during that period that Trump denounced coronavirus warnings coming from Democrats as a “hoax.” Since then, the number of deaths from coronavirus has passed 25,000 worldwide, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

On March 11, Limbaugh argued that the cancelations of major events like basketball games and the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas were an overreaction.

“Where does this end?,” Limbaugh asserted. “Especially when you realize there are diseases out there that kill many more than are being killed by this.”

le monde

also lamar smith and chaffetz threat to defund?

Intrusive and bureaucratic guerrilla warfare

Within the space of a few months, at least five individuals presented themselves as a journalist, independent researcher or assistant in law firms to approach IARC scientists and researchers involved in IARC’s work. All were seeking very specific information about the agency’s procedures and funding.

One of them, Miguel Santos-Neves, works for a New York-based economic intelligence company called Ergo.According to a report in the New York Times in July 2016, he was collared during a U.S. judicial investigation for misrepresenting his identity. On behalf of Uber,Mr. Santos-Neves had investigated a plaintiff who had filed a classaction suit against the company and questioned his professional entourage under false pretenses. Ergo did not respond to Le Monde’s enquiries.

Just like Christopher Watts, two sister organizations with nefarious reputations are interested not only in IARC but also in the Ramazzini Institute. The Energy and Environmental Legal Institute (E&E Legal) introduces itself as a non-profit organization, the missions of which include to “hold accountable those who seek excessive and destructive government regulation that’s based on agenda-driven policy making, junk science, and hysteria.”

The Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, for its part, says “it seeks to provide a counter-weight to the litigious environmental movement that fosters an economically destructive regulatory regime in the United States.”

According to Le Monde, they have initiated no fewer than 17 FOIA requests to the NIH and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Engaged in legal, bureaucratic and intrusive guerrilla warfare, they have demanded the correspondence of several American officials “containing the terms ‘IARC’, ‘glyphosate’, ‘Guyton'” (Kathryn Guyton is the IARC scientist responsible for the “Monograph 112”).

They seek the smallest of details on scholarships, grants and other financial and nonfinancial relationships between these American agencies, IARC, some scientists, and the Ramazzini Institute.

“Let nothing go”

The two organizations are headed by David Schnare, a confirmed climate sceptic who is known for harassing climate scientists. In November 2016, Mr. Schnare temporarily left E&E Legal to join Donald Trump’s transition team. As for Steve Milloy, who is also among the leaders of the organization, he is a wellknown figure in the small world of tobacco industry funded propaganda. When asked about their motivations and sources of funding, the president of E&E Legal replied by email: “Hi, we’re not interested in participating.” The attention on these FOIA requests is amplified by op-eds published in some media outlets.

One of them, The Hill, is mandatory reading for every political player in Washington DC.Their authors are a squadron of propagandists that the association US Right to Know (USRTK) has documented as having longstanding ties to agrochemical companies and conservative think tanks, such as the Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute, both known for their major role in the manufacture of climate skepticism. Their writings expose exactly the same arguments. And sometimes even the same phrases: the “shoddy science” of an IARC ravaged by conflicts of interest and “widely criticized”—yet without ever saying by whom.

The lawyers involved in U.S. lawsuits revealed that Monsanto also used more discreet means.Responding under oath to questions from lawyers representing people who attribute their cancer to Roundup, the firm’s executives revealed a confidential program aimed at countering all criticisms and called “Let Nothing Go.”

The transcripts of these hearings remain confidential. But memos from the law firms involved allow a little more to be known. They show that Monsanto uses third-party companies that “employ individuals who appear to have no connection to the industry but who in turn post positive comments on news articles and Facebook posts, defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs.”

The machine seems to be racing ahead with the advent of Mr. Trump

In recent months, the coalition against IARC has grown. At the end of January 2017, a few days after the inauguration of Donald Trump at the White House, theAmerican Chemistry Council joined its ranks. The U.S. chemical lobby has opened a new front on social networks in the form of a “Campaign for Accuracy in Public Health Research,” with a dedicated website and a Twitter account.

Its stated purpose is to obtain a “reform” of the IARC monograph program. The powerful lobbying organization has put aside the kid gloves: “A side of bacon or a side of plutonium? It’s all the same according to IARC.” The tweet goes with a photomontage showing two fluorescent green bars dipping into bacon and eggs on a plate.

In October 2015, IARC indeed classified processed meats as “carcinogenic” and red meat as a “probable carcinogen” like glyphosate. Perhaps having privileged access to President Trump’s closest circle provides a feeling of omnipotence to these chemical and agrochemical industries? The chief American lobbyist of the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck, taken over as Deputy Assistant Administrator at the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention of the U.S. EPA, the very agency that oversees the re-examination of the glyphosate file.

And was not Andrew Liveris, the boss of Dow Chemical, a member of the American Chemistry Council, entrusted by Donald Trump in person to lead the president’s “Manufacturing Jobs Initiative”?

The machine seems to be racing ahead with the advent of the Trump era. At the end of March, the Republican Texan Lamar Smith, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, addressed the now former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price. Smith focused his demands on the financial links between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Ramazzini Institute in order, he wrote, to “ensure that grant recipients adhere to the highest standards of scientific integrity”.

Ignorance and lies

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/23/monsanto-republicans-cancer-research

EMAILS SHOW MONSANTO ORCHESTRATED GOP EFFORT TO INTIMIDATE CANCER RESEARCHERS

Lee Fang

August 23 2019, 3:00 a.m.

IN 2015, the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified glyphosate, an active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, as a “probable carcinogen,” setting off a global debate about the world’s most popular weedkiller.

Over the last four years, Republicans in Congress have excoriated and pushed to defund the IARC, casting their defense of the chemical as a quest on behalf of small American farmers. Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., has written that his outrage over the cancer research is on behalf of the “farmers and food manufacturers who rely on traditional farming methods to produce the food that fuels America — and the world.”

But according to a recent trove of documents, the ongoing political assault on the IARC has been scripted in part by Monsanto, the St. Louis-based chemical and seed conglomerate that produces Roundup and Roundup-resistant crops.

Roundup has been cash cow for the company since the 1970s, fueling billions of dollars in annual profits. Its use has skyrocketed in recent decades since the company developed genetically modified corn and other crops that are resistant to it; it is now the world’s leading herbicide.

A growing number of individuals say that Monsanto failed to warn consumers of the dangers of using Roundup and had marketed the chemical spray as harmless to humans, while internally recommending that its own employees use gloves and protective gear. Critics say that the Roundup formula used in the U.S. also contains a surfactant that makes the herbicide far more toxic than the variation of the spray sold in the European market.

Monsanto, which merged with German multinational pharmaceutical company Bayer AG last year, is facing as many as 11,000 cases relating to glyphosate. Last year, Dewayne Johnson, a former groundskeeper now dying of cancer, was the first to win his jury trial in San Francisco state court against Monsanto, alleging that years of using Roundup contributed to his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Johnson was awarded $289 million by a jury, though a judge later reduced the amount to $78 million. Another plaintiff, Edwin Hardeman, also alleged that he spent decades spraying the glyphosate-based weedkiller with little to no protective gear and developed the same blood cancer, won a similar case in federal court this year.

[Plaintiff Dewayne Johnson after hearing the verdict in his case against Monsanto at the Superior Court of California in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2018. Photo: Josh Edelson, Pool/AP]

The newly disclosed files, released by a plaintiff’s law firm, Baum Hedlund, include company emails, documents, and deposition transcripts showing that Monsanto lawyers and lobbyists guided lawmakers, coordinating efforts to question the IARC’s credibility and slash U.S. support for the international body.

The company has denied claims that its products cause cancer, and Monsanto lawyers have declared that Environmental Protection Agency’s designation of glyphosate as safe should clear the company of any legal liability. In a recent marketing campaign, Bayer touted its friendly cooperation with regulators as a sign that the public should have nothing to fear from its products.

But the documents also suggest that the firm has used its influence with lawmakers to antagonize regulators, applying pressure and investigative threats to shape the science used to research glyphosate and other controversial chemical compounds, as part of a larger campaign to silence critics and discredit the IARC.

IN JUNE 2015, Michael Dykes, then serving as Monsanto’s vice president of government affairs, laid out the company’s strategy for “managing the IARC issue,” following the cancer research center’s determination that March.

The company, he wrote in an email, had dispatched its team of lobbyists to brief “key staff at EPA, USTR, USDA, and the State Department as well as members of Congress” to raise concerns with the IARC’s scientific process, and with how the decision could impact agriculture as well as international trade. Lobbyists also met with an official at the Department of Health and Human Services; they saw the agency’s support as key “to secure a WHO clarification.”

Later in the year, Dykes updated the Monsanto team with plans to push back against the IARC, including the possible placement of advertisements — in the form of letters from third-party groups — in Capitol Hill newspapers, as well as preparation to use a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing as a venue to get the EPA to reaffirm support for glyphosate. “We will make sure Committee members ask EPA the glyphosate safety question,” Dykes wrote.

[Roundup weed killing products on May 14, 2019. Photo Illustration: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The following year, FTI Government Affairs, one of several consulting firms guiding Monsanto’s political response to the IARC decision, assisted GOP lawmakers with an effort to investigate U.S. support for the IARC.

In one email sent by Todd Rands, a former Monsanto attorney working with FTI, sent a draft of a letter ostensibly written by Rep. Rob Aderholt, R-Ala., a senior lawmaker on the House Appropriations Committee, addressed to Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes for Health. NIH is the government agency responsible for most federal public health research and is the largest funder to the IARC. The letter, in fact, had been written by FTI consultants, along with Rands’s edits, accordingto his deposition testimony.

The FTI-written letter declared that glyphosate “does not cause cancer,” accused the IARC of peddling “bunk science,” and threatened a reassessment of the NIH budget to ensure that the agency is “committed to only funding organizations that produce information and conclusions based on sound science, robust processes, and credible methodology.”

During his deposition, Rands said that he believed it appropriate for Monsanto to draft a letter on behalf of a lawmaker to NIH, calling such ghostwriting a “common practice in Washington.”

It’s not clear what Aderholt’s office did with the FTI-authored letter. Aderholt’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. On June 2, 2016, Aderholt sent a letter to NIH to request a briefing on the IARC’s designation of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen and “the standards that NIH places on research funded by the U.S. taxpayers,” a letter that mirrored many of the demands in the FTI letter, though it used different language.

More GOP letters and demands for investigation over NIH’s funding for IARC followed. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, then-chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., Chaffetz’s successor as Oversight chair, and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, then-chair of the House Science Committee, all called for inquiries into IARC funding and the designation of glyphosate as a carcinogen.

The Monsanto lobbyists closely conferred with the committees as they honed in on the IARC’s funding. Drew Feeley, an attorney for the GOP staff of the House Oversight Committee, emailed an FTI consultant to explain that his office was working to attach a line to a government budget bill designed “to apply to IARC” in order to slash its funding over the glyphosate issue. “Thanks again for coordinating,” Feeley wrote to the Monsanto consultant. Feeley, notably, is now serving as an attorney with the Council on Environmental Quality, the White House office that oversees environmental policy.

“We expect the House OGR investigation about IARC to expand as they move into the new administration,” wrote Rands, in an update to Monsanto colleagues.

Last year, under Smith, the House Science Committee devoted an entire committee hearing into questioning the IARC, with a focus on its conduct around glyphosate. Smith subsequently sent more letters to cancer researchers in Norway, demanding they “correct the flaws in IARC.” The House Appropriations Committee followed up by cutting $2 million in funding to the IARC, a symbolic move to distance the U.S. from the international body, which relies on a budget of around $40 million from a range of member countries.

THE CONGRESSIONAL OUTREACH was only part of a multifaceted effort to control the backlash sparked by the IARC designation.

In recent years, a great deal of new information has come to light around Monsanto’s work to conceal the potential health risks around glyphosate. Earlier this month, new documents revealed that Monsanto operated a “fusion center” to discredit critics of the company, including former Reuters journalist Carey Gillam, who has written extensively about glyphosate. The operation even monitored and considered legal action again singer Neil Young, a critic of Monsanto.

Le Monde, the French newspaper, published an award-winning investigation on the controversy, referring to the Monsanto-run campaign to discredit the IARC as an effort to “intimidate” the cancer research center.

A separate cache of litigation files, released in May, revealed that Monsanto also contracted with Hakluyt, a corporate intelligence firm, to keep close tabs on political elites in Washington. The company consulted with senior Trump and EPA officials, and confirmed that the administration would support Monsanto on glyphosate issues. “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticide regulation,” a domestic policy adviser in the White House told Hakluyt.

[pixA building on the campus of Monsanto headquarters in St. Louis on May 23, 2016. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

The last year has exposed other cloak-and-dagger tactics. The company was criticized for ghostwriting scientific studies on the safety of glyphosate, which were presented as independent research. At the San Francisco civil trial over glyphosate, an FTI consultant working for Monsanto was caught posing as a journalist working for the BBC and another British outlet.

And in 2017, one of the most stunning disclosures revealed that a senior EPA staffer, Jess Rowland, had quietly tipped Monsanto off to the fact that federal agencies had sought to reevaluate the safety of glyphosate, boasting to the company that he could “kill” federal investigations into glyphosate. Shortly before a crucial European Union vote on glyphosate products, the EPA suddenly released a report declaring the safety of the product. The document was later taken down because it had not yet been completed. One Monsanto official relayed to a colleague that Rowland had told him, “If I can kill this I should get a medal,” in regards to the glyphosate review conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a department of Health and Human Services.

After leaving the EPA, Rowland went to work in the private sector, consulting for chemical companies.

There’s also a revolving door between lawmakers supporting Monsanto and professionals working on behalf of the company. Shortly after retiring from Congress this year, following his investigation of the IARC, Lamar Smith took a job at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a lobbying firm that represents Bayer-Monsanto’s interests in Washington.

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-health-2476147228.html

'Climate Change' Removed From National Institutes of Health Website

The effects of climate change is inextricably linked to human health. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that traps heat in the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to spike, air quality to worsen, all while fueling droughts, floods and storms that impact food and water security.

Climate change is making us sick in many ways, but it appears that the Trump administration trying to downplay this fact.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has "altered climate change language, updated climate change references, and reduced access to a Web resource with information on climate change and human health across several webpages," according to a new report from the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), which monitors changes to federal agency websites.

The NIEHS studies the effects of the environment on human health and is one of the 27 institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health. EDGI told reporters this is the first time an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services has made climate-related changes to its online resources.

Changes to the NIEHS website are subtle but telling. For instance, the watchdog group noticed the Global Environmental Health pages has changed the term "climate change" to simply "climate" on side menus and page titles. These changes occurred in late July.

Granted, that's just a single word. The term "climate change" also remains in the body of the page's current text. However, for many leaders of the Republican party and among the Trump administration, climate science is treated with skepticism to outright denial. Media outlets have also reported that staffers from other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy, have been instructed to specifically avoid the phrase.

The subtitle "Health Impacts of Climate Change" was also stricken from a page about climate change and cancer, but semantics are not the only changes on the site. According to EGDI researchers, in July "NIEHS also removed links to an educational 4-page fact sheet titled, Climate Change and Human Health,from two separate pages: a library of brochures and fact sheets, and a page dedicated to explaining the environmental impacts of climate change."

While the fact sheet is still hosted on the NIEHS website, access has been significantly reduced, the report added.

A spokesperson for the group told POLTICO PULSE that the changes appear targeted to reduce the prominence of climate issues, adding that other language on the pages was not affected. PULSE also noted that other Health and Human Service websites still host climate change information, including http://hhs.gov/climate that states, "The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers climate change to be one of the top public health challenges of our time."...

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/03/31/19498/senators-seek-better-conflict-disclosures-scientific-articles

Citing the Center for Public Integrity’s recent “Science for Sale” series, a group of U.S. senators has asked the National Institutes of Health to make it easier to tell who funds research published in scientific journals.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, on Wednesday released a letter sent to NIH Director Francis Collins asking that the National Library of Medicine make changes to its public database of 25 million journal articles, called PubMed, to reveal conflicts of interest in research.

“With industry now employing more scientists than nonprofits, universities and the government combined, and industry funding the research of many independent researchers, there are growing concerns about objectivity in numerous scientific disciplines — including nutrition science and research on health risk from chemicals,” the letter said.

The letter also cited a New York Times story about Coca-Cola Co. quietly funding academic researchers who blamed lack of exercise, rather than soft drinks and fast food, for the epidemic of obesity and diabetics.

The Center’s series revealed how scientific consultants working for the chemical industry publish journal articles that almost always claim their clients’ products are safe. Examples included two consulting firms, Gradient Corp. and Exponent, which published articles to help clients win asbestos lawsuits.

The NIH maintains a public database of medical and life sciences articles in more than 5,600 peer-reviewed journals. While the database often includes an abstract detailing the purpose of a study and its findings, the search results don’t reveal who paid for the research.

Corporations are steering millions of dollars to scientific consulting firms to cast doubt on health concerns surrounding toxic chemicals.

Stories in this series

The NIH requires researchers with government grants to disclose conflicts of interest in journal articles. Many journals have their own disclosure policies.

“While scientists regularly use PubMed to conduct and inform research, millions of nonscientists — consumers, journalists, policymakers and others — also make use of this public resource,” the senators’ letter said.

The Center analyzed the funding of 149 articles published by principal scientists at Gradient and found that 98 percent of the time the articles found that chemicals did not pose risks that would require stricter regulations. In order to obtain the funding information, a reporter had to go to National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, to get the complete copy of each article.

Senators who signed the NIH letter Wednesday in addition to Blumenthal were Democrats Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Richard Durbin of Illinois.

Yet another, filed by a group that receives funding from the conservative Scaife Foundation, succeeded in getting the National Institutes of Health to downgrade warnings about the effects of smokeless tobacco. DQA

http://www.nih.gov/