Over 300 employees of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have urged NIH director Dr Jay Bhattacharya to “restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue”.

They have also appealed to him to reinstate staff, enable global collaboration, and research to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

“We dissent to [Trump] Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” the staff declared in a letter sent to Bhattacharya and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr on Monday morning.

In the letter, which they name the “Bethesda Declaration” after the location of the NIH headquarters, the staff say they are “compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources.”

They describe themselves as “workers from every Institute and Center at NIH”, including some who have signed anonymously “due to a culture of fear and suppression”.

“Standing up in this way is a risk, but I am much more worried about the risks of not speaking up,” said Dr Jenna Norton, one of the declaration organisers, in a media release circulated by a group called Stand Up for Science.

“If we don’t speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,” added Norton, who is a programme director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The letter is timed to coincide with Bhattacharya’s appearance at the Senate’s Appropriations Committee for the NIH’s budget request on Tuesday.

‘Multiple universities’ targeted for ‘political aims’

The staff decry the Trump administration’s “politicisation of research by halting high-quality, peer-reviewed grants and contracts” based on “political ideology”.

Since Trump took office on 20 January, NIH has terminated 2,100 research grants totaling around $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts.

Targets include “multiple universities” who have been hit “with indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science’ for political aims, according to the letter.

“Many [research] terminations contradict federal regulations that mandate protections for research participants and require grant awards to specify potential termination reasons.”

Some terminations eliminate years of hard work and millions of dollars.

“Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million,” the letter notes.

In addition, “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety, abruptly stopping medications or leaving participants with unmonitored device implants.”

“The partnership between NIH and the academic community has made huge contributions to almost every aspect of the health of people across the US,” said Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Reinstate staff, restore global partnerships

They urge Bhattacharya to “reinstate the people who make NHI work”, noting that firing “talented, hard-working professionals and critical departments without thought to their purpose or need has slowed the pace of science, held up extramural grant and contract funding, made NIH less transparent and efficient, and put Clinical Center patients at risk.”

The NIH Clinical Center is the largest US hospital devoted entirely to clinical research, including of cancer, dementia and rare diseases.

They also urge him to “allow rigorously peer-reviewed research with vetted foreign collaborators to continue without disruption”, as American scientists are being “cut off from the global scientific community”.

South Africa may lose 70% of its medical research capacity following the cancellation of NIH funds, crippling 16 universities and setting back two decades of HIV and tuberculosis research.

This follows the NIH decision to prohibit US scientists from working with foreign researchers via “sub-awards”, leading to the immediate and mass cancellation of such grants with South African institutions.

At least 39 TB and HIV clinical research sites in South Africa are under threat due to NIH funding cuts, jeopardising at least 27 HIV trials and 20 TB trials, according to an analysis by the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) mostly of grants from the NIH’s Division of AIDS (DAIDS).The “unprecedented reduction in NIH spending does not reflect efficiency but rather a dramatic reduction in life-saving research,” they conclude.

Stand up for Science, a Washington-based non-profit formed to defend science and democracy, has also mobilised high-profile scientists, including 19 Nobel laureates, to support the NIH staff.

Echoing Great Barrington Declaration

The Bethesda Declaration is deliberately styled after the Great Barrington Declaration, published by Bhattacharya and others during COVID-19, which argues against any measures to prevent COVID-19 other than “focused protection” for those most vulnerable, while allowing widespread SARS-CoV-2 infection to enable “herd immunity”.

The Great Barrington Declaration, sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial, was widely condemned as being unscientific.

Last month, NIH staff staged a walkout during a Town Hall addressed by Bhattacharya in which he said he supported the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was “caused by research conducted by human beings,” possibly partly sponsored by the NIH.

“If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused a pandemic – and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe, and I looked at the scientific evidence; I believe it – what we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that’s any risk of posing any risk to human populations,” Bhattacharya said in a recording obtained by CNN.

Image Credits: Stand up for Science, NIH.