In a scathing public letter, employees of the National Institutes of Health accused the administration of undermining the agency’s work and endangering people’s health.
More than 60 employees of the National Institutes of Health signed their names to a scathing letter sent on Monday to denounce what they described as the degradation of the country’s medical research apparatus under President Trump, accusing the administration of illegally withholding money, endangering participants in studies and censoring critical research.
The letter, sent to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, and then posted online, was a remarkable rebuke of the agency’s leadership. In interviews, signatories to the letter said that they were concerned they could be fired for speaking out, but that the risks of acquiescing to orders they saw as unethical — and in some cases illegal — were too great.
“We dissent to administration policies that undermine the N.I.H. mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” they wrote in the four-page letter. “Many have raised these concerns to N.I.H. leadership, yet we remain pressured to implement harmful measures.”
The letter included signatories from across the agency’s 27 institutes and centers. Its organizers called it “The Bethesda Declaration,” a reference both to the home of the agency’s headquarters and to a 2020 missive by Dr. Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration, opposing Covid lockdowns in 2020. In that letter, he and his co-authors argued for dispensing with the lockdowns in the interest of letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.
Dr. Bhattacharya, who was then an economist and professor of medicine at Stanford University, has described feeling bruised by heavy criticism of the idea, including from N.I.H officials. After he was nominated to lead the agency, he promised to “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the N.I.H.”
With the letter, some of his employees are putting that promise to the test. “We hope you will welcome this dissent,” they wrote.
