Donald Trump’s War On Government Science May Be Underway

The federal government’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is arguably the closest thing we have to an early warning system for disease. In addition to summaries of new research findings, it includes essential information about outbreaks so that front-line professionals and officials know what to look out for ― and, eventually, how to respond.

A 1981 edition contained the first reports of a mysterious virus, later identified as HIV, that was causing a lethal form of pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men. A report from 2014 had detailed information about an Ebola outbreak in Africa that would soon spread to the United States. And editions in early 2020 provided some of the earliest, most crucial data about COVID-19.

The MMWR comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which publishes it every Thursday. But as of Thursday evening, this week’s MMWR still hadn’t appeared.

That is not an accident. In fact, it could be the first shot in President Donald Trump’s war on government science.

On Tuesday, just one day after Trump returned to the White House, the officials he has put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services circulated a memo ordering staff to pause all communications until Feb. 2 unless “reviewed and approved by a Presidential appointee.”

The memo ― first reported by The Washington Post and since obtainedbyotheroutlets, including HuffPost ― applies to the entire department and its agencies, including the CDC. And public communications isn’t the only thing Trump’s team has paused.

The officials also put a temporary stop to meetings and travel, including for the outside advisory groups that make recommendations for funding grants from the National Institutes of Health. Many of the scholarsandscientists who serve on those panels said they heard about the stoppage just weeks or days before scheduled meetings ― or, in some cases, smack in the middle of meetings that were already taking place.

Exactly why the Trump administration has issued these orders isn’t clear. The memo, which came from Dorothy Fink, the acting secretary for HHS, vowed, “The President’s appointees intend to review documents and communications expeditiously and return to a more regular process as soon as possible.”

HHS responded to HuffPost’s request for comment with similar language. “HHS has issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health,” a representative for the HHS Office of Public Affairs said in an email. “This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization. There are exceptions for announcements that HHS divisions believe are mission critical, but they will be made on a case-by-case basis.”

Several public health veterans told HuffPost that prior administrations had also imposed pauses upon taking office. But these sources said they could not recall a halt to communication set to last so long ― or one that was nearly as sweeping.

“I could understand pausing more political or policy-related communications,” Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor who served as HHS general counsel under Joe Biden, told HuffPost. “But keeping HHS career staff from publishing routine public health communications like the MMWR, particularly with the threat of widespread bird flu very much hanging over us, harms our public health response and is not at all normal.”

Trump’s History With The CDC

It’s no secret that Trump’s allies and lieutenants have promised radical changes throughout HHS, with special attention to agencies like the CDC and the NIH, which they have accused of misdirecting resources, mishandling outbreaks and engaging in too much “woke” activity.

This includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the lawyer and purveyor of vaccine misinformation whom Trump has appointed to lead HHS. He has talked about mass dismissals of career staff and shifting the focus of health agencies away from infectious disease.

Statements like that are one reason to think these halts to communication and meetings aren’t the usual machinations of a presidential transition. Another reason is that something like this happened pretty recently — specifically, the last time Trump was in charge.

Back in 2020, as Trump was trying to downplay COVID-19, Politico first reported that political appointees were trying to retroactively revise MMWR reports they claimed exaggerated the threat from the pandemic. Politico also found that Trump’s appointees tried to suppress findings skeptical of hydroxychloroquine, which the president had hyped as a COVID-19 treatment.

COVID isn’t getting much attention from scientists now, but the H5N1 bird flu is. The virus has infected poultry stocks around the country, along with a few human beings. This week’s delayed MMWR had information on the virus, according to The New York Times.

Bird flu symptoms in humans have generally been mild so far, and most of the people infected had direct exposure to birds. But one Louisiana man died, and tests later found evidence the virus could mutate, potentially enabling human-to-human transmission.

It’s precisely in situations like these, public health experts told HuffPost, that timely information about outbreaks matters most.

“The MMWR is one of the main ways the CDC tells the scientific community about infectious disease threats,” said Joshua Sharfstein, who has served in a variety of local, state and federal public health positions and is a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s very important this information reaches the scientific community on time.”

“If in fact there’s information on H5N1, there’s real urgency in telling people and the world what has happened,” Sharfstein added.

Kennedy’s Plans For NIH

Delaying the meetings of NIH advisory committees could also have a significant impact.

The NIH is the world’s largest public financier of biomedical research, with more than 80% of its $48 billion budget underwriting outside research in universities, medical centers and other laboratories. The meetings of its so-called “study groups” are a critical part of the process, because that’s when outside scholars gather to review and recommend which funding applications to approve.

The meetings can last a day or two and typically require coordination among more than a dozen busy scientists and scholars from different parts of the country.

Chrystal Starbird, a biochemistry and biophysics professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, told HuffPost she learned via email yesterday that the NIH had canceled a meeting on cellular research grants. The email said the agency had no information about a makeup date, and Starbird thinks it will likely be weeks, or “more likely months,” before they can find one.

Starbird, whose investigations of cell membranes have implications for the development of cancer and Alzheimer’s therapies, worries that this sudden wave of delays could have a domino effect, setting back the entire grant process in ways that will jeopardize the future of some research projects.

She said labs that operate on bare-bones budgets or on grants about to expire could be in particular trouble because they don’t have the resources to wait longer for money.

“If [HHS] came out today, [and said,] ‘OK, we’re stopping the pause,’ that could be good, but to a certain extent significant damage has already been done,” Starbird said.

That possibility may not mean much to the Trump health appointees who have made no secret of their intentions to overhaul NIH. Nor does it seem to trouble outside critics of the agency like Vinay Prasad, a physician, podcaster and writer who has said the NIH fritters away too much money on useless research.

“Pausing NIH study sections is going to be fine,” Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist at the University of California-San Francisco, wrote on his Substack newsletter, later referring to the researchers who serve on those study sections as “mediocre scientists.”

But while even most NIH defenders think the agency needs reform, they say it still deserves a lot of credit for making the U.S. a worldwide leader in medical innovation — a position, they warn, that actions like this week’s could jeopardize.

Among those making that point was Starbird, who said she has a personal perspective on the value of medical innovation.

“My mother-in-law has late-stage lung cancer, and she is currently receiving a treatment that was just approved this past summer, and so just approved months ago,” Starbird said. “Even if it ends up being just a month’s delay, you could imagine if that drug in that pipeline had been delayed by months, my mother-in-law would not be getting the drug today.”