The NIH is abruptly terminating at least 33 research grants for projects studying vaccine hesitancy. Projects studying mRNA vaccines may be next.
Important story by my colleague Sara Reardon in @science.org
🧪 #IDsky
Don’t tread on me
That yellow one has higher production value—someone prepared ahead of time for this
Four letters, Trump
This one took a little work to decode but once you realize the second one is a uracil and the others are amino acids…
Hello my name is science you killed my funding prepare to die from: preventable diseases, cancer, unresearched epidemics, unadministered vaccines, undiscovered cures, inaccessible healthcare
It’s grant season and I took time off for this
A few selected signs for your enjoyment
Bluetorial:
The announcement to move scientific review out of the institutes and centers into the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) and its potential consequences
You may be asking, yes it felt good but does it matter?
Yes, it does--maybe not in the way you think. Here is my thoughts from college years during Korean military dictatorship.
1/4
This is, of course, not the manner in which the federation was intended to be useful, but the difference between “Washington got nuked by bad guys” and the present scenario is, perhaps, not that measurable
But the data (and publications) we produced all these past decades will still carry on in the other two members of the federated consortium that are still backed by functioning governments at the moment.
Of course, groups like mine are probably in for a bigger world of hurt if NIH’s eRA Commons disappears (we just submitted a grant this week that may never see the light of day but we’ll keep doing it until we can’t anymore).
Disabling NCBI would cause a world of hurt for those of us who’ve built up all our APIs around it (instead of the European or Japanese equivalents) but at least the data is still safe even if the US disappeared. Yes including PubMed.
Yes, all of nih.gov going down is bad of course, regardless of whether it’s malicious or a technical oops that will get fixed eventually (tldr.nettime.org/@ww/11408997...), but I do encourage everyone to learn about the federated nature of the INSDC (including Genbank and PubMed)
HT to Sean Davis for creating a status page for NIH websites: stats.uptimerobot.com/Zrqh8AhvKn - simultaneous worth sharing and sad.
On the 3rd anniversary of Dr Paul Farmer's death, several leaders reflect on his lessons for dealing with the ongoing crisis in global health & development
Paul Farmer’s Moral Clarity Offers Hope, Amidst Chaos And Darkness
www.forbes.com/sites/madhuk...
On the bright side, the wording in NOT-OD-25-068 is pretty clear that all non-US based research institutions currently receiving NIH funding are now allowed to double their F&A rate.
1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.
I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
Disastrous consequences aside, what's fascinating about NOT-OD-25-068 is how it publicly names and shames specific institutions in a way that NIH has never done before. It's as if someone broke into eRAcommons earlier this week, threw it into their AI bot, and asked it to justify their actions.
NIH cuts indirect rates on grants to 15%.
This will be the end of American excellence in science.
Universities will struggle and many (likely most) will terminate their research programs.
Independent research institutions will not be able to survive this.
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
Groundbreaking Ebola vaccination trial launches today in Uganda
In a global first, Uganda’s Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other partners today launched a first-ever vaccine trial for Ebola from the Sudan species of the virus, and at an unprecedented speed for a randomized vaccine trial in an emergency.🧵
Excellent, rapid work by Uganda’s CPHL and partners and also a great use case for @pathoplexus.org