As we head into the third month of the new Trump administration, some of the damage that it is inflicting on American science and medicine is starting to look irreversible. People are going to die, data is going to vanish, careers are going to end, and the benefits of a vibrant scientific community in the United States are going to dwindle, perhaps for decades.
Launching my book AIR-BORNE made it hard for me to pitch in on reporting this seismic event. But since my last newsletter I’ve been finding time to help out a little.
My first piece, co-authored with Apoorva Mandalvilli, feels like a sad epilogue to some of the reporting I did back in 2020, when scientists were scrambling to find vaccines and antivirals to fight Covid. They created effective vaccines in under a year that saved tens of millions of lives. It proved harder to develop the first drugs that reduce the risk of death from an infection of SARS-CoV-2, but eventually they created Paxlovid and other compounds.
At the time, those scientists knew very well that Covid would not be the last pandemic the world will face. They were already thinking about how we might prepare ourselves better for the next onslaught. Some researchers started designing new vaccines they hoped would provide protection against a wide range of coronaviruses that might spill over from an animal in the years to come. Other scientists developed a new generation of antivirals to work against entire families of viruses—some for coronaviruses, others for viruses that cause diseases like Ebola or influenza.
American taxpayers supported that work through grants from the National Institutes of Health. Last week, the NIH abruptly cut those studies short. For my new piece, I called and emailed some of the same scientists I spoke to five years ago. Today, they are angry and frustrated. The Trump Administration has tried to justify cutting programs like these by claiming that Covid is over. This research was not about the past, however. It was going to prepare us for the future.
Those cuts only represent a tiny fraction of the destruction of research at NIH. The agency has fired a leading Parkinson’s disease researcher, for example. It is halting research on the effects climate change has on our health, even as dengue is thriving thanks to warmer temperatures. NIH has halted studies on transgender people—with one apparent exception. The White House is demanding research on regret that transgender people may experience after transitioning.
Along with biomedical research, the Trump administration is abandoning measures that protect health in the United States and beyond. It has cut $2 billion from childhood vaccinations in the United States, and it plans to cut off support for an organization that provides childhood vaccinations in poor countries, an organization that has saved an estimated 19 million lives over the past 25 years. The 10,000 people laid off at the Department of Health and Human Services include people who monitor black lung disease in coal miners and inspectors who look for bacteria in food. The FDA’s top vaccine official quit, condemning Robert F. Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies.”
Here’s the sort of thing that that official might have been referring to: The CDC buried a report that the risk of measles is high for unvaccinated people near the outbreaks in Texas. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s endorsement of treatments like cod liver oil are leading to a rush for these products in Texas—and reports of liver damage. And while Kennedy claims he is eliminating waste in government health research, he is reportedly starting a new study on vaccines and autism, despite the overwhelming existing evidence that there is no link between the two.
The catalog of woes extends far beyond medicine. Just to pick a couple examples: indiscriminate layoffs at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration mean that the government is unable to provide as many weather forecasts—even when storms are on the march. The Trump administration has inexplicably canceled contracts for NOAA’s web support, which means that on Saturday, April 5, many of its public web sites will go dark.
Dan Diamond and Dan Keating wrote in the Washington Post about how these disruptions will have long-lasting impacts on the United States. “I talked to our industry advisory board, and I told them, five years from now, you’re going to have 50 percent less PhD students from bioengineering that you can potentially recruit to your companies,” one scientist said.
On March 31, nearly 2,000 scientists issued an open letter that Trump is setting US science back decades. “The nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated,” they wrote. Scientists who can move will: 75 percent of researchers who responded to a Nature poll said they were considering leaving the country.
IN HAPPIER NEWS
—While I will be doing more reporting on the fate of science in the United States, I will still be finding time to write about the thought-provoking results coming out of basic scientific research—even if I have to report more on work happening abroad.
Here is a story about one of my enduring obsessions: the origin of language. Some researchers think that apes can combine calls the way we combine words—to create new meaning.
—Meanwhile, AIR-BORNE was featured in the Economist: “Five years after covid, have scientists learned their lesson?”
—And here’s a video of a chat I had about the book with Maryn McKenna as part of the Atlanta Science Festival.
That’s all for now. Stay safe!
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