"I find that the views [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people. Enough is enough," he wrote in a resignation letter he shared publicly on social media. He said he was leaving because the CDC, the once-premier public health agency tasked with protecting the health of people in the U.S., had been transformed into a political instrument, with its scientific mission subverted, vulnerable populations erased, and evidence distorted. The agency, he wrote, had submitted to "radical non-transparency" and "unskilled manipulation of data."
Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and provost of Johns Hopkins University, will become the next president of Caltech - one the nation's wealthiest and most elite universities - as it enters a second year of challenging terrain amid Trump administration cuts to scientific research. The campus' board of trustees announced the appointment Tuesday morning after a months-long search to replace President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, who said in April that he would step down.
"At least in the immediate or intermediate future, the United States is going to be hobbled and hollowed out in its scientific leadership," said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health law professor who was removed from a National Institutes of Health advisory board earlier this year with a letter that said he was no longer needed. "I think it will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse all the damage."
Trump in an August executive order said federal grants had been insufficiently vetted, and some propagated absurd ideologies. Hastings, whose South San Francisco firm Nkarta engineers killer cells to fight disease, said biotechnology companies across the board are cutting staff and product-development projects as uncertainty over what comes next rattles investors.
President Donald Trump insists that top universities must pay dearly for not protecting Jewish students. This includes cutting $790 million in medical and scientific research previously led by Northwestern University scholars. Michael Schill, then president of Northwestern, was berated by congressional Republicans for brokering a compromise with pro-Palestinian protesters last year, disbanding their tent cities while preserving free speech. He was too timid in stamping out campus antisemitism, Trump disciples argued. Shill stepped down last month.
It just really undermines the progress, and it delays potential treatments that can change the course of these completely devastating illnesses that are affecting millions of families in the most intimate way," she said.
"A lot of our research, including that for this grant, is looking at why so few people are getting evidence-based treatments for substance use disorder," said Huskamp, Henry J. Kaiser Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. "Medications for opioid use disorder are highly efficacious. They reduce opioid use; they reduce overdose risk and other negative outcomes. These medications save lives."