Vought has spent over a year mocking NIH grants, "injecting dogs with cocaine," Harvard studying "lizards being blown off of branches by leaf blowers," "fundamental DEI across the board," to justify the same executive order push to put grant approval under political control we covered Monday. Unglamorous lizard venom research is exactly the kind of science that led to the discovery of GLP-1 drugs, the class that includes Ozempic.
A University of Michigan law professor who served as HHS general counsel under Biden says the plan runs into existing statutory peer review requirements, not just norms. And even Jeffrey Flier, the former Harvard Medical School dean who has spent years publicly criticizing DEI in research, calls embedding political review into grant decisions inimical to the system, and compares it to shooting yourself in the head if the actual goal is advancing American science.
It’s no secret that some high-ranking members of the Trump administration have long had it in for NIH—and that one official in particular has been pushing for something like this.
@CitizenCohn on an emergency for medical research in The Breakdown:
lnk.thebulwark.com/4h9SsbZ