Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it’s good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just the best if everyone in the agencies that manage American health, all the way up to the top, believed in the power and benefit of vaccines. Sadly, that isn’t the case.
RFK Jr. has fired many people for not agreeing with his stance that vaccines make people autistic, kill them, are bad because too many undesirables poison the gene pool, or whatever other crap he’s spewing these days. He fired Susan Monarez after only weeks on the job, reportedly for not agreeing to rubber stamp changes to vaccine schedules he wanted to make. He fired literally everyone on the CDC’s ACIP panel, the group that advises the CDC on those very same changes to vaccine schedules. There’s probably been more, as well.
We’ll have to see if NIH boss Jay Bhattacharya just started the countdown to his own termination, now that he has publicly broken with Kennedy on vaccines. In a Senate Committee hearing, Bhattacharya was grilled by Bernie Sanders.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, 58, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday. There, ranking member Bernie Sanders asked him point-blank, “Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?”
After trying to hedge and say he did not believe the measles vaccine causes autism, he finally admitted, “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism.”
Asked specifically about what his approach would be to the current measles outbreak in America, Bhattacharya was even more forceful.
Unlike his boss, Bhattacharya was vocally pro-vaccine during Tuesday’s hearing. Discussing the measles outbreak in the United States, he said, “I am absolutely convinced that the measles epidemic that we are seeing currently is best solved by parents vaccinating their children for measles.”
Reluctantly stated or not, those are sane comments that are completely at odds with Kennedy. Now, so there is no misunderstanding, Bhattacharya is still terrible. He made his name railing against COVID-19 policies and vaccine schedules. He’s also engaged in some politically targeted attacks on elite universities when it comes to grant money and the like.
But on this, he’s right. And that potentially puts his job at risk. RFK Jr. doesn’t like dissenting opinions. He tends to avoid them through firings. On the other hand, I don’t know if he can afford more chaos at HHS and its child agencies.
But when it comes to placing bets, betting against RFK Jr.’s ego is rarely a winner.
With all the conversations we’ve had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that’s not entirely true. Despite the rash of budget, staff, and grant cuts that have kneecapped HHS, you can still get a great deal of information from the HHS website, for instance. As an example, here is the CDC site’s page providing information about lead poisoning in the country. It describes how the agency began measuring blood lead levels (BLLs) nationally in 1995 to find where elevated BLLs exist, especially in children, in order to deploy federal resources to combat its occurrence. The CDC page has this to say about BLLs generally in terms of their impact on children.
There is no known safe BLL. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health. Millions of children are being exposed to lead in their homes, increasing their risks for:
Damage to the brain and nervous system
Slowed growth and development
Learning and behavior problems (e.g., reduced IQ, ADHD, juvenile delinquency, and criminal behavior)
Hearing and speech problems
Well, I’m no doctor, but gosh golly gee, that seems bad! Like, the kind of thing a federal government that has protecting its own population as a supposed chief aim would want to combat. And, in touting its own progress on that same page, the CDC agreed at the time the page was written in 2024.
The decrease is most likely a result of an intense coordinated effort to control or eliminate lead sources in children’s environments by:
Government officials
Healthcare and social service providers
The communities most at risk
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a child agency of HHS, has its own page on the topic as well. There they talk again about how this was historically a much larger problem, but one that still remains and needs to be addressed through a coordinated and likely federal effort.
Researchers estimate that half of the U.S. population, more than 170 million people, were exposed to harmful lead levels in early childhood. “The scope of such widespread exposure, particularly from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, suggests the legacy of lead continues to shape the health and wellbeing of the country in ways we do not yet fully understand,” according to the researchers. Lead exposure is associated with IQ loss, for which even small deficits can have a meaningful adverse effect on people’s lives and on society.
The Biden-Harris Administration actively works to protect communities from lead exposure. More than 9 million homes, schools, daycares, and businesses receive their drinking water through a lead pipe, putting people at risk of lead exposure. A whole-of-government effort is deploying resources across federal, state and local governments to address lead hazards. Read more in this May 2024 brief: $3 Billion to Replace Toxic Lead Pipes and Deliver Clean Drinking Water to Communities Across the Country.
There’s not a lot of ambiguity in any of this. Lead poisoning and any level of BLLs, particularly in children, are problems worthy of combatting. To say that we don’t want lead in the blood of our children ought to be as uncontroversial a position as one can take. And, yet, it appears that one of the victims of HHS’ budget slashing is the very program designed to help local communities, particularly those in poorer areas.
On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.
The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.
That Milwaukee example is an interesting one, as it offers us yet another opportunity to watch RFK Jr. simply obfuscate and/or lie in response to it. In a hearing, members of Congress asked RFK Jr. directly about the Milwaukee issue. Kennedy assured those lawmakers that he had a crackerjack team from HHS on the ground in the city working on this. Turns out, not so much.
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”
Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.
Look, I realize that we’re in a brave new world in which Trump officials can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and that they all have an expectation that they are untouchable. But at some point, there have to be consequences for a Cabinet member sitting before Congress and lying through his teeth. Hearings. Inquiries. Charges for contempt of Congress, or for lying under oath. Something. Anything.
Children are suffering and will suffer even worse because of this nonsense, all while Kennedy plays “pin the tail on my own bullshit” with lawmakers. This simply cannot go on.
Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas.
A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.
The language is coded, but definitely not clever. Composed by a DOJ prosecutor perhaps best known for his hundred-plus appearances on Russian state-owned media outlets, the letter [PDF] is full of phrases that make it clear at least one federal prosecutor is interested in deterring scientific rebuttals to the parade of horrors that will be emanating from RFK Jr.’s Dept. of Health and Humans Services over the next few years.
Martin’s letter claims “more and more” scientific journals and publications are “conceding they are partisans in various scientific debates.” He alludes to possible federal crimes being committed by these journals if they are “advocating due to advertisement” (which Martin links to the postal code) or sponsorship (which Martin pretends might have something to do with federal fraud laws). In order to find targets for his prosecutorial attention, Martin asks every journal receiving this letter to respond to the following questions:
How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation? How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relationships with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others? Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints? How do you assess the role played by government officials and funding organizations like the National Insitutes of Health in the development of submitted articles? How do you handle allegations that authors of your work in your journals may have misled their readers?
I am also interested to now if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints. Are there new norms being developed or authored?
These are pretty weird questions to be asking scientific journal publishers. These are exceptionally weird questions for a federal prosecutor to be asking scientific journal publishers. While there are certainly valid concerns about AI involvement in crafting scientific reports, along with some pay-to-play operations that undermine the scientific community in general, it’s generally accepted that these publishers usually publish work that has been subjected to peer review and scientific method best practices.
What this letter sounds like is a very vague threat that prosecutors will start hassling journals that refuse to publish unscientific garbage that appears to support the multiple conspiracy theories pushed by Trump, RFK Jr., and far too many of their supporters. It also suggests that if journals don’t cozy up to the Trump quacks, whatever NIH funding that still somehow exists post-DOGE will vanish completely. It would be worrying enough if this letter had been issued by the HHS. That it came from a federal prosecutor is legitimately horrifying.
Once again, the party of free speech and alleged participant in the marketplace of ideas is showing that it only thinks speech it agrees with should be “free” and that the marketplace of ideas should only offer up ideas it likes. At the very least, this letter has the chance to push some journals into self-censorship, limiting dissemination of studies and essays publishers know don’t align with the Trump Administration’s deep disdain for established scientific principles. And once that end of the idea marketplace begins to dry up, the administration will do all it can to fill the void in the market with bad science, bad ideas, and children’s corpses.
The remarkable successes of the decades-old partnership between biomedical research institutions and the federal government are so intertwined with daily life that it’s easy to take them for granted.
The negative consequences of defunding U.S. biomedical research can be difficult to recognize. Most breakthroughs, from the basic science discoveries that reveal the causes of diseases to the development of effective treatments and cures, can take years. Real-time progress can be hard to measure.
As biomedicalresearchers studying infectious diseases, viruses and immunology, we and our colleagues see this firsthand in our own work. Thousands of ongoing national and international projects dedicated to uncovering the causes of life-threatening diseases and developing new treatments to improve and save lives are supported by federal agencies such as the NIH and NSF.
Considering a few of the breakthroughs made possible through U.S. federal support can help illustrate not only the significant inroads biomedical research has made for preventing, treating and curing human maladies, but what all Americans stand to lose if the U.S. reduces its investment in these endeavors.
Basic science research on what causes cancer has led to new strategies to harness a patient’s own immune system to eliminate tumors. For example, all 12 patients in a 2022 clinical trial testing one type of immunotherapy had their rectal cancer completely disappear, without remission or adverse effects.
Despite these incredible successes, there is still a long way to go. In 2024, over 2 million people in the U.S. were estimated to be newly diagnosed with cancer, and 611,720 were expected to die from the disease.
Nearly every family is touched in some way by autoimmune andneurodegenerative diseases. Government-funded research has enabled major advances to combat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers are also gaining insight into what causes multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the protective covering of nerves and can result in paralysis. Scientists recently found a link between multiple sclerosis and Epstein-Barr virus, a pathogen estimated to infect over 90% of adults around the world. While multiple sclerosis is currently incurable, identifying its underlying cause can provide new avenues for prevention and treatment.
Alzheimer’s disease causes irreversible nerve damage and is the leading cause of dementia. In 2024, 6.9 million Americans ages 65 and older were living with Alzheimer’s. Most treatments address cognitive and behavioral symptoms. However, two new drugs developed with NIH-supported research and clinical trials were approved in July 2023 and July 2024 to treat early-stage Alzheimer’s. Federal funding is also supporting the development of blood tests for earlier detection of the disease.
None of these breakthroughs are a cure. But they represent important steps forward on the path toward ultimately reducing or eliminating these devastating ailments. Lack of funding will slow or block further progress, leading to the continued rise of the incidence and severity of these conditions.
Infectious diseases and the next pandemic
The world’s capacity to combat infectious disease will also be weakened by cuts to U.S. federal support of biomedical research.
Over the past 50 years, medical and public health advances have led to the eradication of smallpox globally and the elimination of polio in the U.S. HIV/AIDS, once a death sentence, is now a disease that can be managed with medication. Moreover, a new version of treatments called preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, offers complete protection against HIV transmission when taken only twice per year.
Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the critical role biomedical research plays in responding to public health threats. Increased federal support of science during this time allowed the United States to emerge with new drugs, vaccine platforms with the potential to treat a variety of chronic diseases, and insights on how to effectively detect and respond to pandemic threats.
The National Institutes of Health contributed over $100 billion to support research that ultimately led to the development of all new drugs approved from 2010 to 2016 alone. Over 90% of this funding was for basic research into understanding the causes of disease that provides the foundation for new treatments.
Defunding biomedical research will result in a cascade of effects. There will likely be fewer clinical trials, fewer new treatments and fewer lifesaving drugs. Labs will likely shut down, jobs will be lost, and the process of discovery will stall. The U.S.’s health care system, economy and standing as the world’s leader in scientific innovation will likely decline.
University shortfalls directly resulting from cuts to research support will dramatically reduce the capacity of American institutions to educate and provide opportunities for the next generation. Funding cuts have led to the shuttering or heavy reduction of training programs for future scientists.
Graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are the lifeblood of biomedical research. Supporting these young people committed to public service through research and health care is also an investment in medical advancements and public health. But the uncertainty and instability resulting from the divestment of federally funded programs will likely severely deplete the biomedical workforce, crippling the United States’ ability to deliver future biomedical breakthroughs.
By cutting biomedical research funding, Americans and the rest of the world stand to lose new cures, new treatments and an entire generation of researchers.
Over at MSNBC, I have a new piece debunking the false claims from many that Donald Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is somehow taking over the government agency that he believes coordinated “censorship” of his views on social media. Bhattacharya and his supporters have been making that claim for years, but the evidence is not there.
The irony is that Bhattacharya, who has long portrayed himself as a victim of censorship, now appears poised to use his new position to censor and punish those he disagrees with, all while cynically using the language of “free speech” to justify punishing those whose speech he disagrees with.
As I note in the piece, folks like Bari Weiss at the Free Press have been pushing this lie for a while and then celebrated Bhattacharya’s nomination as a vindication. Except that it’s all bullshit:
This past week, the editorial board of The Free Press (which has published articles by Bhattacharya falsely supporting his unproven claims of “censorship”)highlighted the “takedown” line(which it misleadingly condensed from two words to one) and said that Bhattacharya’s claims of government censorship were vindicated by the courts.
Oddly, it only discusses the ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It never mentions that this past summer, the Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, reversed that ruling and remanded it to the lower courts for further adjudication. That ruling noted that the plaintiffs in the case, including Bhattacharya,totally failed to show any evidence connecting the statementsof the U.S. government to unrelated actions by social media companies.
The majority opinion noted that “neither the timing nor the platforms line up … so the plaintiffs cannot show that these restrictions were traceable to the White House officials. In fact, there is no record evidence that White House officials ever communicated at all with [the platforms in question].” The court further noted that the only real evidence regarding Bhattacharya was the email between Collins and Fauci, but that the lawsuit in question was not against either. Rather, it was against unrelated individuals in the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Bhattacharya responded to this ruling on his X account, without acknowledging what the Supreme Court actually said. Instead, he said that “free speech in America, for the moment, is dead.” Except anyone who actually read the ruling would see that’s not what was said at all. Instead, the court pointed out that internet companies, as private entities, have the right to moderate as they see fit, and without actual traceable evidence of government coercion, there was no evidence of a First Amendment violation.
Indeed, as Barrett wrote, the evidence showed that the platforms were all moderating similar content “long before” anyone in the government spoke to them about anything, and further that the evidence shows that moderation actions from the platforms appeared to be exercises of “independent judgment.” She further noted how even when some White House officials later flagged content to review, the platforms were quick to push back and respond that the content in question “did not violate company policy.”
Basically, this was all an example of the marketplace of ideas at work, not censorship.
The Supreme Court decision, by a Justice appointed by Trump, makes it clear that Bhattacharya’s claims of government censorship are baseless. Despite this, he and his supporters continue to push this false narrative.
There’s a lot more, but I wanted to highlight a couple of related things that didn’t make it into the piece.
First, I went back and reread the Great Barrington Declaration, and beyond the overly pompous title, it struck me as not as bad as the narrative about it had described. As I wrote in my MSNBC piece, in the early months of the pandemic everyone was working off of imperfect information and trying to do their best. That included public health officials like Anthony Fauci as well as tech companies handling moderation decisions. And also Bhattacharya and his co-authors.
The main difference, though, is that I think the others would now admit that, in hindsight, while they did the best they could with the information they had at the time, in retrospect, their ideas were not entirely correct. Bhattacharya, though, seems 100% convinced that (1) the Great Barrington Declaration was exactly right on, and (2) that the government censored him.
As I detail in my piece, neither claim appears to be fully supported by the evidence, and his playing the censored victim act is silly.
It’s made even worse, of course, because now he’s made it clear that in his role as head of NIH, he intends to push censorial policies to silence researchers who disagree with him. Specifically, he’s talking about denying important NIH research funding to schools he judges to be too woke.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.
Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.
So basically, if you support his general views about “campus culture,” he’ll continue to fund your totally unrelated research. That plan is way more censorial than anything that happened to him (again, nothing really happened to him).
If enacted, Bhattacharya’s plan would be a gross abuse of power that would have a chilling effect on scientific discourse. Researchers would be under pressure to conform to his preferred political views or risk losing vital funding. This is the exact opposite of the open inquiry and debate that science depends on.
This is a dangerous plan that threatens to politicize scientific research and undermine the credibility of the NIH. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has built his brand on being a martyr for free speech. Apparently, in Bhattacharya’s world, free speech means the freedom to agree with him about how everyone should have responded to his speech.
Something I discovered after the MSNBC piece had been published is that a big part of Bhattacharya’s complaints about Facebook actually were that it was briefly taken down (and then restored!) not because of complaints from the government, but rather from angry anti-vaxxers who brigaded Facebook. That’s according to Lucio Eastman, who created the web page for the Great Barrington Declaration and paid for its hosting:
Seems kind of important, no?
In the end, Bhattacharya’s nomination and stated plans represent a troubling trend of officials using claims of “free speech” to justify actual censorship and punishment of dissenting views.
This is yet another example of the rank hypocrisy we’ve seen from many Trump appointees, who disingenuously invoke free speech principles while actively working to suppress views they dislike. Bhattacharya’s case is particularly egregious given his own false victimhood narrative. He’s the boy who cried censorship wolf, and is now eager to actually devour some dissenting sheep.
The federal government would prefer information not want quite so badly to be free. It has obligations under the Freedom of Information Act to set information free, but it also has a handy stack of exemptions to ensure not too much information is freed.
Citizens are free to ask for information. And the government is, far too often, free to deny these requests in whole or in part. But it gets really ridiculous when the government releases information but redacts pretty much everything it’s releasing.
It’s a scam. It allows agencies to pad their numbers, showing that they released information in response to requests while not actually, you know, releasing information. A fully redacted response still counts as a response in the stats, which allows agencies to pretend they’re far more responsive than they actually are.
We’ve covered several of these quasi-releases here at BestNetTech. In “response” to an ACLU request for information on the FBI’s use of GPS trackers, the agency released 111 fully redacted pages. Still counts as a response! Not any actual information in it!
The FBI did it again in response to journalist Brad Heath’s request for information about the tool used to hack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. What was left unredacted was boilerplate from agreements with the tech company and a few random partial sentences that contributed almost nothing to the public’s understanding of this incident, which was preceded by heated litigation the DOJ hoped would force Apple to break the device’s encryption.
Other times, federal agencies have reacted bizarrely to FOIA requests, apparently motivated by the belief that no information should be released without redactions. This includes redacting publicly available DOJ press releases. The “gotta redact something” attitude also results in inconsistent behavior, like two releases of the same info, with each version sporting different redactions.
The case du jour involves information of extreme public interest: the federal government’s involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One hypothesis of the origin of the COVID-19 virus is that it “escaped” from the Wuhan lab, which specializes in coronavirus research. Prior to the 2020 outbreak, the National Institute of Health (NIH), in conjunction with a New York-based research organization (EcoHealth Alliance) had funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute.
For more than a year, The Intercept has been trying to obtain more information about the NIH’s work with the Wuhan Institute. And, for more than a year, the NIH has continued to withhold this information. The Intercept sued. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the NIH agreed to turn over thousands of pages of relevant material.
[T]he most recent batch of documents, which the NIH sent The Intercept on Tuesday, underscores an ongoing lack of transparency at the agency. Even as members of Congress and scientists call for additional information that could shed light on the origins of the pandemic, 292 of 314 pages — more than 90 percent of the current release — were completely redacted. Besides a big gray rectangle that obscures any meaningful text, the pages show only a date, page number, and the NIAID logo. The remaining pages also contain significant redactions.
As Lerner points out, some of these redactions may be “technically justifiable.” But the complete redaction of more than 90 percent of this content seems unjustified, especially since there’s intense public interest in understanding the origin of the current pandemic, as well as whatever involvement their own government may have had in the genesis of this coronavirus strain. This simply isn’t acceptable given the ongoing worldwide crisis that is still killing thousands of people a day and has almost single-handedly destroyed international commerce by severely disrupting supply chains.
Unfortunately, the National Institute of Health believes the public doesn’t deserve transparency. And it will likely take several more rounds of litigation to convince it otherwise.
Folks may know that when Jonas Salk created the polio vaccine he chose not to patent it, and when asked who owns the patent on it, responded: “Well… the people I would say. There is no patent… Could you patent the sun?”
Whenever people bring this up, patent maximalists — especially those in the pharma world — like to come up with all sorts of excuses about how that was “different” somehow. My favorite excuse was that he did this because “the public had funded the vaccine.”
Fast forward to today. Moderna, somewhat famously, helped produce one of the very first COVID vaccines using its mRNA technology. It’s a great thing (I got two Moderna shots in my own arm as soon as I could). You may have heard a lot about Moderna as well. While the company had been around for a decade, this vaccine is its first product on the actual market. It had been experimenting with mRNA technology, but hadn’t actually come out with anything until the COVID vaccine.
But — and this is the important part — it was the US government, and by that we mean “the US public,” who mostly funded Moderna’s COVID vaccine… and it was actually US government employees who did a lot of the important work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the US government gave Moderna $483 million dollars to work on the COVID vaccine. A few months later it gave another $472 million.
Moderna acknowledged that scientists at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) played a “substantial role” in developing Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine…
So, “the public” funded this vaccine, and the public — via the government which represents us — helped do the scientific work necessary to make the vaccine.
The vaccine grew out of a four-year collaboration between Moderna and the N.I.H., the government?s biomedical research agency ? a partnership that was widely hailed when the shot was found to be highly effective. A year ago this month, the government called it the ?N.I.H.-Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.?
The agency says three scientists at its Vaccine Research Center ? Dr. John R. Mascola, the center?s director; Dr. Barney S. Graham, who recently retired; and Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett, who is now at Harvard ? worked with Moderna scientists to design the genetic sequence that prompts the vaccine to produce an immune response, and should be named on the ?principal patent application.?
Moderna disagrees. In a July filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the company said it had ?reached the good-faith determination that these individuals did not co-invent? the component in question. Its application for the patent, which has not yet been issued, names several of its own employees as the sole inventors.
Apparently the NIH and Moderna had been “negotiating” about this when Moderna made that filing. As this went public and people (rightly) started calling Moderna out for this bullshit, Moderna took a half step backwards and claimed that it was willing to share the patent with the US government (and said “Moderna remains the only company to have pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 intellectual property during the pandemic.”)
But, it seems like we should go a step further: there’s no reason to patent this. I have no problem with Moderna getting plenty of profit for its important role in developing the vaccine. And, it is. The company went from having losses every quarter through last year, to making billions in profit this year. It made over 7 billion in net income (not gross) this year through the first three quarters.
That’s not because of its patent. It’s because it’s producing something that is important to humanity, which governments are more than willing to pay for, and which remain in high demand globally.
So, don’t try to hog it. Don’t try to hog it from the US government. But don’t even try to “share it” with the US government. Share it with everyone. Let the people “own” it by refusing to patent it at all. After all, would you patent the sun?
PETA is certainly not above filing some pretty ridiculous lawsuits, so I was initially skeptical when I heard that it had filed a lawsuit against the directors of the National Institutes of Health (Francis Collins) and Health & Human Services (Xavier Becerra) over Facebook keyword blocking. However, upon reading through the lawsuit, it seems pretty legit. At issue is that it appears that NIH has put in place a block list on Facebook and Instagram that blocks anyone from mentioning PETA and a surprisingly long list of words and phrases that are likely of interest to PETA.
If this sounds sorta somewhat similar to the lawsuits saying that the President can’t block people on social media, well, perhaps that’s because that lawsuit and this one both involve lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, who have specialized in getting government officials to stop abusing social media blocks to suppress speech. In this case, some PETA supporters were noticing that certain comments they were posting on the NIH Facebook and Instagram pages didn’t appear to be showing up. So they FOIA’d the blocklist that NIH was using, and discovered it was pretty extensive… and not generally what you would call “content neutral” (which would be required under the 1st Amendment):
a. #stopanimaltesting
b. #stoptesting
c. #stoptestingonanimals
d. Animal(s), animalitos, animales
e. Chimpanzee(s), chimp(s)
f. Primate(s)
g. Marmoset(s)
h. Cats, gatos [i.e., Spanish for ?cats?]
i. Monkey(s), monkies
j. Mouse, mice
k. Experiment
l. Test(ing), testing facility
m. Stop
n. PETA, PETALatino
o. Suomi,1 Harlow2
p. Hurt, hurting
q. Kill
r. Torture(s), torturing
s. Torment(ing)
t. Cruel
u. Revolting
That list is pretty revealing. I mean, it’s not difficult to see how this came about. Not for nothing, but PETA folks can be a pain in the ass. Which seems to basically be by design. They like making a nuisance of themselves, and you can see how some administrator at NIH was getting sick of it and started coming up with words that would block their annoying comments. And that’s fine for normal everyday private actors. But when it’s the government, there’s a problem. Especially when that list seems so clearly targeted. For something like this to survive 1st Amendment scrutiny it needs to be “content neutral.” This is anything but.
Defendants? practice of hiding comments containing words associated with animal
rights advocacy, including the name of a well-known animal rights organization, is a viewpointdiscriminatory
and content-based restriction on speech that infringes Plaintiffs? First Amendment
rights. It violates Plaintiffs? right to speak in a public forum and their right to read the speech of
others who have used blocked keywords in comments on Defendants? social media pages.
Given the ruling in Knight v. Trump, the claims here seem pretty strong (in fact, potentially even stronger than that case). This isn’t just blocking people, it’s legit trying to bar discussions of certain topics NIH doesn’t want discussed in open spaces that it is creating, as a government entity. PETA may be annoying (and at times frivolous and ridiculous), but this lawsuit seems exactly on point.
It’s no secret that drug prices are often high, and continue to rise — by 32% in the past five years according to one analysis. It’s only natural that many should be willing to pay even exorbitant amounts for drugs. If there is the hope of a cure, or at least of some relief from pain and symptoms, for themselves or their family, most people would probably put that above money.
It’s less obvious why drug prices are so high in the first place. The standard response from the pharma industry is that companies need incentives to develop new treatments, and these are typically in the form of the high prices they can charge. Although plausible, it overlooks the important contribution that publicly-funded research makes here. Many new drugs are made possible thanks to ground-breaking early work by academics in universities or institutes, not in companies. That’s not something that Big Pharma likes to talk about, as this post from James Love on the Bill of Health blog reminds us:
This is a story about U.S. patent number 6,958,335, and how it took more than 18 years for Novartis to acknowledge National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in a key patent for Gleevec, allowing Novartis to shape the narrative regarding its role in the development of Gleevec, and also to avoid demands that Novartis make the invention “available to the public on reasonable terms,” which is an obligation under the Bayh-Dole Act.
Some say it’s a miracle drug. Others call it a silver bullet. Gleevec, also marketed internationally as Glivec and sometimes referred to by its chemical name imatinib, entered the medical world with a bang. This medication was initially approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001 for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a rare form of cancer that affects certain types of white blood cells.
That “miracle drug” has meant big money for Novartis. According to the Bill of Health blog post, by the end of 2018, the cumulative sales for Gleevec exceeded $53 billion. Love notes that as an invention that was partially funded by taxpayers, Novartis ought to have made the invention “available to the public on reasonable terms”. That would presumably have translated to a lower price, and possibly to more people taking the drug, and more lives being saved. Those didn’t happen, because Novartis didn’t acknowledge the NIH funding until now, a mere 18 years late. Sadly, this is not an isolated case of forgetfulness, as Love points out in his conclusion:
[Knowledge Ecology International] has written the NIH on several occasions to identify cases where inventors have failed to acknowledge federal funding in patent applications. Such cases have not been difficult to find. In the 1990s, Congress and [US Department of Health & Human Services] investigated such failures to disclose, and found widespread non-compliance with disclosure mandates, and lax oversight. This is an area where new Congressional oversight would be welcome, particularly as the question of the federal role in drug development is being spun by various parties.
That’s worth bearing in mind the next time Big Pharma tries to justify eye-watering drug prices because of the innovative research required to create them.
We’ve written in the past about how the National Institute of Health (NIH) requires any research it funds (and it funds a lot) to be published under open access rules via its own PubMed Central platform after a certain period of time. There have been some efforts in Congress to require other government funded research to go down the same path, and some other agencies have worked on some similar ideas on their own. Now, NASA has announced that it will be requiring all research published via the $3 billion NASA spends each year to to also be published on the PubMed system (and also within in 12 months, as the NIH requires)
The provisions of NASA?s policy on articles track with those in the current NIH Public Access policy, and will require NASA-funded researchers to deposit articles into the PubMed Central database, to be made accessible with no more than than a 12 month embargo. However, the NASA plan notes that, ?publishers may petition for longer embargo periods, but strong evidence of the benefits would be needed.? This language is notable, as it seems to suggest that any determination of changes in embargo length will be measured against the public good, rather than specific industry concerns.
Also, it looks like the plan will include efforts to make the raw data more available as well:
One final item that is tucked away at the end of the NASA plan, but is worth noting: the Agency will explore the development of a ?research data commons? along with other departments and agencies, for storage, discoverability, and reuse of data with a particular focus on making the data underlying peer reviewed scientific publications resulting from federally funded scientific research available for free ?at the time of publication.? This is an idea that appears to be gaining traction in the federal agency community, and is well worth tracking closely.
It’s good to see more government agencies moving in this direction. It would be even nicer to see shorter time frames for the embargo, and even further commitment to releasing the data beyond just “exploring,” but this is good for science, data, learning and innovation.
