NEW YORK, June 9 (Xinhua) -- More than 60 employees of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) signed their names to a scathing letter sent on Monday to denounce what they described as the degradation of the country's medical research apparatus under President Donald Trump, accusing the administration of illegally withholding money, endangering participants in studies and censoring critical research.
The letter, sent to Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, and then posted online, was "a remarkable rebuke of the agency's leadership," reported The New York Times about the move. Signatories to the letter said that they were concerned they could be fired for speaking out, but that the risks of acquiescing to orders they saw as unethical, and in some cases illegal, were too great.
"We dissent to administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe," they wrote in the four-page letter. "Many have raised these concerns to NIH leadership, yet we remain pressured to implement harmful measures."
The letter included signatories from across the agency's 27 institutes and centers. Its organizers called it "The Bethesda Declaration," a reference both to the home of the agency's headquarters and to a 2020 missive by Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration, opposing COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
Halting clinical trials midstream would endanger participants who had agreed to take medicines or have medical devices implanted, the letter said. In other cases, it said, the Trump administration has cut American scientists off from collaborators abroad and redirected funding from independently vetted projects to unscreened projects "to cater to political whims." ■
