I’ve been thinking about Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) a lot, ever since it was announced that longtime antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been nominated to become Secretary of Health and Human Services. Many regular readers will know why if they are familiar with Lysenkoism, the disastrous political campaign led by Lysenko against science-based agriculture based on Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics in favor of Lamarckism (more on that later). In brief, during his time as Josef Stalin’s favorite scientist, Lysenko and his version of biology that came to be known as Lysenkoism led to the persecution of biologists who stuck to science-based views regarding agriculture that conflicted with Lysenko’s, up to and including imprisonment and, even in some cases, execution. Worse, his ideas applied to Soviet Agriculture led to crop shortfalls and worsened famines, to the point where Although no one has been imprisoned or executed yet, under the reign of President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary RFK Jr., the suppression of politically incorrect science and purges of the ideologically impure or suspect have already begun, most recently Peter Marks, the FDA’s Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), who was forced to resign last week:
Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, has resigned, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services said Friday.
“If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy,” a spokesperson at HHS said.
A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that Marks was forced out of his position.
No doubt. After all, remember that RFK Jr. promised purges of the CDC, FDA, and NIH even back when he was running for President as an independent, long before he bent the knee to Donald Trump in return for a prominent role in shaping the Trump administration’s health policies, which unfortunately is turning out to be as HHS Secretary. Now he’s delivering. Marks isn’t the first, and he’s far from the last. Why, however, did his resignation lead me to think of Lysenko more than ever? You have to read his resignation letter, which basically lays it out way more bluntly than the typical resignation letter does.
Although Marks doesn’t explicitly say it, RFK Jr. is the new Lysenko in that, with him, ideology trumps science every time. It’s especially ironic given that Marks held that role during 2020 and was largely responsible for Operation Warp Speed, the accelerated effort that led to the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines:
Early in the pandemic, Marks, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, took the highly unusual step of engaging with multiple drug manufacturers—companies that are typically competitors—to discuss what would be needed for a successful vaccine to receive an emergency use authorization.
Marks recognized that the drug companies’ proposed timeframes were faster than any previous vaccine development, but “still completely inadequate to meet the exploding public health need,” said Dr. Cynthia Dunbar, a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
“By the time we landed in April of 2020, it was clear we were going to need some heroic effort,” Marks said. “Every month we could shave off development could save a lot of lives.”
An avid “Star Trek” fan, Marks called this initiative Operation Warp Speed because the scale of the effort seemed so “improbable and difficult” as to be almost like science fiction, Dunbar said.
The project represented an unprecedented collaboration between government and the private sector to vaccinate the people of this country as quicky and safely as possible. The task became more urgent as millions were getting sick and tens of thousands were dying from the coronavirus across the nation. Now, more than a year later, thanks in large part to Marks’ efforts toward the onset of the pandemic, U.S. vaccination rates are faster than almost any other country in the world and confidence in the vaccines’ safety and efficacy remains high.
Truth be told, I never realized that Marks had come up with the name “Operation Warp Speed.” That was probably his biggest mistake, because to a lot of people the name implied that speed trumped everything else, including safety and efficacy, making it easy to weaponize against the vaccines, even though the FDA, if anything, resisted pressure from the first Trump Administration—remember who was in charge during most of the first year of the pandemic!—to approve the vaccines faster:
After standing up Operation Warp Speed, Marks returned to his full-time role overseeing the FDA’s approval process for vaccines and biologics. He believed this process would not only help the country produce and administer vaccines more quickly, but also inspire public confidence that any vaccines approved were safe and effective. He also wanted to make sure that the FDA based its decisions on science, not politics.
“He just kept making it clear that he could not be persuaded, influenced, shamed, guilted or threatened into acting in any way other than where the science led him,” [Arthur] Caplan said.
[…]
“That was extremely unpopular at the White House at the time, but it was the right thing to do,” [Francis] Collins said. “And he withstood a great deal of criticism and pressure.”
Of course, now that RFK Jr. and his “make America healthy again” (MAHA) ideology rule HHS, there is no room left for someone who follows the science wherever it goes. I’m not saying that everything Marks did was perfect. It was a crisis situation, and at the very least the name for the effort was problematic in terms of messaging. However, now an antivaxxer is in charge, and, make no mistake, RFK Jr. is not a “vaccine critic” or a “vaccine skeptic.” He is antivaccine.
First, let’s take a look at Marks’ resignation letter and why it led me to think of Lysenko more than ever. Then I’ll take a look at what’s happening in the rest of HHS, including the NIH, CDC, and FDA that reinforces my conclusion that RFK Jr. is the new Lysenko, even though he isn’t even a scientist.
Marks vs. Kennedy
Marks is quite blunt about why he is resigning. After touting his successes in improving the safety of the blood supply, he mentions the rapid development of a vaccine for COVID-19, noting:
In the last of these, during the COVID-19 pandemic I had the privilege of watching the vision that I conceived for Operation Warp Speed in March 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kadlec become a reality under the leadership of HHS Secretary Azar and President Trump due to the unwavering commitment of public servants at FDA and elsewhere across the government. At FDA, the tireless efforts of staff across the agency resulted in remarkably expediting the development of vaccines against the virus, meeting the standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness expected by the American public. The vaccines undoubtedly markedly reduced morbidity and mortality from COVID- 19 in the United States and elsewhere.
Basically, Marks’ crediting President Trump as a strong collaborator for Operation Warp Speed is ice cold, particularly while also pointing out how the FDA had made sure that the vaccines met expected standards for safety and efficacy. Here, however, is the money quote:
Over the past 13 years I have done my best to ensure that we efficiently and effectively applied the best available science to benefit public health. As you are aware, I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency by hearing from the public and implementing a variety of different public meetings and engagements with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.
Having followed and written about RFK Jr. for nearly 20 years, I am hard-pressed to come up with a better concise description of his approach to vaccines and science. Like Trofim Lysenko, RFK Jr. is an ideologue whose “science” flows from his preconceived notions about vaccines, public health, and chronic illness. Like Lysenko, RFK Jr. is not swayed by evidence, science, or reason. After all, many have tried to persuade him that vaccines do not cause autism using scientific evidence, and he still fervently believes it.
Let’s take a break for a little history lesson, shall we?
Trofim Lysenko: What happens when an ideological scientific crank becomes very powerful
Before I come back to RFK Jr. and his parallels with Lysenko, I would like Ethan Siegel describes how Lysenko burst onto the Soviet scientific scene in the late 1920s thusly:
Lysenko’s work on vernalization was transformative for Soviet agriculture. Normally, most crops that are successful in Russia-like climates require the signal of a cold, long winter coming to an end to begin flowering. However, Lysenko (correctly) realized that one could artificially induce those conditions, triggering the crops to flower even in the absence of a cold, long winter. This advance, known as vernalization, offered the promise of dramatically improving the crop yields of the entire country. His publication from way back in 1928 catapulted him to fame, prominence, and political power within the USSR.
However, there was a problem: while Lysenko’s method worked for a couple of particular crops, that same method didn’t universally apply to all crops, as many in the USSR hoped it would. In fact, as other scientists quickly showed, Lysenko’s papers contained flaws in both his ideas and his reasoning, rendering his conclusions suspect. Although he did experience some mild success with vernalizing two crops specifically — peas and wheat — his ideas behind why these plants were yielding successful crops were wrongheaded, and demonstrably so.
Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics on ideological grounds, and developed his own wild ideas that were interesting, compelling, profound, and also entirely incorrect. He claimed that organisms within a species, such as the same crop of plant, would instinctively work together for the good of the collective population; an ideology in line with communist propaganda, but at odds with genetics. His rejection of Darwinism was again ideologically based, not scientifically, and he admitted as much, stating:
“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.”
That last quote made me chuckle. Funny how conservative Christian creationists and die-hard Communists can somehow sound very much alike. After all, creationists often rail against what they see as the “materialism” at the core of evolutionary biology. In any event, Lysenko’s initial successful results, which soon became suspect, led him to spearhead a campaign to reject Mendelian genetics in favor of a pseudoscientific hypothesis of environmentally induced heredity. This campaign lasted from the late 1920s into the early 1960s and Lysenko’s ideas about genetics and heredity came to be known as Lysenkoism.
In essence, Lysenkoism is warmed-over Larmackism, or soft inheritance, a concept named after French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who championed the hypothesis that notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism had acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. The classic example often taught in high school biology class is that of the giraffe, whose long neck, Lamarckism postulates, came about through successive generations of giraffes ancestors stretching their necks to reach the leaves on ever-higher branches of trees. In contrast, according to Darwinian evolution, a wide variety of neck lengths originally existed in a population of giraffe ancestors, and then a food scarcity at low elevations selected against the short necked giraffes, leaving only the giraffes with the genes for long necks as the survivors.
Lysenko’s ideas were explicitly based on his view of Communist doctrine:
Officials eventually put Lysenko in charge of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s. The only problem was, he had batty scientific ideas. In particular, he loathed genetics. Although a young field, genetics advanced rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s; the first Nobel Prize for work in genetics was awarded in 1933. And especially in that era, genetics emphasized fixed traits: Plants and animals have stable characteristics, encoded as genes, which they pass down to their children. Although nominally a biologist, Lysenko considered such ideas reactionary and evil, since he saw them as reinforcing the status quo and denying all capacity for change. (He in fact denied that genes existed.)
Instead, as the journalist Jasper Becker has described in the book Hungry Ghosts, Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree.
Based on his ideas, Lysenko proposed that he could “educate” Soviet crops to sprout at different times of the year by soaking them in freezing water and using other interventions, going on to claim that future generations of the crops would then remember these cues and inherit the beneficial traits. He had a number of other crackpot ideas as well. For example, in addition to claiming that plants could pass on traits acquired during life to their offspring, Lysenko denied the existence of DNA and genes and claimed that plants selected their mates. He also espoused the idea that some plants choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of the remaining plants. Based on these Ideas, Lysenko believed he could revolutionize Soviet agriculture, boosting crop yields and boost crop yields and transforming the empty Russian interior into vast farms. The result was catastrophic:
Such claims were exactly what Soviet leaders wanted to hear. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Joseph Stalin—with Lysenko’s backing—had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted. Stalin refused to change course, however, and ordered Lysenko to remedy the disaster with methods based on his radical new ideas. Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, for instance, since according to his “law of the life of species,” plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. He also forbade all use of fertilizers and pesticides.
Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to Lysenko’s methods died or rotted, says Hungry Ghosts. Stalin still deserves the bulk of the blame for the famines, which killed at least 7 million people, but Lysenko’s practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. (Deaths from the famines peaked around 1932 to 1933, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in farmland cultivated using Lysenko’s methods, food production was actually lower than before.) The Soviet Union’s allies suffered under Lysenkoism, too. Communist China adopted his methods in the late 1950s and endured even bigger famines. Peasants were reduced to eating tree bark and bird droppings and the occasional family member. At least 30 million died of starvation.
Does Stalin’s backing of Lysenko remind you of anything, such as Trump’s backing of RFK Jr.? Lysenko, having Stalin behind him, was also quite ruthless about getting rid of critics and competition:
Unable to silence Western critics, Lysenko still tried to eliminate all dissent within the Soviet Union. Scientists who refused to renounce genetics found themselves at the mercy of the secret police. The lucky ones simply got dismissed from their posts and were left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several got sentenced to death as enemies of the state or, fittingly, starved in their jail cells (most notably the botanist Nikolai Vavilov). Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had arguably the best genetics community in the world. Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts set Russian biology back a half-century.
Nikolai Vavilov, by the way, was a true scientific pioneer. By the late 1920s, as director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov had amassed the largest seed collection in the world. He worked hard, he enjoyed himself, and drove other eager young scientists to work just as hard to make more food for the people of the Soviet Union. As plant biologists Ian Godwin and Yuri Trusov put it in 2017, Vasilov “worked hard, he enjoyed himself, and drove other eager young scientists to work just as hard to make more food for the people of the Soviet Union.” They also note:
The Lysenko vs Vavilov/Mendel/Darwin argument came to a head in 1936 at the Conference of the Lenin Academy when Lysenko presented his “-ism”.
In the face of scientific opinion, and the overwhelming majority of his peers, Pravda declared Lysenko the winner of the argument. By 1939, after quite a few scientists had been imprisoned, shot or “disappeared”, including the director of the Lenin Institute, there was a vacancy to be filled. And the most powerful man in the country filled it with Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko was now Vavilov’s boss.
Within a year, Vavilov was captured on one of his collection missions and interrogated for 11 months. He was accused of being a spy, having travelled to England and the United States, and been a regular correspondent with many geneticists outside the Soviet Union.
It did not help his cause that he came from a family of business people, whereas Lysenko was of peasant stock and a Soviet ideologue. Vavilov was sent to a gulag where, tragically, he died in 1943.
The embrace of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union also destroyed what had been one of the best genetics research programs in the world in the 1920s:
Examples of the false claims put forth under Lysenko are numerous and extraordinary. They include:
- The false claim that rye could transform into wheat and that wheat could transform into barley, even though they cannot.
- The false claim that weeds can transmute into food grains, even though they are distinct organisms.
- The false claim that nature always exhibits natural cooperation between different species, even though competition and natural selection are most commonly observed instead.
From the late 1920s, when Lysenkoism was first adopted, until the death of Stalin in 1953, scientific research into genetics suffered a decades-long stagnation in the Soviet Union. During those 25 years, from 1928-1953, more than 3000 mainstream biologists were removed from their scientific and/or academic positions. Moreover, many were sent to the gulags and a number of them were even executed.
Why? Because all of these decisions were part of a campaign, orchestrated by Lysenko himself, to suppress those who opposed him. If opposition happened to come from mainstream biologists who were actually conducting scrupulous work whose conclusions were unpalatable to him, so be it.
One also notes that, even after Stalin’s death, it took nearly a decade to discredit Lysenko and Lysenkoism sufficiently that it fell from favor. Indeed, Stalin’s successor as ruler of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, for a time fell under Lysenko’s spell, and the Great Chinese Famine that resulted in part from the adoption of Lysenko’s methods occurred from 1959-1961. In fact, it arguably took until the 1990s before Soviet science and genetics had truly purged themselves of Lysenko’s influence, even though Lysenko died in 1976.
On the other hand, there was recently an attempt to rehabilitate Lysenko’s reputation. Can you guess the basis of this attempt to “rethink” Lysenko? Yes, it’s the rise of epigenetics, the science that shows that there are acquired characteristics that can be inherited through the epigenetic alteration of DNA. (Unsurprisingly, quacks love to invoke epigenetics to justify their woo, and in their hands it might as well be magic.) Of course, one can’t help but note that Lysenko claimed that genes didn’t exist, while epigenetics take genes as a given. They are, after all, what is being turned on or off by the epigenetic modifications. Moreover, while epigenetic changes can occasionally pass from parent to child, the changes always disappear after a few generations. Unlike Lysenko’s claims, the changes are not permanent.
Ironically, although biologists who opposed Lysenko routinely lost their jobs, were imprisoned, or “disappeared,” some opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin’s lifetime escaped this fate, namely members of the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists. According to Tony Judt, “it is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid.”
As I said, no one has been sent to prison…yet. Nor has anyone been executed…yet. I would also point out that the lack of scientists being sent to prison or executed is not due to a lack of desire among some parts of the MAHA movement. Remember “Nuremberg 2.0“?
Yet, as I have said, the purges are well underway. They come in two forms. First, there is a purge of science that does not conform to the new administration’s ideology; second, there is a purge of personnel.
RFK Jr. and Donald Trump: Lysenko and Stalin revisited?
Steve Novella and I have both written about one example of ideology overriding science with respect to vaccines; specifically the appointment of David Geier to be in charge of a study examining vaccine safety in general and the question of whether vaccines cause autism in particular. As an aside, I wondered why RFK Jr. didn’t choose David’s father Mark Geier, who was the brains behind the father-son team and also an actual physician, to do the study, but it turns out that Mark Geier had died on March 20 at the age of 76. In any event, as both of us have pointed out, David Geier has no skills that make him remotely qualified to carry out such a study; indeed, he and his father were notorious for their “Lupron protocol,” in which they misdiagnosed autistic children with precocious puberty and then treated them with a powerful puberty blocking drug, Lupron, to lower testosterone levels, the rationale being that testosterone binds mercury and makes it easier for chelation therapy to eliminate it. One characteristic that David Geier does share with Lysenko’s acolytes, whom he hired to work on Soviet agriculture, though: He believes in the antivax ideology and lacks anything resembling competence in science.
The most obvious and dramatic examples of the purges going on at HHS, however, are occurring at the NIH, where hundreds of research grants are being summarily canceled without warning because they do not “further administration aims.” For example, last week the NIH began canceling grants studying COVID-19 because “the pandemic is over.” I kid you not:
The White House appears to have a new target for its cuts to research funding: Grants linked to COVID-19, which President Donald Trump and his appointees have decided are a waste of money because the pandemic is over.
Science has learned that grant termination letters went out last night to principal investigators of 29 awards made by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), including nine grants that were part of a program hoping to deliver antiviral drugs to prevent future pandemics. “The end of the pandemic provides cause to terminate COVID-related grant funds,” the notification states. “These grant funds were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary.”
Oh, and researchers whose research is being defunded are “encouraged” not to fight the decision:
According to the grant termination letter Rice and colleagues received, the researchers were told they could appeal but were discouraged from trying to fight the termination. “Although ‘[the National Institutes of Health] generally will suspend (rather than immediately terminate) a grant and allow the recipient an opportunity to take appropriate corrective action before NIH makes a termination decision,’ no corrective action is possible here,” the termination notice said. “The premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”
These terminations come complete with updated guidance. Let’s just say that COVID-19 research is not the only “forbidden science” under RFK Jr. and Donald Trump:
The updated documents that Nature obtained (see Supplementary Information below) were sent on 25 March to ‘grants-management specialists’ — NIH staff members who oversee the business side of awarding funding. This document includes COVID-19 on a list of “research activities that NIH no longer supports”, in addition to research on China, DEI, “transgender issues” and vaccine hesitancy. The latest guidance also says that grants related to South Africa and climate change should be terminated.
The document also outlines a new category of research thatshould be terminated: any project on a list sent by the NIH director or the HHS, which is currently helmed by long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also, the NIH is terminating grants to study long COVID (although some have been restored). It has also been suggested that soon research involving fetal cell lines will be defunded, as have research into preventing HIV/AIDS; managing depressive symptoms in transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse patients; intimate partner violence during pregnancy; and how cancer affects impoverished Americans.
I’ve been a researcher since the early 1990s and a principal investigator with a laboratory since 1999. Although I’ve never been a permanent study section member, I have served as an ad hoc member on a number of NIH study sections over the years. I can assure you, nothing like this has ever happened before going back as long as I can remember. I’ve asked colleagues even more senior than I am, and they assure me that nothing like this has ever happened during their careers either. Never has the NIH suddenly canceled such a large number of grants. Indeed, the NIH rarely cancels grants, and then usually only for malfeasance, such as misappropriation of funds or scientific fraud, and then only after an extensive investigation. What is happening here is that grants that have, in essence, “banned words” in their titles, abstracts, or other documents are being targeted for cancelation. Indeed, RFK Jr., also appears to be coming for any grants funding research into new vaccines or therapies using mRNA technology:
The NIH confirmed in a statement to the Guardian that it made a “data call” to learn more information about the funding of mRNA vaccine grants. Nature, the scientific journal, first reported the data call, and said it had been conducted by the acting NIH director, Matthew Memoli, on 6 March. Scientists were given one day to report the information, and NIH collected information about 130 mRNA grants as a result.
Many of the scientists, public health experts and medical researchers interviewed by the Guardian spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing that they might be targeted if they expressed concerns publicly.
One former senior NIH official who resigned recently said what was happening inside the organization was “not understandable”.
“So far, any attempt at reasoning with people has fallen on deaf ears. Everything is being run by the department [Department of Health and Human Services] or the White House,” the person said. KFF Health News separately reported that all grants involving mRNA research were to be reported to Memoli, for referral to the office of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and the White House.
Yes, it sounds as though RFK Jr. is going to personally review every mRNA grant and decide whether its funding should continue. As a result, surprising no one, scientists are frightened and intimidated. They’re also looking for anyway they can to game the system and avoid scrutiny by avoiding any words that might trigger an ideology-based review. Basically, what is happening at HHS under RFK Jr. is that the NIH is no longer basing its funding decisions solely on scientific merit; rather, it’s imposing the broadest ideological test to prescreen grant applications and reject those that do not align with RFK Jr.’s ideology. Lysenko must be smiling. The incompetence is also amazing, as evidenced by one researcher who was funded by the NIH to study whether the shingles vaccine could reawaken the virus in the eye whose grant was terminated. She found that it could. This is exactly the sort of research that RFK Jr. says that he wants, but because the grant got flagged, likely because it was about vaccines.
Meanwhile, scientists working on such projects are finding themselves unemployed:
What really makes Acharya sad is the effect of the funding cuts on her colleagues.
“I can’t save them,” she said. “I’m trying to call people and try to get jobs for them. I’m trying to set up interviews and stuff, but it’s really hard.”
Universities have lost so much federal research funding that many are coping with their own grant cancellations and doing their own belt-tightening. There’s a hiring freeze at UCSF.
“It’s not these people’s fault that they ended up being in a research group that was good, it was so promising, and their careers would have been made, and now it’s gone, and they’re gonna be out of a job,” she said.
Which, I suspect, is the point. RFK Jr. wants to force scientists into not studying what he doesn’t want them to study and into studying what he does. Very Lysenkoist of him!
Then, of course, RFK Jr. is planning on purging 25% of HHS employees across all agencies, to go from 82,000 employees to 62,000, including:
- 3,500 jobs at the FDA, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
- 2,400 jobs at the CDC, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
- 1,200 jobs at the NIH, the world’s leading public health research arm.
- 300 jobs at CMS, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.
Moreover, like any authoritarian regime, its pettiness knows no bounds. The new administration has even removed a mural at the NIH featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci making an inspirational statement, ““Science is telling us that we can do phenomenal things if we put our minds and our resources to it.” Rep. Jamie Raskin called it just right, too: “This is the kind of treatment that scientists get in totalitarian societies like Stalinist Russia if they don’t toe the political line of the leaders.” Indeed, there are echoes of Lysenko in the termination letters, which frequently say things like: the researcher’s project is “antithetical to scientific inquiry” and “harms the health of Americans.” Like Lysenko, RFK Jr. is claiming the mantle of science as he attacks, purges, and defunds actual science.
Moreover, Trump and RFK Jr.’s lackey Jay Bhattacharya, who has just taken over as NIH Director, seems down with the whole purge. One of his first acts upon taking over the NIH was to instruct his staff to compile a list of grants and contracts related to “fighting misinformation or disinformation.” This has been the first step under this administration in identifying grants that they want to terminate.
That’s not all, either. HHS is suppressing any results that RFK Jr. might not like:
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
The bureaucratese tells me that RFK Jr. was almost certainly behind this:
When asked what role, if any, Kennedy played in the decision to not release the risk assessment, HHS’ communications director said the aborted announcement “was part of an ongoing process to improve communication processes — nothing more, nothing less.” The CDC, he reiterated, continues to recommend vaccination “as the best way to protect against measles.”
This is about the most mundane observation and recommendation I can imagine, but since it involves vaccinating people at risk for measles, RFK Jr. doesn’t like it. Such is the new “science” at HHS.
Are we witnessing the destruction of science in the US?
Obviously, as those of you who have been paying attention to the news—perhaps even closer attention to the news than I—know, I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I haven’t even discussed the Trump administration’s attempt to slash indirect costs on NIH grants here, mainly because I discussed it in depth when it first happened. Similarly, I haven’t discussed the reorganizations of huge swaths of HHS being proposed, such as the creation of a new Administration for a Healthy America, which will “consolidate the OASH, HRSA, SAMHSA, ATSDR, and NIOSH, so as to more efficiently coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs and harmonize health resources to low-income Americans. Divisions of AHA include Primary Care, Maternal and Child Health, Mental Health, Environmental Health, HIV/AIDS, and Workforce, with support of the U.S. Surgeon General and Policy team.” (These acronyms stand for Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, the Health Resource and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety.)
On the surface, this wouldn’t necessarily sound so bad were it not for the massive cuts in personnel and that the cuts will only save $1.8 billion out of a total HHS budget of $2 trillion. Just this weekend, the news broke that RFK Jr. had terminated the entire Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy, whose stated mission of the OIDP is “to provide strategic leadership and management, while encouraging collaboration, coordination, and innovation among federal agencies and stakeholders to reduce the burden of infectious diseases.” This includes implementing various national plans to prevent and control infectious diseases. For example, there’s the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, Vaccines National Strategic Plan, Viral Hepatitis National Strategic Plan and the Sexually Transmitted Infections National Strategic Plan. The OIDP also directs different initiatives, such as initiatives to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S., prevent healthcare-associated infections and control tick-borne diseases.
Basically, any government entity dealing with acute diseases caused by infectious agents (plus HIV/AIDS, which is a chronic disease that, untreated, takes years to kill) seems to be in RFK Jr.’s crosshairs because of his Lysenko-like ideological belief that chronic disease is all that matters. In a rambling video describing the reorganization, RFK Jr. alternated between praising his employees and blaming them for harming America’s health:
I love how he mentions how low the US ranks in terms of various health measures compared to other wealthy industrialized countries and, instead of blaming it on lack of universal health insurance (which a major contributor), he blames it on the “sprawling bureaucracy” of HHS. Meanwhile, just two months into President Trump’s term and less than a month into RFK Jr.’s reign as HHS Secretary, morale among biomedical scientists in the US is rock-bottom, as evidenced by this survey by Nature:
The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.
I realize that this was not a scientific poll, but it echoes sentiment that I’m hearing. I also can’t blame any of the respondents who are thinking of leaving for thinking that way. I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t had similar thoughts. Unfortunately, I’m too close to retirement and basically tied to my current location by family obligations. I am, however considering giving up research and going all clinical, given that the director of the NIH knows my name and thinks I’m a “threat to science.” It’s that bad out there.
Lysenkoism destroyed genetics as a science in the Soviet Union for several decades. The USSR went from a nation with a top-flight research program in the then-new science of genetics to a laughingstock has-been, in the process letting many more of its own people die of famine than had to, all because Stalin liked Lysenko’s ideas because they were based on his Communist ideology and tried to make science conform to that ideology. The problem, of course, is that science doesn’t care what your ideology is, and it will be no different for RFK Jr. New pathogens will arise. Diseases once under control will reemerge if vaccine uptake plummets. There will be more unsafe drugs and medical devices if there are fewer scientists to evaluate them.
In fact, RFK Jr. scares me more than Lysenko. Lysenko limited his pseudoscience and suppression of science mainly to genetics and agriculture. RFK Jr. is not so limited. His pseudoscience, science denialism, and conspiracy theories encompass all areas of medicine, health, and public health. Lysenko’s grip on Soviet science arguably killed millions. How many will die as a result of RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary? It’s impossible to predict now, but I shudder to think about it. My guess is that the toll will be huge.