Ferric Fang, MD

Haha, good question.

Well, at least we now know where our crazy uncle got this idea— from the FDA Commissioner or the NIH Director!

FDA Commissioner Makary was on right-wing media this weekend repeating his nonsensical claim that the “Fauci-led NIH brewed up a virus that killed 20 million people worldwide.” This announcement is predictably rocketing around the other site but was too much even for Grok to swallow.

Texas researcher faces deportation after being held for week at San Francisco airport A legal permanent resident with a green card who flew back to the U.S. after visiting family in South Korea was detained by immigration authorities and held for more than a week at the San Francisco I...

apnews.com/article/texa... researcher faces deportation after being held for week at San Francisco airport

Doctor Who Compared Pandemic Restrictions to Nazi Germany Gains Keys to the Vaccine Vault In the media’s rush to cover the nomination of Casey Means to the position of Surgeon General, one important name was neglected. Means, of course, deserves scrutiny as the co-shepherd of the Make Amer...

Describing Prasad as a “contrarian” is an understatement. For a less hagiographical profile of his actions during the COVID pandemic, see:

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

I’m hearing chatter that senior NIH leadership received an email from Memoli Friday morning castigating NCI for posting their payline with attribution to MYF.

I hear the email said something about how we don’t need to inform the community.

So much for transparency!

This is a “Tragedy of the Commons,” in which individual institutions acting in what they believe to be their own self-interest fail to protect the collective good.

“Vought holds to a legal theory that the President has the power to decide not to spend funds.”

C’mon WSJ, you know that this is outside of the President’s constitutional authority, which has been affirmed by the Supreme Court, the DOJ and the GAO.

Sounds serious. If only the Administration hadn’t gutted our public health infrastructure.

Retraction has always been an honorable way for authors to withdraw published work from the literature when they no longer consider the results to be valid.

As the late statistician Stephen Lagakos noted, “You may be able to lie with statistics, but it’s a lot easier to lie without them.”

In fact, we mentioned the arsenic paper as an example of a paper that was clearly wrong but not retracted. This was in 2014.

Sources of error in the retracted scientific literature Retraction of flawed articles is an important mechanism for correction of the scientific literature. We recently reported that the majority of retractions are associated with scientific misconduct. In...

I respectfully disagree that retracting papers for simply being wrong is new. Over 10 years ago colleagues and I reviewed 423 retractions for errors such as those in the arsenic paper— contamination, analytical error and irreproducibility.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395722/

Trump Gets Rid of Those Pesky Statistics The numbers were simply not patriotic enough.

Donald Trump Declares Victory Over Statistics

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget Senate budget bill includes small increase for the health-research agency — but faces a long road before being signed into law.

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Professional societies like the AMA, ACP, IDSA, AAP, AAFP, etc. are “special interest groups” that must be excluded, but anti-vax groups like NVIC are welcome. US vaccine policy has clearly passed through the looking glass now.

Trump said that he will reduce drug prices by “amounts that nobody can even imagine,” and for once he is telling the truth.

“These schools do not have any ideological values other than their own flourishing. . . This is why the administration will crush them.”

COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.

"This implied notion that Sweden’s experience proves lockdowns were pointless, we could have largely ignored the pandemic, and overall deaths would have gone down is certainly provocative, but it’s utter nonsense." prospect.org/health/2025-...

Jay Bhattacharya once studied health disparities. As NIH director, he’s allowed such research to wither Jay Bhattacharya’s tenure as NIH director has seen health disparities research swept up in the Trump administration’s attack on DEI

Incredibly well reported deep dive on NIH and health disparities research in STAT. 🧵

www.statnews.com/2025/08/01/n...

1/31

Should be an STD drug with that name

“By replacing vaccine groupthink with a diversity of perspectives, Secretary Kennedy is strengthening the integrity of the advisory process.”

The whole damn point of the committee is to reach an expert consensus on how best to use vaccines. We don’t need diverse opinions from every kook & crackpot.

Deleted some over-negative messages about the Senate NIH bill today after some internal discussion.

It’s a win. Let’s take the win. We all did this, NIH community!

The question remains: how do we get Russ Vought out of NIH and stop him from blowing up grants via interference w the agency?

“RFK Jr’s stated concerns ring hollow and his solution is nonsensical.”

This is great news. It is also as clear as a signal that Congress wants to keep the Department of Education and most of it's programs. So why is the Supreme Court allowing Trump to fire its employees and end those programs?

With boost to NIH budget, Senate panel rejects Trump’s plan to slash agency Republicans on spending committee push back against proposed reorganization and overhead cuts

We take any good news we can get these days about US science funding.

Another important bit that's absent from the bill — collapsing NIH's 27 institutes into 8, and getting rid of some like the minority-health and nursing-research institutes.

The 27 institutes and centers would stay the same under this proposal.

Interesting adopted amendment from Sen Reed re. clinical trials abroad targeted by the NIH's ban on foreign subawards.

The amendment allows "reimbursements and other funding arrangements with research partners abroad to foster pediatric cancer, rare disease, HIV and infectious disease
research."

Here's the Baldwin amendment that DOES effectively prevent NIH from implementing multi-year funding.

Deleted my previous post; the amendments hadn't been posted yet. h/t @davidimiller.bsky.social

But no previous President has failed to honor existing research commitments on purely ideological grounds. Don’t try to pretend this is just business as usual.