Max Kozlov

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

Powerful @maxkozlov.bsky.social interview with Susan Monarez, who was fired from the CDC for standing up to Robert Kennedy's demands. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

Read our exclusive interview by @maxkozlov.bsky.social with the ex-CDC director - Susan Monarez -
In which she talks about the importance of the job and the reasons why she was fired

🧪 #CDC #MedSky
@nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

"But whether or not I ever want to go back to the federal government — I just don’t know if I can. I know that there is greatness in health innovation in the United States...And I just don’t ever want to be put in a position where we don’t embrace that"

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

Powerful interview of recently fired CDC director by @maxkozlov.bsky.social . What unfolded is chilling and also sad to read in her words. The decimation of the CDC is a low point in global public health history because its impact extended beyond America.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

EXCLUSIVE: In her first interview all year, Susan Monarez, CDC director for only 29 days, tells me why Trump/RFK fired her and where this is all headed.

The CDC director is an “inherently political position, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be politically compromised”, she tells @nature.com.

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

In a wide ranging interview, Monarez told me about her upbringing, why she was interested in the job, and her reactions to the shooting on the CDC campus that left one dead and shattered some 150 windows.

“The CDC is far too important to just give up on,” she says.

Read the full interview ⤵️.

Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired “I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.

EXCLUSIVE: In her first interview all year, Susan Monarez, CDC director for only 29 days, tells me why Trump/RFK fired her and where this is all headed.

The CDC director is an “inherently political position, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be politically compromised”, she tells @nature.com.

NIH races to spend its 2025 grant money — but fewer projects win funding Despite political obstacles, officials are on track to disburse all of the research funds allocated to US biomedical behemoth.

Staff members at the NIH seem to have done the impossible: spend the agency's $48 billion budget.

“Everyone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it’s a mess that did not need to be made,” an NIH program officer told me.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

From an NIH source:

"The fact that it’s 8am on the day of a likely shutdown, and NIH personnel have received not one word about it from our leaders, from HHS, or higher, is gobsmacking.

Normally we receive shutdown preparations emails starting days in advance. Absolute silence except at IC level."

To pick up the spending pace, some employees cancelled holiday plans, worked overtime and filled in for staff laid off across the agency.

This year, “it’s like a pressure cooker that exploded. There was a willingness to work extra hard to move the science forward”, a staffer told me.

Thousands fewer projects will be funded so success rates for grant applications hit all-time lows.

“That is extremely demoralizing,” says ex-extramural chief Mike Lauer. “We want people to be excited about being in science. This will do even more to chase people away from doing science in the US.”

NIH races to spend its 2025 grant money — but fewer projects win funding Despite political obstacles, officials are on track to disburse all of the research funds allocated to US biomedical behemoth.

Staff members at the NIH seem to have done the impossible: spend the agency's $48 billion budget.

“Everyone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it’s a mess that did not need to be made,” an NIH program officer told me.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NIH races to spend its 2025 grant money — but fewer projects win funding Despite political obstacles, officials are on track to disburse all of the research funds allocated to US biomedical behemoth.

Despite political obstacles, officials are on track to disburse all of the research funds allocated to the NIH

go.nature.com/46Mxycw

From an NIH source:

"The fact that it’s 8am on the day of a likely shutdown, and NIH personnel have received not one word about it from our leaders, from HHS, or higher, is gobsmacking.

Normally we receive shutdown preparations emails starting days in advance. Absolute silence except at IC level."

Several scientists have received letters from the NIH director disinviting them from their positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding, I'm told.

In July, I reported that NIH staff were told to select members aligned with Trump administration priorities.

Recently I learned that civil servants have the First Amendment-protected right to speak out on matters of public concern.

Thurgood Marshall, in an 8-1 SCOTUS decision, noted that government employees know how the gov’t works, and the public has a special interest in hearing from them.

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history.

"The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

And THIS is interesting as a much more shall we say pointed counterfactual: tracing the impact of past NIH grants that specifically look like projects the Trump administration is currently trying to defund

bsky.app/profile/maxk...

The benefits of NIH-funded research are "widespread and diffuse," and that a large-scale budget cut in the past would have likely led to "substantially fewer medical innovations", conclude @pierre-azoulay.bsky.social @sampat.bsky.social and colleagues.

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

Coincidentally, another group published results today on a very similar question: What research wouldn't have gotten done had the NIH's budget been cut by 40%, as Trump proposed?

Under that scenario, NIH-funded research on more than half of 557 drugs approved 2000-2023 would have never happened!

“It’s our whole field! Dammit,” says @microbiome.bsky.social, one of the co-authors of the human-microbiome paper.

“That particular grant was a big multicentre thing, but it had amazing trickle-down effects,” she says.

“It wouldn't have happened without that grant. No way. No way.”

"Highly cited studies that might not have existed if their grant had been cancelled include a seminal paper showcasing the results of the Human Microbiome Project.

It was probably flagged by the algorithm because 3 of its supporting grants referenced the diversity of genetic populations."

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history.

"The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

YouTube video by nature video Why is autism really on the rise? What the science says

Autism is rising. Or at least that’s how it looks. But is it really increasing? And if so, why? As President Donald Trump blames Tylenol, Nature examines the decades of research on the causes of autism.

Read more: go.nature.com/4ns6Rku 🧪

GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy on Trump and RFK Jr’s claims about Tylenol and autism:

“Talk to your OB about it. But secondly, I was talking to a woman, she goes, ‘Oh, this is great. Two men telling me not to take the only thing I can take when my back's hurting and I'm pregnant.’”

Exclusive: RFK Jr cancelled mRNA research — but the US military is still funding it The Department of Defense is continuing to bankroll projects to develop vaccines against deadly pathogens.

Exclusive: The US Department of Defense is continuing to bankroll projects to develop vaccines against deadly pathogens

go.nature.com/46AcHbZ

Yesterday's presser is perhaps the most glaring example of the discrepancy between the Trump admin's words (gold standard science! rigor! reproducibility!) and their actions (citing a couple correlative studies to make massive policy changes).

Placebo RCTs for thee, observational study for me.

Trump links autism and Tylenol: is there any truth to it? The US president calls the widely used painkiller, also known as paracetamol, ‘a very big factor’ in autism, but scientists say that strong evidence is lacking.

My colleagues @heidiledford.bsky.social & @helenpearson.bsky.social looked into the link between autism and Tylenol — here's what they found

“When you see any associations, they are very, very small,” says @jamcusack.bsky.social. People are "trying to look for simple answers to complex problems."

Autism is on the rise: what’s really behind the increase? RFK Jr has vowed to find out what’s responsible, but scientists say he is ignoring answers from decades of research.

Now might be a good time to repost this story about what scientists actually know about the complex causes of autism, and what's behind the increasing prevalence.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Three ways ex-CDC chief says that Trump team is sidelining science Susan Monarez testifies at tense Senate hearing that scientific integrity is being quashed at US health agency.

“I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity. The stakes are not theoretical — we have already seen the largest [US] measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which claimed the lives of two children.”

go.nature.com/46rhA7s