Max Kozlov

Bhattacharya testified that he's taking this issue seriously, but I just spoke with a researcher who had completed all the screening and was disinvited from NIAID's council *today*.

NIAID's council is set to run out of voting members in October. No grants can be funded without Council.

Reporting this story in Cameroon, I met people who were blind because larval worms died in their eyeballs: NTDs cause immense suffering and disability.
But they're preventable! And treatable! And eliminatable!

For the same reason that Indiana, which is virtually the same size as Massachusetts received nearly $349 million last year in farm subsidies, while Massachusetts got only about $9 million, 1/39th of Indiana’s boon.

And third, Bhattacharya said many trials were renegotiated to "take out the political ideology" and then allowed to resume.

Senators seemed to accept that reasoning, but I was surprised that they didn't push back on how arbitrarily "political" was defined, and who was making those determinations.

Second, Bhattacharya also said that many grants were restored. Well they were restored because a federal court found the cuts to be unconstitutional and ordered them to!

NIH staff were told not to address ones that were terminated if they didn't sue or appeal.

Bhattacharya said the number of trials disrupted, if you don't count the ones that had funding restored or renegotiated, is not hundreds but about a dozen.

This is misleading. First, funding can't easily be turned on or off, so any disruption is a big problem.

One observation: Several senators brought up terminated grants. Bhattacharya kept saying the agency hasn't cut any funds. That is false.

When he says no funds have been cut, he means NIH spent all its allocated money, as required by law. In fact, a watchdog found NIH illegally impounded funds.

BHATTACHARYA: The key thing about the Danish is the adoption of trust–

CASSIDY: That's because Denmark is not a country — it's a club. Everybody knows each other. They all look alike.

CHAIRMAN CASSIDY (R-LA): We're both professors. Education is the way you address trust.

Saying the MMR should be divided into three doses for no scientific reason...is not going to increase trust. It's going to decrease complete immunization rates. We know that from experience.

BHATTACHARYA: Denmark has strong trust in public health. That's what we're trying to do. Re-establish that public trust.

B-R: I agree on the public trust piece, and that's what is concerning me: Instead of modernizing the NIH, we're actually going backwards to a time we didn't even have vaccines.

RFK's vaccine agenda is a major theme at this hearing.

BLUNT-ROCHESTER (D-Del): It's strange to me we're comparing oureslves to Denmark as a peer nation. Denmark has 6 million people, we have 340 million. Denmark has socialized medicine and universal health care, US does not.

lol. To entertain the possibility he's asking in good faith, the very simple answer is that Boston is one of, if not the, largest hubs in the nation for scientific research with several of the nation's top research institutions. From 2025 RePORTER data, I count 205 research orgs in MA vs 23 in IN.

An NIH staff member texted me wondering if Indiana was looking for some affirmative action or diversity funding.

"We had to terminate all those awards that were specifically targeted to under-represented institutions."

JIM BANKS (R-Indiana): Massachusetts, which is virtually the same size as my state (?!), received nearly $3 billion last year.

Can you explain why schools on the coast seem to get more NIH funding than schools like my state, which is doing a lot of research as well?

[correction: in my haste, I said Baldwin above, when I meant Sen Patty Murray!]

An NIH staff member texted me immediately: "His answer was bullshit btw. It implied that the fault was in NIH not nominating people quick enough rather than the administration not doing their part" to review the slates that agency staff had already submitted.

Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026 Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.

Baldwin quotes directly from my article abt advisory-council vacancies.

BALDWIN: This poses a very serious threat to NIH's ability to fund research.

BHATTACHARYA: I've ordered the ICs to nominate new members... including for the advisory committee to the director [which hasn't met since Dec 2024]

That is false. Hundreds of trials were suspended bc of the COVID-19 pandemic, but trials were not terminated en masse due to changes in "agency priorities" — that happened for the first time under the Trump administration and Bhattacharya's watch.

BALDWIN: Can you guarantee that you will not terminate any more clinical trials this year?

BHATTACHARYA: Most trials were restored–

BALDWIN: My question wasn't going backwards, it's going forwards.

BHATTACHARYA: In 2020, a large number of trials were terminated. It's hard to predict the future.

Bhattacharya was cautious on the topic of vaccines, emphasizing multiple times he was trying to improve the trust of patients in their doctors and in vaccines.

Sanders pushed back, noting that spreading misinformation does not engender trust.

bsky.app/profile/maxk...

Modernizing the National Institutes of Health: Faster Discoveries, More Cures | The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Full Committee Hearing on February 3, 2026 at 5:00 AM

I'm on Capitol Hill watching NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya testify to the Senate HELP committee.

Thankfully I haven't been escorted out of this event (yet). Here's what I'm following. You can also watch live here:
www.help.senate.gov/hearings/mod...

Seems to be setting up for an argument that a combo of vaccines might be linked to autism.

Trump and RFK have both falsely claimed that children get a "vat of 80 different vaccines" that "overloads" their immune systems.

Sanders: Do vaccines cause autism to the American people?

Bhattacharya: I do not believe the measles vaccine causes autism.

Sanders: I didn't ask about measles. Do vaccines cause autism?

Bhattacharya: I have not seen a study to suggest any **single** vaccine causes autism.

(emphasis mine)

Both Memoli and Bhattacharya downplayed the urgency of the problem, even as NIMHD is slated to run out of voting members next month.

"You'll see this problem essentially solved by the end of the year," Memoli said.

Bhattacharya said he's urging that Councils have more young scientists on them.

Top NIH leaders addressed my scoop that advisory councils are running out of voting members at the Reclaiming Science event (I'm now watching live stream).

Memoli says NIH was 3 years behind in filling slots when he came in (but neglects to say NIH disinvited dozens of people about to join them).

This must be that radical transparency I keep hearing about.

This is a targeted attack on science media.

Bhattacharya has slammed science media for what he calls biased coverage, but how are our readers — the global scientific community — supposed to understand his new agency priorities if we can't even get in the door?

I'm at the Willard Hotel where I've been denied entry and kicked out of the Reclaiming Science event with NIH director Bhattacharya & other top agency leaders.

@jocelynkaiser.bsky.social and I registered for the event months ago yet were told capacity was full, even as they let in dozens of others.

Bhattacharya, a moment ago: "What you've been seeing in the press is that there have been funding cuts. There haven't been funding cuts. What there has been is a change in agency priorities."

Our year in numbers begs to differ
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

An NIH source tells me that after this story was published, agency leadership held an emergency meeting about Council approval and is looking for ways to speed up the pipeline.

"Better late than never?" the source says.