27 UNIHTED / NIH Vigils Newsletter 8/16/26

Written By Cara AB

Hi NIH Vigilers and 27 UNIHTED Community

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Aldous Huxley

Here are the facts we refuse to ignore this week.

Vigil “Auntie” News 

- The Good -

Senate Overwhelmingly Passes Bill Temporarily Blocking OMB Grant Overhaul

The Senate voted 90–6 on August 8 for a bill that would keep government agencies funded through December 11 and, for that period, prohibit implementation of new federal grant regulations requiring, among other things, senior political appointee review of awards.  The House must still hold its vote after it returns to session on August 31 and has the option to amend the Senate bill.  It is important to note that the continuing resolution (CR) passed by the House before its August recess did not include a delay on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) grant rule.  Nevertheless, Roll Call has predicted an easy passage in the House, with both chambers of Congress eager to avoid a federal shutdown prior to the midterm elections.  This CR is by no means a permanent fix to the impending doomsday of a proposed rule that would sideline scientific judgement in favor of the Trump administration’s ill-informed pet priorities but it means 2+ more months from OMB’s initially planned Oct 1 effective date; time that legislators and science advocates can use to continue pushing for complete and well-deserved rejection of the proposed rule.

More Good News:

  • NIH-funded research published in Nature found that reactivation of latent viruses may be one contributor to long COVID.

  • Republican Senator Bill Cassidy criticized President Trump’s executive order on childhood vaccines, writing, “This executive order is wrong.  The President does not have the expertise to make these changes. Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe.”  Ironically, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who pushed for the order, probably would not have been confirmed by the Senate last year without Cassidy’s vote.

  • Although vaccines are under attack by anti-vax forces, everyone still seems to like antibiotics (at least, for now).  A bipartisan Stop Superbugs Act was introduced in the Senate to authorize NIH to speed up clinical trials for new antibiotics, with the goal of combating drug-resistant strains.

  • Artificial intelligence was used to create 16 new bacteriophages capable of infecting E. coli—both a remarkable scientific advance and a potentially scary biosecurity risk.

  • In a Republican squabble, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s eating habits a “crazy diet.”  Often termed a “steak and sauerkraut diet,” it focuses on meat and fermented vegetables.  Nutrition experts agree with some elements of Kennedy’s approach but are concerned about the heavy emphasis on meat and lack of nutritional balance.

- The Bad -

Final Rule Bans Federal Funding of Gender-Affirming Care for Minors 

Despite overwhelming opposition, the final rule was issued on August 11.  Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds may no longer be used to provide puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or surgery for enrollees under the age of 18 for Medicaid or 19 for CHIP.  While such surgery is rarely performed on minors, it is estimated that 130,000 trans youth could lose access to their current gender-affirming medications. The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association all support gender-affirming care for trans youth and opposed this change in public comments, as did 90% of the overall 11,000 public comments submitted.

Bhattacharya Engages in a Testy Interview on “Face the Nation”

NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya was interviewed on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” where he blamed many national health concerns on the media and the Biden administration.  Bhattacharya appeared both inarticulate and belligerent, telling host Margaret Brennan “The key thing is, there’s a loss of public trust in public health that happened in part because of — frankly even on this network and on other networks— there was a particular single point of view put across during the COVID pandemic about, you know, that led to things that really did cause harm to people.”  Brennan did not let the false claims stand, saying “The pandemic began under the Trump administration…  RFK Jr. called the COVID vaccine the deadliest vaccine ever made. That is misinformation.”  Bhattacharya refused to back down, saying “distrust was not caused by President Trump. It wasn’t caused by Bobby [Kennedy, Jr]. It was caused by a lot of sort of misinformation, often spread by the government itself, spread by mask mandates.”

Misinformation Campaign Against Fauci Continues: COVID Vaccines and Miscarriages

While all the data clearly shows that COVID vaccines pose no added risk to pregnancy, Republican lawmakers recently released faulty statistics along with early emails from former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci.  They used these items to suggest that there was an increased risk of miscarriage after being vaccinated that was covered up by Fauci.  In her Substack “You Can Know Things,” Kristen Panthagani analyzes Fauci’s text messages and concludes that “Dr. Fauci’s texts were consistent with public messaging about COVID vaccines for pregnant women at the time: the risks weren’t fully known, and more data was needed.  The data is now here and tells a clear story— there is no association between COVID vaccination and miscarriage.”

More Bad News:

  • The National Cancer Institute has new requirements for additional justification of the use of animal models in cancer research.  Now abstracts must justify the use of the model, explain why other methods are inferior, and describe a plan for validation in humans.  

  • NIH is proposing changes to how peer review outcomes are reported.  These changes would remove transparency, hiding the impact score from applicants and NIH program staff and replacing numeric scores with “binning,” reporting on whether an application was in the top 25%, the second 25%, or the bottom half.  Public comments to this proposal are due October 13.

  • NIH K award funds may no longer be used “to support the conduct of a clinical trial, clinical trial feasibility study, or ancillary study to an existing clinical trial.”  This change comes as part of a larger restructuring of K awards that includes the elimination of the requirement for a data management and sharing plan (DMSP).

- The Ugly -

Trump Undermines Evidence-Based Childhood Vaccine Policy

In what can only be described as staggering cognitive dissonance, Trump’s executive order on “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” released on August 10 both calls for fewer childhood vaccines and mandates that the combined MMR be administered as three separate vaccines, preferably at three separate doctor visits.  There is no scientific, public health, or economic basis to split the MMR and, in fact, it would be counter-productive.  Follow-up reporting found that no individual measles, mumps, or rubella vaccines are currently licensed in the United States, while Merck and GSK said there is no published scientific evidence supporting separation of the combined vaccine; experts estimated developing and licensing separate products could take years and potentially as long as a decade.  It is notable that the American Association of Pediatrics is not changing their recommendations for immunizations and remains a trusted source of information on vaccine benefits and risks.  This will be an early test for Erica Schwartz, the not-yet-sworn-in director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who will have to decide how to respond to President Trump’s new executive order.  During her confirmation hearing, she said she would follow the science.  We will see.

NIH-Funded Science Should Not Inform Policy, According to Leadership

Max Kozlov’s recent article in Nature describes how NIH “has begun turning away research grant applications for which the ‘primary function’ is informing policymakers and legislators.”  Internal documents state that policymakers “are not considered a stakeholder group within the scope of NIH’s mission,” and NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya has been reiterating this message publicly.  27 UNIHTED, along with current and former NIH workers, authored a Substack about this very topic earlier last week, outlining the harms and hypocrisy behind the decision.  The Substack authors state clearly that we “cannot hope to improve public health if NIH actively prevents research intended to inform policy and policymakers.”  According to Meredith Matone of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, “public policy that is blind to current evidence risks safety and effectiveness.”

Science Interrupted

What We’ve Lost: Climate-and-Health Research

In Trump 2.0, extensive changes to the U.S. stance on climate change are impeding our ability to respond.  Recent progress is being undone, and U.S. emissions are projected to be up to 18% higher by 2035.  Among the losses:

NIH has supported climate-and-health research for decades, but the Climate Change and Health Initiative, launched in 2021, was an intentional effort to build something bigger.  Congress invested an additional $40 million for it in FY2023, and by FY2024 the initiative spanned 12 NIH institutes and centers (ICs), funded 16 new exploratory research centers, and included a Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center with more than 2,000 active members.  Its Climate and Health Scholars Program brought outside experts directly into NIH to strengthen scientific, training, data, and policy capacity.

Then, in February 2025, HHS abruptly ended funding for all three pieces of this hard-won infrastructure—not because they were ineffective, but because they were inconsistent with the Trump administration’s new climate and energy policy.  NIH subsequently rebuilt part of that capacity at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) under a much narrower “Health and Extreme Weather” program.  Consistent with this restructure, the journal Nature revealed internal NIH guidance in May that directed staff across multiple ICs to continue supporting research on “[e]xtreme heat, floods, wildfires, and other weather-related exposures only; no funding is allowed for studies related to fossil fuels or alternative energy sources, such as solar power.” 

This administration has not simply cut climate-and-health research.  It has dismantled an extraordinary effort of human coordination to understand and combat climate change as a public-health threat while simultaneously restricting the questions NIH researchers are allowed to pursue.  The honest fact is that climate change will continue to affect human health whether or not the federal government chooses to study it.  What we are losing is our ability to understand those effects—and the evidence we need to respond.

Reflection from the Community

“However, as we organize—through the Bethesda Declaration, 27UNIHted, with kindred spirits—we resist the sense of paralysis and stand up to the bullies.  Deep in my heart, I believe reason, rule of law, and justice will prevail if we fight back on the senseless assaults.  It is not easy, but giving up is not an option.”

-Anonymous Retired Worker (from “Reflections on the NIH Reduction in Force”)

Leadership Watch

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally has a permanent director.  The Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz on August 5 by a 51–44 vote, after the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee advanced her nomination in late July.  Schwartz takes over an agency that has spent months cycling through leadership changes while facing intense scrutiny over vaccine policy, scientific independence, and the direction of federal public health.

The HELP Committee also advanced Sean Kaufman’s nomination for HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, though his confirmation by the full Senate remains pending.  If confirmed, Kaufman would oversee major pieces of the nation’s emergency-preparedness infrastructure, including the Strategic National Stockpile–an emergency reserve of medicines, medical supplies, and equipment–and federal programs responsible for developing and deploying medical countermeasures during a public-health crisis.  Kaufman’s nomination has faced a bumpier path after past comments questioning vaccines—including the infant hepatitis B vaccine and the debunked vaccine-autism link—and his support for halting some mRNA vaccine research drew sharp criticism from HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy.

Upcoming Events

27 UNIHTED / NIH community events

Community Events

  • 8/18, 1:30 pm - NIH Small Business 101.  NIH is hosting a free webinar series on small business funding opportunities (SBIR/STTR) on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm ET.  The last, "Managing Foreign Risk," will occur on August 18.

  • 8/19, 10:00 am - 3:30 pm - NIH Autism Data Science Initiative: Research Progress and Future Directions.  NIH will host a virtual public webinar reviewing ADSI progress and future research directions, including community engagement, autism etiology/causation, treatments, and validation/replication.  Watch on NIH Videocast.

  • 8/19, 12:30 pm - Research!America Learning Lunch: “Bridging Community and Research: Communicating Science Effectively.”  Free virtual discussion on communicating research to general audiences and building collaborations between researchers and communities.  Register through this link.

  • 8/20, 8:00 - 9:00 pm - Union for Concerned Scientists - August Recess Office Hour.  Scientists and science supporters can get help planning congressional-recess advocacy, including efforts supporting the Scientific Integrity Act.  Register by clicking here.

  • 8/25 - Recognizing Civil Servants Through the Service to America Medals.  Partnership for Public Service/FedSupport webinar about the “Sammies,” and the upcoming nomination process.  Register here.

  • 8/27, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm - Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee meeting.  The rescheduled meeting will be held in person at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Neuroscience Center in Rockville and online via NIH Videocast.  Advance registration is required for in-person attendance, link TBD.  Public comments are due August 20 (See CTA below).

  • 8/28, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm - March on Washington: Defend the Vote.  At the Lincoln Memorial, the National Action Network, the King family, and partner civil-rights groups will rally around voting rights, civil rights, and economic justice.  Registration form here.

Calls To Action

Wondering how to write a public comment for the Federal Register?  Find commenting guidance at Regulations.gov.

*Ending Soon* Tell NIH how scientific impact should be measured by Aug 19

NIH is seeking public input on what features of modern science—including replication, transparency, collaboration, rigor, and other forms of research contribution—should be measured, recognized, and rewarded.  Submit feedback through this comment form.

*Ending Soon* Comment on the Proposed Autism Strategic Plan by Aug 20 

Submit a public comment showing your concern with the proposed strategic plan by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) before the August 27 meeting.  To submit, send an email to IACCPublicInquiries@mail.nih.gov.  Comments should be included in the body of the email or attached as a Word document.

*Ending Soon* Comment on NSF’s proposed grant-policy overhaul by August 24.

NSF is accepting public comments on draft Guidance on Financial Assistance that would replace its current Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide.  Stand Up for Science warns that parts of the draft adopt key elements of OMB’s controversial proposed grant rules before those rules have even been finalized.

*NEW* Submit a Comment About Proposed Changes to NIH Grant Review Reporting 

NIH is seeking public input on the proposed change to report application categorization as “most competitive,” “competitive,” and “not discussed” in lieu of final overall impact score. Comments due by October 13.

Submit Ideas for Future NIH Common Fund Priorities

NIH is seeking public input on cross-cutting biomedical and behavioral research challenges that could be addressed through workshops, pilot initiatives, or future NIH Common Fund programs.  Direct inquiries to: Common Fund Office-Office of the Director (OD), cf-ideas@mail.nih.gov.  Responses are due by September 19. 

Sign the SUFS Petition Supporting Dr Fauci

According to Stand Up for Science (SUFS), it is likely illegal that the Republicans on the Senate panel referred the contempt resolution to the Justice Department without a full-Senate vote.  On August 7, 2026, SUFS published a petition to Congress to rescind the contempt referral to the Justice Department immediately.  Currently at 500 public signatures.

Endorse the Bethesda Declaration - One Year Later

A year after the release of the original Bethesda Declaration, NIH staff remain concerned.  The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026.  If you share these concerns, be counted as a supporter of the Bethesda Declaration: One Year Later.  Learn more about the Bethesda Declaration Movement on 27 UNIHTED's Bethesda Declaration Hub.  Currently at 480+ signatures.

Impeach Vought

Add your name (or anonymous voice) on the petition to urge Congress to impeach Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought for unlawfully dismantling government services Americans rely on.  Learn more at www.impeachvought.com.  Currently at 2,555 signatures.

Stand with EPA scientists

More than 100 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees were fired for signing a Declaration of Dissent raising concerns about their working environment and recent policy changes.  Sign the petition to support these silenced staff members who were retaliated against for speaking out to protect science and public health.  Currently at 579 signatures.

Sign on for Scientific Integrity

The Union of Concerned Scientists has drafted a letter of support for the Scientific Integrity Act, which has been reintroduced to the Senate.  Let our leaders know that evidence-based decision-making is important to you by signing The Momentum for Scientific Integrity Action here.

Stand up for the National Science Board

On April 25, the Trump administration dismissed all sitting members of the National Science Board, an independent advisory group for the National Science Foundation.  Sign this open letter to Congress from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine (NASEM), asking for the reinstatement of fired members and appointments for all vacant positions.  27 UNIHTED has added its organizational endorsement.  Currently at 5,855 public and organizational endorsements.

Reach out to your members of Congress about issues that matter to you. 

Some possible topics:

Help the NIH Community:  Review a resume, host a job workshop, plan a happy hour, volunteer, and/or advocate with 27 UNIHTED.  Check out the links on our website to take action and volunteer. 

Wellness Weekly

Our somewhat serious community recommendations for self-care are:

  • Walk to the store instead of driving

  • Read an utterly indulgent book just for fun

  • Let yourself go to bed when you’re tired, not when you’ve “gotten enough done”

In solidarity,

27 UNIHTED and NIH Vigils

Cara AB
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27 UNIHTED / NIH Vigils Newsletter 8/9/26