This week has been approximately 10,000 days long. Personally, I’ve found some comfort in this piece of elder millennial catnip.
As far as the wide world of biomedical science and higher education: There’s some good news about NIH’s budget (with several big caveats), a couple of policy updates, and news out of RPI and UC Berkeley.
According to analysis by Stat, it looks like the NIH will be spending its whole budget this year.
The agency has lagged behind in spending its budget for most of the year due to various pauses, reviews, and personnel changes. There was even concern that unspent funds would be a subject to a “pocket rescission”, but that no longer seems likely.
Unfortunately, while the amount of funds spent is catching up to expected levels, the number of projects funded this year has substantially decreased. This is likely due to the “forward funding” model implemented earlier this year.
HHS Director RFK Jr has continued to state that the agency will have a report on the cause of autism later this month.
As of yesterday, we have the first indication of the types of work that will be funded through this effort- a contract between the CDC and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to study the association between vaccines and autism. This is, of course, as close to already settled science as possible.
In other “gold standard science” news, The Atlantic has a beguiling piece on where recent focus on the - completely unsupported - association between Tylenol and autism may have come from.
The Conversation has a nice piece that lays out the broad ripple effects of NIH funding cuts. A newish report from the Brookings Institution covers similar territory for college towns.
Two new policy announcements from NIH this week:
NOT-OD-25 - Which changes the structure of projects with foreign components. Essentially, any funded grant with international components will be disaggregated into an award for any domestic components and separate awards for any international components.
NOT-OD-25-154 - Which deals with “research security” issues. There’s a lot to untangle here, but a major takeaway is that individuals who are a party to a Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Program (MFTRP) can no longer serve as senior/key personnel on NIH grants. There isn’t an easily accessible definition of an MFTRP, but it appears to roughly refer to entities on this list.
The SF Chronicle reported yesterday that UC Berkeley has turned over the names of 160 students, faculty and staff to comply with a federal investigation into their “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism”. Berkeley’s student newspaper has additional details, including a note that other UC campuses may have done the same but have yet to inform the individuals whose information was shared. Judith Butler is quoted all over this story.
The next meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is next Thursday (9/18).
While the committee’s membership has been making news lately, the Wall Street Journal reported today that the Administration is poised to present data they claim links COVID vaccines to the deaths of at least 25 children.
The data appears to come from Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which contains unverified reports that can be submitted by anyone. There is no evidence for such an association from other sources.
I missed this in the deluge of other news, but the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has announced that it has opened an investigation into the National Academies over a review it is conducting on the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on public health.
Today’s cover image was taken with a cheap point and shoot camera and Ilford Delta 400 35mm film, which rules (the film, not my picture taking).