Today is Rene Magritte’s 127th birthday, which is my flimsy excuse for using The Treachery of Images (1927) as the preview image. True story: When I was in grad school there was an emergency exit door on which somebody had taped a picture of the painting with the added caption “This is not an exit”. I’m still puzzling about what that means.
Anyway, today’s update covers updates from NIH, CDC, HHS, and other acronyms. As we enter academia’s quiet season, the cadence of these updates may shift to weekly. But perhaps I’m being overly optimistic.
Today NIH released a new statement about how funding strategies for the agency’s institutes, centers, and offices (ICOs) are to be developed, implemented and evaluated.
Starting in January, funding decisions will “not rely on funding paylines.” Rather, “ICOs will consider these scores in context of their and NIH’s priorities, strategic plans, and budgets.”
This is perhaps good news in terms of increasing transparency. The catch is that “ICO Directors will continue to have the delegated authority to decide what is funded by their ICOs” and many ICO Director positions are worryingly in flux.
In addition to the above, has put also put out a series of notices this week:
NOT-OD-26-007: Reminds recipients that any change in award scope represent new terms and conditions for that award. Specifically, this notice is directed towards recipients who renegotiated their Aims, Objectives, Titles, and/or Abstracts to align with the agency’s priorities.
NOT-OD-26-009: Adds language to the NIH grants policy statement outlining how awards can be cancelled if they no longer effectuate the program goals or agency priorities.
NOT-OD-26-011: Reinforces that NIH is under a continuing resolution and that NIH Institutes and/or Centers may, at their discretion, issue non-competing research grant awards at a level below that indicated on the most recent Notice of Award.
As reported in the New York Times, Stat, and many other outlets, the CDC has updated its informational page on vaccines and autism.
Among other changes, the first bullet point on the site now reads, ”The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
This page now carries one of the more absurd footnotes I have ever seen…
Two friendly reminders: 1. There are many, many studies - including one that used health records from an entire country - providing rigorous evidence that vaccines do not cause autism. 2. The paper that catalyzed this whole mess is - to put it very mildly - not exactly “Gold Standard Science”
Science is reporting that CDC researchers have been told to phase out any projects involving macaques.
The Department of Education announced a series of partnerships with other federal agencies this week, all of which transfer functions out of the agency.
HHS has published a revised version of its May 2025 report on pediatric gender dysphoria. The new version includes responses to a number of solicited peer reviews and, yes, it is as bleak as you might imagine it to be.
The Washington Post has a piece on international student enrollments in US universities. The clearest trends thus appear to be for the enrollment of international students in graduate programs.