Making Infectious Disease Great Again...On Purpose.

StopAllTheScience

InSectionsVille

The confirmation hearings for Bobby the Younger are scheduled to take place later this week.

And yet, the following, as noted by Anil Oza at STAT News, has already happened:

A flurry of scientific gatherings and panels across federal science agencies were canceled on Wednesday, at a time of heightened sensitivity about how the Trump administration will shift the agencies’ policies and day-to-day affairs.

Several meetings of National Institutes of Health (NIH) study sections, which review applications for fellowships and grants, were canceled without being rescheduled, according to agency notices reviewed by STAT. 

A Feb. 20-21 meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a panel that advises the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services on vaccine policy, was also canceled. So was a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria that was scheduled for Jan. 28 and 29...

The point is, they don't even need to install Mr. Kennedy as their codswallop spewing figurehead because the extremists are already at the helm.


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While the immediately scary stuff here is the halting of the vaccine and antibiotic resistance advisory committees, in the American NIH biomedical research system 'study sections' are, essentially, the same as grant panels in the much smaller Canadian CIHR system. These study sections are where the real hard-nosed biomedical discovery funding decisions are made by scientists, not bureaucrats. Thus, the fact that the extremists are also cancelling US NIH study section meetings is really worrisome as it could be a spanner chucked in the gears of the world's biggest evidence-based, scientifically driven biomedical research engine. And we already know how threatened the extremists are by evidence and science.


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