We all want @NIH to succeed and I believe that dissent in science is productive. However, the Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions NIH has taken in recent months. 🧵1/5 We’re working to remove ideological influence from science. NIH funding must be based on provable, testable hypotheses, not ideological narratives. Projects that don’t meet that bar are discontinued so we can focus on rigorous, impactful research. 🧵2/5

In 2022, the @NIH terminated a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. American taxpayers had for years been sending money there to fund dangerous gain of function research. Wuhan refused to turn over lab notebooks that the NIH demanded.
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thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to… Under the old system, which the @nih replaced this week, grantees were supposed to police the behavior of subawardees, including data sharing, financial auditing, etc. In the Wuhan case, we all saw how poorly that worked out...
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Two weeks ago, I ordered all work to halt at a high biosecurity risk @nih lab located in Frederick, MD. I did this because of a serious incident involving biosafety that had occurred in early March, but which did not cross my desk until weeks later.
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foxnews.com/politics/hhs-h… It turns out that a contractor at the lab had deliberately cut a hole in a biocontainment suit over a personal dispute with a co-worker.

Researchers are supposed to wear these suits when they do experiments with dangerous pathogens. This is how lab leaks can happen!
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