Trump Administration Targets More Than 5,000 NIH, CDC Bureaucrats To Be Laid Off; USAID-Funded Pandemic Research Failed To Spot COVID Or Ensure Chinese Transparency, and other C-Virus related stories
Trump administration targets more than 5,000 NIH, CDC bureaucrats to be laid off:
The Trump administration will reportedly fire thousands of federal employees working in public health and science agencies on Friday as part of its effort to shrink the size of government.
The latest cuts will affect about 5,200 employees working across agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to STAT News.
The mass firing will target recent hires still on probationary employment, which typically applies to workers who have been on the job for less than one year, the health and medicine outlet reported.
The CDC alone will lose roughly 1,300 workers as a result of the purge. It’s unclear how many NIH employees will be fired.
Affected workers will be placed on paid leave for one month, without access to work systems, before their termination, according to STAT News.
“HHS is following the administration’s guidance and taking action to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government,” an HHS spokesperson told The Post.
“This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard,” the rep added.
The CDC and NIH did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Over the past week, an unspecified number of contract workers at HHS agencies have also been informed that their positions are being eliminated, including dozens at the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, STAT News reported. —>READ MORE HERE
USAID-Funded Pandemic Research Failed To Spot COVID or Ensure Chinese Transparency:
President Donald Trump’s effort to unilaterally wind down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has sparked a heated debate about the agency’s role in pandemic response.
USAID’s defenders cite its important role in researching viruses and responding to disease outbreaks. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, on the other hand, accused it of “[funding] bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people.”
What is the truth?
In the case of the most recent pandemic at least, it’s fair to say that USAID’s pandemic prevention efforts were a failure. The agency’s programs for predicting and stopping a global virus outbreak in the human population missed COVID-19.
Those same programs also directed millions of dollars in grant funding to the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance and its subgrantee, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—two organizations that feature prominently in investigations into the possibility that COVID-19 was an engineered virus that escaped from a lab.
EcoHealth Alliance, its now-former president Peter Daszak, and WIV were all debarred from receiving federal funding during the Biden administration for failing to abide by restrictions and transparency requirements related to virological experiments they were conducting in Wuhan—where the COVID-19 outbreak started.
Those experiments involved collecting SARS-like coronavirus viruses in the field, from both animal and human sources, and then manipulating them in at WIV.
As I detailed in a story for Reason last year, some of those experiments resulted in the creation of hybrid viruses that were more transmissible and deadly in humans than their natural variants.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded those experiments in likely violation of the then-extant federal government pause on so-called “gain-of-function” research.
NIAID was not the only agency funding EcoHealth’s work with WIV.
The organization was also a subgrantee on USAID’s PREDICT program.
Between 2009 and 2019, USAID spent $210 million on the PREDICT program—which collected virus samples in numerous countries and shipped them off to dozens of labs for further research. —>READ MORE HERE
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