NIH whistleblower on vaccines says ‘the story needed to be told’

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach Megan on Signal at mmolteni.13.

Whistleblower complaints by two former top National Institutes of Health officials offer their inside accounts of the Trump administration’s targeting of vaccine science at the world’s largest funder of biomedical research and the reach of Matthew Memoli, the agency’s deputy director, in enacting those policies. 

The complaints were filed Thursday by the former directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Fogarty International Center, who claim they were illegally forced out of their jobs in retaliation for raising concerns about grant cancellations and increasing involvement from political appointees. They allege that the administration operated in a manner that was likely illegal in terminating wide swaths of grants to external researchers focusing on topics the White House deemed unworthy and that a half-billion-dollar program created to study flu vaccines violated norms by circumventing scientific peer review. 

“People need to know the story of what went down” internally at NIH “because we’ve heard a lot about CDC,” Jeanne Marrazzo, the former director of NIAID, told STAT. “But the focus on vaccines and infectious diseases really demands a full accounting of how what’s happened at NIH dovetails very well with what’s happening and being done” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies. “The story needed to be told,” she added.