How scientists are fighting the Trump administration’s attempts to silence them

We’ve talked a lot on the program about the Trump administration’s wars on science and education and why they’re doing as part of a larger far-right attack on the achievements of modernity.

This month, the president announced that a change to federal immunization guidance for infants to reduce the number of recommended shots. He cited no actual evidence, just his ludicrous belief that doctors were pumping infants with a liter of vaccine liquids. I wish I was joking.

In addition to the harms to public health and science that Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Junior are creating, the destruction is wreaking havoc on real people’s lives at the scientific and government agencies.

My guests on this episode are two people who have been on the frontlines of these battles. Both are former employees at the National Institutes of Health, which has seen massive layoffs and its scientific recommendations ignored and censored by Kennedy and its director Jay Bhattacharya — after he made his career claiming to oppose censorship of science. They also have a great essay out about the Trump administration’s attacks on science and how to fight them.

Alexa Romberg was former deputy chief at the Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Sylvia Chou was program director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute and is a scholar of linguistics and health communication. Both are members of 27 UNIHTED, an organization supporting employees who have been laid off or resigned from the National Institutes of Health.

Our conversation focuses on the how people have been impacted, the hypocrisy of Bhattacharya, and why scientists are having to learn to be more political with their livelihoods under attack.

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The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:12 — The people behind the worst Covid-19 ideas are running Trump’s health policies