NIH's New Nepotism – Atlantic

Matthew J. Memoli's year was exceptionally good.

In early January, Memoli, a little-known flu researcher, runs a small laboratory at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of National Institutes. The Trump administration then used him as the acting director of a $48 billion federal agency, who was responsible for the suspension of rewards, mass withdrawal of grants, refunds for clinical trials, and the firing of thousands of employees. Now, NIH’s chief deputy director Memoli will soon see his research thriving: he and a close collaborator, Jeffery Taubenberger (also NIH), recently joined NIH’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Wall Street Journal The couple will now award up to $500 million in bonuses through their in-house vaccine research, according to reports Thursday. (All the current and former NIH officials I spoke to with this story have requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution from the federal government.)

In a press release last week, the Department of Health and Human Services described the award’s goal as developing a universal vaccine against influenza viruses, coronaviruses and other “epidemic and prone viruses,” a valuable investment. The universal vaccine is designed to immediately prevent multiple strains of the virus, including versions of pathogens that have not yet caused an outbreak.

But several vaccine researchers and immunologists told me that this particular course on pandemic prevention is shortsighted and suspicious, especially as the government has been tricking HHS staff and divest funds from hundreds of other infectious disease-centric projects. As stated in the press release, this new project, known as the “Gold Standard for Generations”, appears to rely solely on one vaccination strategy, rather than a particularly novel one. The way awards represent the traditional model of government, the assembly of groups of independent scientific experts, to consider a range of research strategies while funding several projects in separate institutions, hoping that at least one person will succeed. One official told me that Memoli was involved in the latest award “apparently someone who took advantage of the system”.

When I contacted HHS and Memoli for comment, they were in conflict with the accounts of the Gold Standard Generation. A HHS spokesman confirmed to me that the total award is $500 million, only mentioning Memoli and Taubenberger's vaccine technology when discussing the program, describing it as “developed entirely by government scientists.” By contrast, Memoli wrote to me in an email saying that the $500 million would “support multiple projects”, including partners within and outside the NIH and described it as “a large-scale investment in a large number of research.” When I asked for clarification from HHS, the spokesperson told me that the funding “will support multiple projects” and added that “the first initiative focused on the flu.” The spokesperson and Mollory did not answer questions about the criteria for other projects that will be included in the program, nor did they answer the timeline for which they will be solicited or funded.

Neither Memoli nor Taubenberger's work received such financial attention. Both of them have spent a lot of careers running small labs at NIAID. Taubenberger, who did not respond to a request for comment, has long been respected in the field of virology. A few years ago, he gained wide recognition for discovering and sequencing the influenza virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic. He was also appointed acting director of Niaid last month after his former director Jeanne Marrazzo was removed from the Trump administration. He often works with Memoli, whose work does more work under the radar.

Memoli's appointment of acting director was also unorthodox: Before January, he had no experience in overseeing grants or running large federal agencies. However, he criticized Covid-Vaccine's request for “anomalous problems” in an email to Anthony Fauci in 2021. Jay Bhattacharya, now head of NIH, praised Memoli on social media, calling him “a brave man who stood up in difficult times”. Last year, during an internal NIH review, Memoli described the term of– Another Trump-managed bugaboo, as “offensive and demeaning.” (Memoli did not answer questions about how politics might affect his appointment.)

Memoli and Taubenberger's vaccine technology may eventually produce effective products. It relies on a vaccine composed of a whole virus that is chemically inactivated. At least the vaccine being developed is under safety testing and there are some encouraging preliminary data behind it. But the flu virus often mutates, often jumps across species, and it is difficult to get vaccinated for a long time. Although scientists have been trying to make a popular – fluorinated vaccine recipe for decades, none of them succeeded. When the goal is this noble path, and the path to success is success, the smartest and most effective way is to “fund as widely as possible”, Deepta Bhattacharya (not related to Jay Bhattacharya) at the University of Arizona. The strategy has long been at the heart of NIH’s mission, which puts most of its budget power supply beyond its research beyond its agents themselves.

Bhattacharya said the entire inactivated virus strategy of Memoli and Taubenberger is also “not completely cutting-edge”. The technology has been decades past and has been tried by many other scientists before, and has since been mostly out of favor. Newer technologies tend to be more efficient, produce faster, and are unlikely to cause side effects. Moreover, the two candidate vaccines have not yet cleared the point where many immunities failed in clinical trials. Often, funds of this scale are retained for projects that already have strong data to show that they are effective in reducing disease or infection, Bhattacharya said. However, according to its press release, HHS appears to be confident about the project’s release: The department targets the FDA approval of at least one vaccine in 2029 and claims that the vaccine will be suitable for other respiratory viruses such as RSV and Parainfluenza. However, there is no public evidence to support the technology's compatibility with other viruses.

Several vaccine experts told me that the work of Memoli and Taubenberger is not a $500 million initiative in itself. A NIH official told me that a billion dollars would be “really ridiculous money” for any single research program. NIH labs are typically funded by their agency, with a smaller budget and much smaller budget: In the 2025 fiscal year, NIAID asked only $879 million of its $6.6 billion budget to go to its approximately 130 internal research groups. At the recent NIAID leadership meeting, even Taubenberger admitted that he was shocked by the huge announcements originally announced by HHS and his platform was closely related to his.

In my response to me, both Memoli and HHS claimed that the $500 million will eventually fund multiple projects. However, neither will answer questions about how to identify other studies or how much will be directed to Memoli and Taubenberger's work, the only study HHS has announced the program. Memoli and Taubenberger's vaccines do seem to be the Linchpin of Gold Standard: Both Memoli and HHS spokesmen said their projects will be the main starting point for the program. This still makes “a lot of eggs in one basket,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. If Memoli and Taubenberger's vaccine technology fail with no clear alternatives, the country could be particularly vulnerable when the next big outbreak breaks out.

A NIH official pointed out to me that the first Trump administration did pour billions into developing mRNA-based vaccines at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, an unproven new technology at the time. The government has made substantial investments in pharmaceutical company Moderna, which continues to receive substantial federal grants to work on its mRNA vaccine. (However, HHS is now being considered raising funds from a contract in a modern contract worth nearly $600 million, aiming to develop vaccines that could cause flu viruses, such as H5N1 bird flu. “I'm not sure what Molorie is.”

While funding ModernA, the government also allocates its resources elsewhere, including several other immunizations made by several other companies, all with a large research team and a long history of expanding vaccine technology and carrying out huge clinical trials. Meanwhile, the new initiative appears to be at the expense of other vaccine-related work already in the campaign. A NIH official told me that the metal standard money comes from HHS's Advanced Research and Development Bureau for Biomedical Research and Development (Barda) and is redistributed from funds originally set aside for NextGen Project Project, a $5 billion competitive investment program to develop new Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. A HHS spokesman told me that the fund's restructuring “realigned Barda's core mission: to prepare all the pathogens of influenza viruses, not just COVID-19,” and called the NextGen project a “waste.” (SARS-COV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is not an influenza virus.)

NIH leaders are in line with their right to bring funds into favorable scientific pursuits. Francis Collins has been director until 2021 and he is not shy about advancing NIH’s neuroscience-centric brain initiative or our precision secondary medicine program. Monica Bertagnolli, who directed NIH in January, launched a health-rights-centric health program and proposed a competitive White House initiative on women’s health. However, these programs fund a wide variety of projects, without a single scale of resources focused on the work of any single NIH leader. Taubenberger is also listed as the inventor of vaccine technology patents, which is not uncommon in vaccine research, but it means he can benefit directly from HHS's huge investment. (When I asked Memoli if he and Taubenberger could get royalties through commercialization of their vaccine technology, he noted that he was not listed as an inventor and “no royalties for that particular patent.”)

In internal vaccine research, a large amount of funding is in a way aligned with Kennedy’s obvious priorities, which opposes the impact of private companies on medicine. A press release about the technology being “fully owned by the government and developed by NIH” boasts about the technology, which “ensures radical transparency, public responsibility and freedom from commercial conflicts of interest”. A NIH official told me that the statement also pointed out that one of the assets of vaccine technology is its “traditional” approach, which is a potential attraction for Kennedy's suspicion of newer vaccine technologies. (Kennedy has been criticizing the 199 vaccine, recently erroneously claiming that vaccines targeting only a portion of respiratory pathogens, known as monoantigens, do not work.)

Kennedy is a longtime anti-vaccine activist, but does not seem to seek vaccine research to fund it. A NIH official told me: Memoli was “actually the one who pushed it forward”: a few weeks ago, he sent Taubenberger to brief Kennedy on the work of the two. (Memoli didn’t answer questions about this briefing, nor did he answer most of his support from Kennedy.) However, regardless of how the inciteers conveyed a disturbing message to other research communities in the United States – “The only way to overcome HHS priorities is to be part of the Inner Circle,” Bhattacharacharacharya of the University of Arizona told me. One NIH official said more bluntly: “It's obvious that it's all nepotism.”