Hopkins scholar: Purge in research funding stoked by Trump’s ‘fictional, conspiratorial worldview’

I am augmenting today’s Substack commentary with a brief note here on my WordPress blog to alert as many readers as possible to the Republican rationale for the proposed purge of biomedical research funding. 

The “big, beautiful” budget bill now before the Senate includes a devastating $18 billion cut to funding for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading funder of life-saving research into disease. Cited as a reason: the so-called “Wuhan lab leak” conspiracy theory about how the Covid-19 pandemic began.

The Trump Regime claims this theory has been confirmed, but it’s not true. (Even if it was, why would that translate to an $18 billion punishment for NIH research?)

Here’s a link to my Substack post.

Along with it, read what a Johns Hopkins scholar in health security has to say about the Wuhan lab leak claim. Gigi Gronvall (above) is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and a senior scholar at the Hopkins Center for Health Security. She says the funding purge underway is a result of “a fictional, conspiratorial worldview.”

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