Whistleblower complaints detail tension over vaccines at NIH

Two prominent scientists said in whistleblower complaints filed late Wednesday that they had been removed from leadership positions at the National Institutes of Health after objecting to Trump administration efforts to undermine vaccines, flout court orders, withhold research money and politicize the grant-making process.

The complaints shed light on much of the internal strife at the agency earlier this year, as the Trump administration clamped down on the country’s medical research funding apparatus.

The scientists drew particular attention to what they described as an administration-wide “hostility” toward vaccines that they said had taken hold in the upper echelons of the NIH, long one of the world’s leading engines of vaccine research.

The allegations added to a growing chorus of protest from former high-ranking health officials over what they warned were dangerous and unscientific views about vaccines gripping the federal government and potentially opening the door to preventable infections.

Those policies have not only restricted people’s access to vaccines, some officials have said, but also have constrained federally funded research on future inoculations against infectious diseases.

The complaints were filed by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who until the end of March had directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the institute previously run by Dr. Anthony Fauci; and Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, who until mid-April had directed the NIH’s Fogarty International Center, which supports global health research.

“If we don’t continue to do the science, then we won’t have the future advances,” Neuzil said in an interview. “We won’t make vaccines better. We won’t be able to quickly have vaccines against new and emerging infections.”

At the center of many of the latest whistleblower complaints was Dr. Matthew Memoli, the principal deputy director of the NIH, which has a $48 billion budget and is the world’s largest funder of medical research.

In January, the Trump administration plucked Memoli out of the middle rungs of the NIH to make him the agency’s acting director. He became its second-in-command after Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Senate-confirmed director, began his tenure in April.

In a statement, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the health department, said that Memoli “emphasizes that vaccines are not interchangeable; each must be assessed on its own merits.” He added that Memoli “remains fully aligned with this administration’s vaccine priorities and consistently champions gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

Marrazzo and Neuzil say in the complaints that Memoli repeatedly downplayed the value of vaccines in situations that included discussions of the latest flu season’s heavy death toll among children.

At the same time, the scientists said, the NIH was canceling vaccine studies at universities across the country. The agency then added layers of political review to the grant-making process that would rule out any research at odds with Kennedy’s “scientifically unsupported position that vaccines caused harm, including autism in children,” the complaints say.

Marrazzo and Neuzil say in their complaints that the award did not pass “any of NIH’s usual rigorous and competitive scientific review processes.” They add that “directing so much money to one research project in the absence of peer review can be viewed as gross mismanagement and a gross waste of funds.”

Nixon said in the statement that “any suggestion that Dr. Memoli supports vaccines only when they serve his personal research interests is entirely false and misleading.” He added, “Science is not one-size-fits-all. COVID-19 does not behave the same as influenza, and it is inaccurate to conflate the two or to suggest their vaccines should be approached identically.”

In the first eight months of the Trump administration, the NIH has sustained repeated blows, jeopardizing the decades-old partnership between the federal government and American universities on medical research.

The administration fired more than 1,000 NIH employees, quashed hundreds of research grants and significantly slowed the agency’s grant-making machinery.

Those changes, the whistleblower complaints say, led to abrupt and, in some cases, illegal efforts to derail federal grants, risking the health of people who had agreed to participate in clinical trials and wasting taxpayer money that had already been spent on studies.

And health officials scrambled to satisfy President Donald Trump’s demands, including a directive that federal money stop flowing to South Africa, stifling American-funded research there on vaccines and treatments for diseases in the United States and abroad.

The Trump administration wanted to find “what will ‘punish’ South Africa,” an official in Kennedy’s health department wrote to Neuzil in late February, according to the complaints.

Nixon’s statement said “on foreign funding, NIH is committed to supporting rigorous, credible science — not ideological or fringe projects.” He added, “Assertions that reprioritization, reallocation, or cancellation of certain grants are ‘anti-science’ misrepresent NIH’s progress and often echo the grievances of former staff.”

Far from welcoming dissenting views, a core promise made by Bhattacharya during his confirmation hearing, the agency retaliated against officials who raised objections by demoting them, the complaints said.

That included Marrazzo, Neuzil and the directors of several other of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, the complaints said.

Watching doubts about the value of vaccines take root even at the NIH, a redoubt of vaccine research whose work over the years fueled the rapid development of COVID shots, alarmed the two scientists, they said in interviews.

“We have seen, in the U.S. and abroad, the devastating effects of not being prepared to fight these infectious diseases,” Marrazzo said. The derailment of promising vaccine research, she said, “is putting us at such a disadvantage, and doing such a disservice to the American people, as far as maintaining their prospects for good health.”

Debra Katz, a lawyer representing the two scientists, said the Trump administration had “eviscerated” the agency that protects whistleblowers, but Marrazzo and Neuzil “came forward to inform the public about the serious dangers to public health that the country and the world face.”

In a statement, that agency, the Office of Special Counsel, called the accusation that the office had been eviscerated “baseless.”

Memoli had drawn attention in 2021 for clashing over vaccine mandates with Fauci, his boss at the time. He said then that he was declining to be vaccinated against COVID.

Memoli emailed Marrazzo to ask for the NIH’s view on such situations and wrote in the email that refusing a child a transplant on the grounds of that child’s vaccination status “should not be happening,” according to the complaints.

Marrazzo told Memoli that the NIH did not issue formal guidance on the matter but that transplant specialists recommended vaccinations to ensure better health outcomes, the complaints say. Memoli later replied that he strongly believed “we do not have data to support this recommendation and that it should be reevaluated.”

Two weeks later, Marrazzo was presenting at a high-level NIH meeting on the recent outbreak of bird flu. She mentioned that already that winter, 68 children in the United States had died from the seasonal flu, an unusually high toll.

(That figure has since climbed to 278 children, the most pediatric deaths in a flu season since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Ninety percent of those deaths were in children who had not been vaccinated.)

“Dr. Memoli stated that while a vaccine was ‘fine,’ the number one way to prevent bad outcomes in a respiratory outbreak is to have a healthy population,” the whistleblower complaints say.

A similar scene played out days later at a White House meeting on pandemic preparedness. “Dr. Memoli reiterated the administration’s position that vaccines are unnecessary if populations are healthy,” the complaints said.