White Coats v the White House

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1:23Scientists, British and American, have made the atomic bomb at last. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and assured its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20 ,000 tons of PNP. President Truman says that the Allies have spent 500 million pounds on what he calls the greatest scientific gamble in history, and they won.

1:54Roland Pease:Summer 1945 was a turning point for American science. The deadly dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan symbolised their unrivaled technical prowess, science in the service of the country's war effort. And just weeks before, the organiser of that effort unveiled a blueprint for how science could continue to serve America in peace. I go back, really, to 1945, when Vannevar Bush, an advisor to then-President Roosevelt, wrote a report called Science, the Endless Frontier, and he outlined a science policy which has been the unwritten policy of the United States ever since then, so for 75 years. And it's worked.

2:42Roland Pease:I'm Ronan Peace, and as a global science journalist with almost 40 years in the business, I've seen those successes time after time after time. It's been clear how well the Neva Bush's deal helped fuel the American economy. But that formula for success has been put in doubt. Are we all here to defend science? Now, I am just thrilled to be here with so many mad scientists. The White Coats have been out on the street because of the new scientific direction the White House has taken. They should be angry, and everybody in America should be mad and angry about what we are witnessing right now in our country, including the illegal and reckless attacks on science by Elon Musk and the Trump administration.

3:37Roland Pease:They're mad at what they see as attacks on the very integrity of science. I'll come to that shortly. And also the funding of science. Trump has cut science funding to its lowest levels in decades, and these cuts include all fields, physics, chemistry, engineering, and the biomedical sciences. So the proposed budget cut for the next fiscal year includes a 34 percent cut to basic science. The National Science Foundation is facing proposed budget cuts of more than 55 percent. And the National Institutes of Health, which funds all biomedical research, has a proposed cut of 40 percent. And you are looking across the spectrum at all sciences, all basic applied sciences and applied and developmental sciences as well.

4:22Roland Pease:To see how profound that is, let's go back 80 years to the start of the love affair between science and US politics, when scientific prowess helped the country win World War II, particularly the Manhattan Project. You may have seen the film Oppenheimer, but before Oppenheimer, there was Bush. Dr. Vannevar Bush is one of America's more important citizens. Now in his 66th year, this son of a universalist minister has served the government over a period of about 40 years. Long before Oppenheimer was put in charge of the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush and the president of Harvard and another distinguished physicist, Bush, by the way, was an engineer.

5:09the three of them ran the atomic bomb project.

5:14Roland Pease:Rush Holt, nuclear physicist turned politician, turned science administrator. He also ran the government research program. It was an agency that had existed before the war, but didn't amount to anything before the war. And after the war, it eventually became the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and all of the other constellation of government funding agencies. Good evening, Dr. Bush. Why, good evening, Ed. Well, sir, I've known you a number of years, and last week, I managed to mispronounce Van Eever, and I apologize. Well, you've got plenty of company there, Ed.

5:57Most everyone mispronounces it.

6:00Roland Pease:Laughing apart, Vannevar Bush, with his Endless Frontier report, reshaped the landscape of US science policy, having learned during the war the efficiency of farming government research out to universities across the country, like his own Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The bargain was struck that the government would provide ample funding, mostly through universities, but also through other research centers and so forth. And the scientists would make their own decisions about how to spend this money, what research to do, and they would deliver to society the benefits. To what extent do you think the bargain, you know, was that 100 % successful?

6:46Roland Pease:Was it largely successful? Does American wealth and commerce today reflect the success of that ideal? In a utilitarian way, it is unquestionably successful. Looking at it by scientific measurements, what we understand now that we didn't understand before, what we can use in our daily lives or in technical ways that we couldn't use before, what we have in the way of cures and preventions and treatments in medicine. It is just unmistakably a success. Just the Wyss Institute, OK, we're small. We're about 375 full-time staff. We've created over almost 70 startup companies that have led to 2 ,000 jobs.

7:36Roland Pease:Donningberg directs the elite Wyss Institute of Biotechnology at Harvard, which epitomises the payback you can get from Bush's deal, which is now under attack. OK, these are high paying jobs and they're also leading to good things that will help all mankind. And, you know, MIT, they did a study in 2014 or 15 retrospectively. And there was something like 30 ,000 companies that was born by MIT and trillions of dollars of value. So as I've said in my interviews, the action of the administration is basically shooting the nation in its foot. Up until very recently, the United States spent probably 40 % or so of all the world's research funding.

8:22That's fallen off dramatically just in the last six months.

8:26Roland Pease:In other words, since Donald Trump came to power. In part, he has a cost-cutting agenda. Science is expensive. But second, he approaches a lot of science with distrust, as you can read in one of his first executive orders posted on the White House website. Today, across science, medicine and technology, ideological dogmas have surfaced that elevate group identity above individual achievement, enforce conformity at the expense of innovative ideas and inject politics into the heart of the scientific method. These agendas have not only distorted truth, but have eroded public trust, undermined the integrity of research, stifled innovation and weakened America's competitive edge.

9:11Roland Pease:In line with those accusations, whole swathes of science came under the spotlight. Climate science, anything to do with gender, diversity, equity, also much of biomedicine even. And to those at the brunt of the onslaught, it felt their very integrity was being questioned. Yeah, I am. I'm very depressed about the situation. This is what I've heard time and again talking to working US scientists over the past six months. Is it okay if I actually read the email out loud, the beginning of that? Yeah, please do, yeah. It's a dear Dr. Minor. Late Friday afternoon, the NIH informed us that they were cancelling a significant portion of our awards.

9:50We regret to inform you that the above award was on the list and has been terminated effective immediately. So in that moment, I felt a surreal sense of disbelief as it dawned upon me. This is my own government. The email was sent to our Office of Sponsored Programs at Vanderbilt. Just says that NSF has undertaken a review of its award portfolio. Effective immediately, the following are terminated because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities. my grant ID and then some kind of legalistic things.

10:28Roland Pease:This is not in line? Yep. Biologist Patricia Silvera found her research mocked in the president's State of the Union address to Congress and to country. $8 million for making mice transgender.

10:45This is real. I was in the lab. I was about to run my lab meeting and I started getting email after email. And then I literally just Googled my name and the mice and I saw. But it's just not really an accurate representation of what we do.

11:02Roland Pease:Which is to study the role of hormones in teenage asthma. The transgenic mice are a way of doing that. I don't appreciate the misrepresentation of some of what we do, especially with the general public, because it is taxpayers' money. and I wouldn't want anyone to think that we are wasting their money or using it for anything that is negative. It just casts a deep fear and paralysis and chill over the whole of the American science enterprise. And I can assure you that everybody who works in research in any university, in any state of the country, as well as certainly in government labs, is deeply concerned about their future.

11:43And that lack of stability and that lack of certainty and that fear is going to drive our scientists, young scientists, especially either out of science or

11:51Roland Pease:to other nations if it continues. These are the scientists who in the past, under Vanneva Bush's deal, brought Americans, indeed all of us, better cars, computers, better crops, clean power, and the conquest of space. It brought unprecedented health as well. The polio vaccine came soon after the war, quickly followed by a host of other vaccines considing many childhood diseases to the history books. But vaccines are at the very heart of the sharpest divide today between scientists and President Trump's administration. If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles? For measles?

12:36Probably for measles.

12:38Roland Pease:Robert Kennedy Jr. is probably Donald Trump's most controversial appointee pointee when it comes to science. As Secretary for Health and Human Services, he's found his long track record of questioning vaccine safety raised time and again in Congress. Again, I don't want to give advice. Just one last one, just a yes or no, please, if you could, polio? Polio? Again, I don't want to be giving advice. These issues came to a head in June when he summarily fired the 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunisation Practices, accusing them of corruption and conflicts of interest, replacing them with his own choice appointees.

13:18Roland Pease:Before he acted, few of us had heard of ACIP, though we implicitly accepted their judgments. Here was a team that sifted the scientific evidence, considered expert testimony brought before them in dull, diligent, thorough consultations, before coming to their recommendations which would guide clinicians and insurers in the U.S. health system. The Center for Disease Control's Fiona Havers led the U.S. Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network and was due to give significant evidence to the committee about COVID and infants, but resigned because of Secretary Kennedy's actions. So the presentation that I was scheduled to present at this meeting that happened in June was really focusing on who's currently getting hospitalized for COVID in the United States.

14:06In summary, most pediatric hospitalizations occur in children younger than two years. Most of these hospitalized children have no...

14:14Roland Pease:In Fiona's absence, a colleague stepped in to present the dry list of statistics intended to inform the vaccine discussions, in particular on the vulnerability of the youngest children. Outcomes among hospitalized children can be severe, with one in four admitted to the intensive care unit. COVID-19 deaths continue to occur among infants and children. Like me and several of her former colleagues, Fiona watched online to see how the new committee received the vaccine evidence. Receiving the most recently recommended vaccine. What did you make of it? Well, I'm very concerned that they are going to restrict access to people that could benefit from them.

14:51But the bigger issue is that several weeks before the meeting, even before he fired this outside Advisory Committee, RFK Jr. went on X and announced that CDC had changed their immunization policy for COVID and that COVID vaccines were no longer recommended for healthy pregnant women and healthy children. He did that without following any of the ACIP processes. Nobody who was a COVID vaccine expert at CDC was involved in that decision. And he completely bypassed this ACIP committee, this advisory committee, which has a very structured, very transparent, very evidence-based process for any policy decision being made.

15:27So him just like announcing on X that CDC had changed COVID vaccination policy for the United States, all of us at CDC were like, wait, what just happened? And I almost quit at that point, actually. And one of my colleagues did resign. But then when he blew up the committee and just like fired the entire all 17 panel members, I was like, there is no way I can't, I can't stay. I also felt like as a scientist and as a physician, like I didn't want to legitimize this committee by presenting to them because they are not the appropriate people to be making these decisions.

15:59Roland Pease:And you say that because? Well, I mean, the people who are currently on the committee, with the possible exception of one person who has ACIP experience, do not have the appropriate background to be on this committee. Many of them have no background in vaccines, in infectious diseases. And from the questions that they were asking at the public meeting, it was very clear they didn't really understand the methodology. They didn't understand a lot or the background of what was being presented to them. So they aren't qualified in that way. The way you say that the people who have been appointed aren't qualified, it does seem to me that sounds a bit like you want to have a self-perpetuating priesthood running vaccines rather than a sort of more open debate and a wider set of voices.

16:44Roland Pease:Is that a fair criticism? Well, I think that is a criticism that's frequently raised. I do think people who are on these kind of committees, like people like myself who, you know, I'm viewed as a subject matter expert, do need to be careful in terms of just saying, oh, well, we're the experts, you should listen to us. I think people who have concerns, their concerns need to be taken seriously. We need to be very careful how we respond to those and make sure that we're addressing those concerns. But his statement that he did this to be more transparent and to return to gold standard science while sort of blowing up all of the very transparent evidence-based procedures that had been put in place to make vaccine policy transparent and evidence-based and basically throwing all of those out the window.

17:32I mean, he's not doing that. He's saying he is, but he's doing the opposite of that.

17:36Roland Pease:As if to underline the point, since I recorded that interview, Secretary Kennedy has barred advice to the committee from professional bodies like the American College of Physicians. And rejecting evidence of how mRNA vaccines helped in the pandemic, he's unilaterally axed half a billion dollars worth of further mRNA development. And he publicly called on a scientific journal to withdraw a new study on vaccine safety that he disagrees with, getting this swift response from the editor. If Mr Kennedy and his anti-vaccine followers want good evidence for people to make knowledgeable decisions about vaccines for themselves and their families, I think this is a piece of that evidence.

18:23Roland Pease:A reminder, this is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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19:43Roland Pease:So much of this white coat versus White House friction comes down to a chasm in worldview between working scientists and President Trump and his administration, distrustful of their privileged status under the Vannevar Bush deal. This particularly came across in another of President Trump's executive orders on his plans for, quote, restoring gold standard science, in which he asserted, over the last five years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly, blaming in particular, executive departments and agencies that have used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.

20:24He continued, We must restore the American people's faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good.

20:35Roland Pease:To achieve this gold standard science in its latest order on the topic, President Trump directs his appointed officials to take direct political oversight of funding decisions, for example, banning any with anti-American values. His fusion physicist and former Democratic congressman Rush Holt argues the arguments around trust are more complicated than the White House allows. Perhaps I'm getting a little too partisan or political here, but I think President Trump has been very skilled at playing on people's suspicions, fears, and baser instincts. That includes taking a scepticism about whether science is as good as scientists think it is, and really casting suspicion on it.

21:32Roland Pease:But does this go back to possibly the sense of elitism that's built into the Vannevar Bush frontiers thing, which is to say, let the scientists do the work, adjust it back and accept it. In a sense, people are saying, look, Harvard, you may think you're clever, but we'd rather you did different stuff. Yeah. Vannevar Bush used some wonderful democratic, small d language about men and women coming together to trade ideas and so forth. But in practice, he was an elitist. He thought that this money should go to scientists who had already proved their mettle. It should go to the major universities.