US public health officials have been told to stop working with the World Health Organization (WHO), effective immediately. A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, John Nkengasong, sent a memo to senior leaders at the agency this weekend telling them that all agency staff who work with the WHO must immediately stop their collaborations and “await further guidance.”

President Trump’s executive order begins the process of withdrawing the US from WHO, but the process requires several steps; WHO requires the approval of Congress and that the US meets its financial obligations for the current fiscal year. The country withdrawing must also provide a one-year notice. At a Las Vegas rally, Trump also said the US could consider rejoining the WHO, if China’s contributions increase.

The action follows several others in the medical research field.

Abrupt pause

There has been an abrupt pause in hiring, public communications, meetings and training workshops for some scientists at the Maryland-based National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has led to a “chaotic situation” and a “threat to important medical research,” some of Maryland’s most high-profile federal lawmakers warned on Monday. The directive has even prevented NIH researchers from purchasing supplies for clinical trials.

This is because the US Health and Human Services (HHS) Department just halted most outgoing communications, travel and grant reviews among its agencies.

In a letter to the acting head of the HHS, those lawmakers (Representative Jamie Raskin and Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Holland) asked for “an end to this administrative chaos” while describing Trump’s actions as “sharply disrupting” work at the agency in Bethesda.

The Trump administration is also preparing an executive order that would halt federal funding, at least temporarily, for a risky and controversial kind of research into viruses that makes the pathogens more dangerous or contagious.

The goal of the order would be to stop scientists with US funding from conducting “gain-of-function” research on the most dangerous viruses (studying them in a lab in a controlled setting), people familiar with the plans said. 

Gain-of-function research

Some viruses, such as the H5N1 bird-flu pathogen, might be exempt from the order, one of the people said. The order has not been finalized, and its specifics are a work in progress, the person said. President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has expressed support for a pause on the research.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic recently released a report labeling gain-of-function research as “dangerous” and “a threat to US national security.”

In a report called Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research, the NIH pointed out that “biomedical research has made enormous contributions to the understanding of disease and the development of cures and more effective vaccines and drugs.”

And speaking for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Darya Minovi said: “Right now, it sort of feels like we are drinking from a fire hose, and I know that a lot of that is the intention of the administration. We have just seen a complete rejection of science.”