Lev Facher , 2025-05-07 20:46:00
Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, excoriated the Trump administration’s efforts to upend federal scientific agencies on Wednesday, saying the logic behind the moves “escapes any possible explanation.”
Speaking on a panel about trust in science and scientific institutions, Collins also expressed a degree of regret for public health officials’ failure to explain their own uncertainty and the fast-changing landscape during the Covid-19 pandemic. But he laid the blame for the current fear and unrest within U.S. scientific circles squarely at the feet of the Trump administration, criticizing it for canceling research grants, pulling back on efforts to wield mRNA vaccines as cancer therapies, and dismissing “thousands of capable scientists” from government agencies.
“All of these changes are being made in a slash-and-burn approach without any real interest, it seems, in the consequences,” Collins said. “It’s basically taking ‘move fast and break things’ and applying it to our nation’s medical research enterprise, where maybe ‘first, do no harm’ would have been a better place to start. So a lot of harm is being done.”
Collins’ remarks came during a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference 2025, a major gathering in Los Angeles attended by scientists, policymakers, advocacy group leaders, and journalists, among others. The panel also included Rick Berke, STAT’s executive editor.
The longtime NIH director, who was initially appointed by former President Barack Obama before being retained by President Trump and then former President Joe Biden, acknowledged that presidential transitions often entail “some bumps.” But he called the Trump administration’s current incursion into the day-to-day operations of scientific agencies, and the 40% cut it has proposed to NIH’s budget next year, “devastating” to the U.S. research enterprise.
“The leaders who are forced to implement this are totally demoralized,” Collins said. “I am. So are the six institute directors at NIH who have been let go in the course of the last couple of months for no justification whatsoever. … It is particularly hard for young scientists to look at the situation and see whether there’s a future for them anymore.”
Still, Collins and other panelists acknowledged shortcomings in the way that many public health experts have communicated information to the public in recent years, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m guilty of this. I worked for CNN for seven years — you would have seen me, probably, really frustrated on the TV during Covid being like, ‘Believe the science, just do what the scientists say,’ because lives were on the line and it was really scary,” said Seema Yamin, a physician and writer who leads the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. “Except, if we haven’t peeled back that curtain on the scientific process … then we’re just shouting at people during a really scary time.”
Collins, too, said he wished he had another opportunity to communicate information regarding Covid-19 to the general public in 2020 and 2021.
During that time frame, many Americans actively resisted advice from leading officials like Collins and Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, particularly regarding masks and vaccines.
As the virus that caused Covid-19 mutated and as the pandemic shifted, much of the advice that they and other government health officials initially gave — like former Surgeon General Jerome Adams’ February 2020 social media post that masks are not effective in preventing the general public from being infected, or later guidance that the Covid-19 vaccines were 95% effective at preventing infection — ended up being inaccurate or no longer relevant.
“I would have started off saying: I’m going to give you the best guess that I’ve got right now, based on the information we have, but the information has a lot of gaps,” Collins said. “So here’s what we’re going to say, and trust me, this is the experts that know as much as can be known right now about what you should do. But we might be wrong, and this might have to change in a month.”
He added: “We never said that. It was just like: Here’s what you have to do.”
STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
