STAT+: NIH staffers published a letter of dissent a year ago. They feel it’s been ignored

Last June, hundreds of staffers at the National Institutes of Health broke rank in an unprecedented move and published an open letter of dissent to agency director Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya eventually met with many of the signers of the so-called Bethesda Declaration, who hoped it would spur a course correction at an agency they saw as going down a problematic path. But in a report published Tuesday, on the one year anniversary of the letter, 71 staffers write that they feel NIH leadership “largely ignored the concerns raised in our declaration.”  The new report, called “The Bethesda Declaration One Year Later, Continuing Harms to the NIH Mission,” outlines nine main concerns, with proposed solutions. It is also a response to the sentiment that “things are normalizing and getting better,” said Jenna Norton, a program officer at the NIH who emphasized she was speaking in her personal capacity. Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…