16 state attorneys general sue Trump administration over NIH grant terminations
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(WASHINGTON) — Sixteen state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Friday over its cancellation of research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues the cancellation of the grants is “unlawful” and the attorneys general “seek relief for the unreasonable and intentional delays currently plaguing the grant-application process.”
The defendants named in the suit include the NIH, almost all of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Department of Health and Human Services and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The NIH told ABC News it does not comment on pending litigation. The HHS did not immediately reply to ABC News’ request for comment.
“Once again, the Trump administration is putting politics before public health and risking lives and livelihoods in the process,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “Millions of Americans depend on our nation’s research institutions for treatments and cures to the diseases that devastate families every day.”
“The decision to cut these funds is an attack on science, public health, and medical innovation — and I won’t stand for it. We are suing to restore these critical funds because the people of New York, and the entire nation, deserve better,” the statement continued.
Over the past several weeks, active research grants related to studies involving LGBTQ+ issues, gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have been canceled at the NIH because they allegedly do not serve the “priorities” of President Donald Trump’s administration.
As of late March, more than 900 grants worth millions of dollars have been terminated, an NIH official with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named, told ABC News.
In previous termination letters, viewed by ABC News, they state that, “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”
“The premise…is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities,” the letters continue.
The plaintiffs argue that the terminations, “if left unchecked,” could cause “direct, immediate, significant, and irreparable harm to the plaintiffs and their public research institutions. “
The attorneys general are seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction asking the defendants to review delayed applications and barring them from carrying out terminations of grants.
Earlier this week, researchers who had millions of dollars’ worth of grants terminated by the NIH sued the agency, the HHS, Bhattacharya and Kennedy in the hopes of stopping any further research cancellations.
(NEW YORK) — Dr. Kimberly Shriner remembers the first COVID-19 patient who came into Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California, in March 2020.
He was a 35-year-old man who arrived at the hospital short of breath.
“He went straight to our intensive care unit. We were very suspicious that he had COVID,” Shriner, an infectious disease specialist and the hospital’s medical director of infectious disease and infection prevention, told ABC News.
Testing was minimal at the time, but eventually the results came back and confirmed that he had COVID. The patient was eventually sedated and intubated, and he died 24 hours later. Shriner said the next few patients admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 followed similar trajectories, becoming more and more short of breath before eventually dying of their illness.
“As physicians, we understand death,” Shriner said. “We understand that we can’t save every patient, but when you’re having 100% mortality with your first experience with this thing, it was pretty overwhelming and daunting. That first week [was] particularly surreal.”
Tuesday, March 11, marked five years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the global outbreak of COVID-19 to be a pandemic. The U.S. is in a much better situation now, with fewer hospitalizations and deaths — and vaccines to prevent severe illness from COVID, frontline health care workers say.
However, they add that, as Americans become more removed from the early days of COVID, it may be hard to remember what it was like — especially for those who were treating patients.
“Everybody was worried, doctors, nurses,” Dr. Matthew Sims, director of infectious disease research for Corewell Health, a non-profit health care system located in Michigan, told ABC News. “It was absolutely crazy, and I think that people have forgotten. I think people have forgotten the horror of what COVID was like in the beginning and, I mean, it was a horror situation.”
Quickly changing world
Shriner said one of the indicators of how quickly the world was changing was the evolution of her hospital’s meetings about the virus and how to prepare as information was starting to come out of China.
“Meetings were held in a very tiny, little meeting room. Nobody was wearing masks or anything,” she said. “And then as things began to evolve, and we saw it was happening, that the rooms got started getting bigger, and then we started meeting with masks on, and then, eventually, went virtual.”
Shriver recalled that the situation was “very terrifying” on a personal and professional level.
“If we’d known how difficult it was going to be, I think we would have been even more disturbed,” she said.
Sims said it became clear how quickly patients could get infected in March 2020. Not long after the WHO declared a global pandemic, he came on shift that week to be the infectious disease doctor rotating in the hospital.
“We had two confirmed cases admitted at that point. By the end of the week I spent on, we had over 100 confirmed cases admitted,” he told ABC News. “It was absolutely devastating to the hospital, to the health care system as a whole … It was a crazy time.”
The state of hospitals
Both Sims and Shriner said the lack of early testing at the time was a source of frustration. Since routine testing wasn’t available, results often took days — or even weeks — to return.
Additionally, hospital labs often had to confirm results with state departments of health.
Sim said as the hospitals became full, it sometimes became a race against the clock to try and treat patients.
“I remember one of the most devastating cases I saw was a young man, relatively young, young kids at home,” he said. “A little overweight, I think he was a diabetic, but he just got super sick, and we were trying to get remdesivir, which was compassionate use at the time,” referencing an antiviral drug later approved to treat COVID-19.
Sims said the hospital had to call up the company manufacturing the drug, tell them about the patient and then get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to use doses on the patient.
“And we got approval, and then they have to ship it to us,” Sims said. “It was all being shipped as fast as possible, but before it could even get here, that patient got too sick to even use it, and the patient died. A week before, he was home with his kids, his wife, et cetera, in normal state of health, and then, all of a sudden, got this terrible virus and died.”
As it became clear how contagious the virus was, hospital staff were required to always wear masks. Shriner said she still has a scar or imprint on her nose from having to wear a mask for 18 hours a day.
One of things she remembers most was the lack of sound, other than machines, whenever she visited ICUs.
“As the months progressed, we ended up having six different intensive care units because the patients were so sick,” she said. “We had many, many patients that were on ventilators. You’d walk into these areas, and it was just silence. All you heard were the ventilators going and seeing people in full protective gear all the time.”
To handle the influx of patients, both hospitalized and in emergency departments, Shriner said her hospital stopped all non-emergency surgeries to be able to have extra physicians available.
COVID-19 vaccines arrive
On Dec. 11, 2020, the FDA granted Pfizer-BioNTech the first emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 16 and older. Three days later, nurse Sandra Lindsay became the first person to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. as distribution began.
Both Shriner and Sims felt a sense of relief that a tool was finally available to help stem the spread of disease.
Shriner said she was the first person in her hospital to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, even though she didn’t want to be.
“I didn’t want to be the first person. I was perfectly fine with letting other people go ahead of me,” she said. “And [the CEO] said to me, ‘You have to be.’ She said, ‘If you don’t get vaccinated, nobody else is going to do it.'”
Shriner said the distribution of the vaccine “was a sign of the way out. It was very hopeful.”
Lessons learned
Both Sims and Shriner say COVID-19 taught health care workers many lessons, including how to share information quickly, how to diligently monitor diseases and how to scale up health care capacity.
Sims said another valuable discovery was better communicating to the public that information during a public health crisis can change rapidly.
One example is that early studies would come out suggesting certain drugs might help treat patients. Eventually additional information would be published proving the opposite.
“We were learning, and we were learning in such a rapid [way], it was hard to communicate,” he said. “I think if we had any failure, it was that in that rapid push to communicate.”
Sims noted how that created some uncertainty.
“We didn’t get the message across enough that some of what we’re learning may be wrong, and we will tell you that as we learn,” Sims said. “We’re going to tell you what we know now that may not be the same thing we know tomorrow.”
Shriner added that stay-at home orders and lockdowns were hard on people and, if another pandemic happens, she is hopeful there would be different decisions on what should be locked down.
“Maybe we don’t have such stringent lockdown rules and isolation rules,” she said. “You know, the outdoor restaurant became a great thing. You know, think of all the home delivery services really took off. And so, a lot of good things came out of it, but they were hard won.”
(LONDON) — Europe saw the highest number of measles cases last year in more than 25 years, according to a new report published Thursday from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.
There were an estimated 127,350 measles cases in the European region last year, which is double the number of cases for 2023 and the highest number since 1997. The region consists of 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Children under 5 years old accounted for more than 40% of cases in the region, and more than half of the cases required hospitalization, according to the report. Additionally, a total of 38 deaths were reported based on preliminary numbers.
The European region accounted for one-third of all measles cases globally last year, with 500,000 people missing their first dose of the measles vaccine.
“Measles is back, and it’s a wake-up call. Without high vaccination rates, there is no health security,” Dr. Hans P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, said in a press release. “As we shape our new regional health strategy for Europe and Central Asia, we cannot afford to lose ground. Every country must step up efforts to reach under-vaccinated communities. The measles virus never rests — and neither can we.”
It comes as global vaccination rates for measles have been on the decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a higher number of cases and outbreaks worldwide.
A WHO report published last year found a 20% increase in measles cases between 2022 and 2023 — infecting a total of 10.3 million people globally in the latter year.
More than 22 million children missed their routine measles vaccine in 2023. Only 83% of children received their first measles dose that year, and only 74% received their second dose.
A threshold of 95% vaccination coverage is needed to prevent outbreaks from occurring, according to the WHO.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is dealing with its worst measles outbreak since 2019. More than 250 cases have been reported in an outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, which is close to the 285 total measles cases reported in the entirety of last year nationwide.
Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, health officials said.
Two likely measles deaths have been reported so far in the U.S. One is a confirmed death associated with measles, while the other occurred in a New Mexico resident who tested positive for measles after dying and the cause of death remains under investigation.
The death in Texas of an unvaccinated school-aged child was the first measles death recorded in the U.S. in a decade, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Similarly to global rates, CDC data showed U.S. vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years.
During the 2023–24 school year, just. 92.7% of kindergartners met vaccination requirements for the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, according to an October 2024 CDC report. The report also found that exemptions from school vaccination requirements increased to 3.3% from 3% the year before.
(NEW YORK) — Longer periods of extreme heat has been found to accelerate biological age in older adults by up to two years, according to new research.
More heat days over time correlated with deterioration at the molecular and cellular level in adults 56 years or older, likely because the biological deterioration accumulates over time and eventually leads to disease and disability, Eunyoung Choi, a postdoctoral associate at the University of California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told ABC News.
Researchers at the University of Southern California studied blood samples from 3,686 adults starting at an average chronological age of 68 years with varying socioeconomic backgrounds across the U.S. and compared epigenetic aging trends to the number of extreme heat days in the participants’ places of residence, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances.
“Epigenetic age is one way we measure biological aging, which tells us how well our body is functioning at the physical, molecular and the cellular levels,” Choi said. “…We know that some people seem to age faster than others, and that’s because biological aging doesn’t always match chronological age.”
Regression modeling showed that more heat days, or longer-term heat, over one and six years increased biological age by 2.48 years. Short and mid-term heat also increased biological age by 1.07 years, according to the paper.
Extreme heat was defined as the daily maximum heat index — derived from both temperature and humidity — with a “caution” range of between 80 degrees to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and an “extreme caution” range of between 90 degrees and 103 degrees Fahrenheit, in accordance with the National Weather Service, according to the paper. “Extreme danger” was defined as any heat index level over 124 degrees Fahrenheit.
The researchers compared the epigenetic age of participants from regions with long periods of extreme heat to those living in cooler climates. There was a 14-month difference in epigenetic age between residents living in places like Phoenix, Arizona, than milder places like Seattle, even after accounting other individual and community-level differences, like income, education, physical activity and smoking, Choi said.
“Two people that had identical sociodemographic characteristics and similar lifestyles, just because one is living in a hotter environment, they experience additional biological aging,” she said.
The 14-month differences is comparable to effects seen with smoking and heavy alcohol consumption — two well-established risk factors of accelerated biological aging, the researchers found.
DNA methylation — the process of chemical modification to DNA that tends to change as people age — is “highly responsive” to environmental exposures like social stress, pollution and, in this case, extreme heat, Choi said.
Previous research has linked extreme heat to serious health risks like cardiovascular disease, kidney dysfunction, hospitalization and even death, Choi said. But prior to this research, scientists did not fully understand what is occurring at the biological level before those health issues appear, Choi added.
“The physical toll of the heat might not show up right away as a diagnosable health condition, but it could be taking a silent toll at the cellular and the molecular level,” Choi said.
It’s important to uncover potential hidden effects of heat on the body because it can serve as an “important precursor” before they turn into more serious health conditions, Choi said.
“We can intervene at the earlier stage,” she added.
Humidity also plays a big role in how the body responds to heat, especially for older adults, Choi said.
“As we age, our bodies don’t cool down as rapidly,” she said.
The new research provides a foundation for the development of targeted public health interventions, the researchers said.
“This provides strong evidence critical for guiding public policy and advocacy initiatives aimed at developing mitigation strategies against climate change,” Choi said.
ABC News Medical Unit’s Dr. Jessica Yang contributed to this report.
