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.
(WASHINGTON) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will move to phase out the remaining eight artificial food dyes from America’s food supply within two years, his department announced Monday, a significant escalation in his fight to rid the country’s food of additives that studies suggest could be harmful.
Kennedy and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary will offer details on Tuesday afternoon in Washington, D.C.
Tuesday’s announcement will target artificial dyes that are used in cereal, ice cream, snacks, yogurts and more.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration in January started the process to ban one artificial dye, Red No. 3, which will need to be removed from food by January 2027 and from medications by 2028 because it was shown to cause cancer in rats.
Kennedy will now seek to remove the eight other petroleum-based dyes approved by the FDA.
The secretary is expected on Tuesday to announce the approval of additional natural dyes, a person familiar with the plans told ABC News.
It is not yet clear what enforcement mechanism Kennedy will seek to implement the new changes.
The two-year timeline Kennedy is expected to announce comes after he told food industry leaders at a meeting last month that he wanted their companies to remove artificial dyes from their products by the end of his four-year term, according to a memo describing the meeting, which was obtained by ABC News.
Kennedy’s announcement Tuesday would speed up that process — and alert companies that Kennedy intends to make good on his warning quickly.
From candy to breakfast cereal to medication, synthetic food dyes are in a wide range of products that Americans consume. Studies suggest their vibrant color makes food more appealing and could even increase appetite.
The health effects of the dyes are not fully understood, but many other countries have either banned the additives outright or required food packaging warning labels about the health risks.
All dyes have the potential to spark allergic reactions for a small minority. Several dyes have been linked to hyperactivity and behavioral problems in children or have been shown to cause cancer in mice or rats — but none have shown to cause cancer in humans.
Already, red and blue states alike have taken matters into their own hands in removing artificial food dyes from certain foods. Both West Virginia and California have passed laws to ban a handful of food dyes from school lunches, with plans to extend the ban to a broader, statewide level too.
In West Virginia, the ban on artificial dyes in school lunch will go into effect in August, making it the first state in the country to implement such restraints. In California, it will take effect in 2028.
Twenty-six other states, from Iowa to Washington and from to Texas to Vermont, are considering similar legislation around banning food dyes or other chemical additives in foods, according to a list compiled by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that focuses on chemicals and toxins.
The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment within California’s Environmental Protection Agency in 2021 concluded a two-year study into seven synthetic food dyes that found associations with certain neurobehavioral outcomes in some children.
Researchers also found that the FDA’s current level of “acceptable daily intake” levels for the dyes may be too high to protect children from the potential behavioral impact, the report said.
(WASHINGTON) — Measles is continuing to spread across the United States, as outbreaks grow in western Texas and New Mexico.
Between the two states, 256 cases have been confirmed as of Thursday, mostly in those who are unvaccinated or with unknown vaccination status, according to state health officials. At least one unvaccinated school-aged child in Texas has died and another suspected death is being investigated in New Mexico in an unvaccinated adult. At least 10 other states have also confirmed cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As health care professionals work to care for patients, they are also attempting to combat the proliferation of misinformation about how to prevent and treat the disease, some tell ABC News.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the prominent voices on measles, making comments that public health experts say are not accurate.
In multiple interviews, Kennedy has claimed that vitamin A and cod liver oil are effective treatments for measles. He also said that poor diet contributes to severe cases of measles and that — while vaccines prevent illness — they also cause severe illnesses and even death.
Some public health experts told ABC News these statements are not rooted in scientific evidence and could be quite dangerous for the public.
“I think it’s really important to try to stay away from these ideas of fringe theories or ideas that have not been scientifically proven,” Kirsten Hokeness, director of the school of health and behavioral sciences at Bryant University, in Rhode Island, told ABC News.
Vitamin A as a form of treatment
During an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Kennedy said that HHS was currently providing vitamin A to measles patients for treatment. He claimed vitamin A can “dramatically” reduce measles deaths.
The World Health Organization recommends two doses of vitamin A in children and adults with measles to restore low vitamin A levels, which can help prevent eye damage and blindness.
However, experts who spoke with ABC News said it is not an antiviral treatment against measles (meaning it does not prevent infections), nor is there one available.
“Because it has been described that patients with vitamin A deficiency can have a more severe course, the WHO recommends low doses of vitamin A for children diagnosed with measles,” Dr. Carla Garcia Carreno, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Medical Center Plano in Texas, told ABC News. “This is a supplementation in case of deficiency, and it is not intended to treat the virus. High doses of vitamin A can have serious consequences.”
“Neither vitamin A nor cod liver oil will treat measles,” she concluded.
Poor diet linked to severe measles disease
Kennedy has claimed that poor nutrition plays a role in causing severe measles disease and that a healthy diet can lessen severity.
While malnutrition can be a factor in severe disease, malnutrition and nutritional deficits in measles patients have historically been seen in underdeveloped countries, according to experts.
Additionally, studies have found that mass nutritional supplementation “followed by an increase in vaccination coverage” can reduce measles infection and mortality.
“Certainly, good nutrition can promote a healthy immune system, and it’s a good idea for everyone to try to maintain good nutrition, but it’s certainly not a substitute for vaccination,” Dr. Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told ABC News. “There’s no evidence that it can prevent infection, no evidence that it can prevent an infected person from spreading the virus and contributing to one of these outbreaks.”
“So, I want to be very clear, good nutrition is absolutely no substitute for vaccination to prevent someone’s own risk for developing severe, maybe fatal, measles,” he added.
Claims about the safety of the measles vaccine
The CDC currently recommends that people receive two doses of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old.
One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective, the CDC says. Most vaccinated adults don’t need a booster.
Kennedy has said vaccines do “stop the spread of the disease” but also said they cause “adverse events.”
“It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself [causes], encephalitis and blindness, et cetera,” he told Hannity, without providing evidence.
Weaver said there is no vaccine that is without risks but that the MMR vaccine is incredibly safe and effective.
“There’s no evidence that it has severe outcomes … similar to what the measles virus infection causes,” he told ABC News. “It certainly can cause very minor reactions at the site of injection, like just about every vaccine, but it’s one of the safest vaccines that’s ever been developed.”
Weaver added that the risks of complications from a measles infection far outweigh any risks from the MMR vaccine.
As for Kennedy’s unfounded claim that the MMR vaccine causes death, a 2015 CDC review published in the journal Vaccine found such claims are deaths reported to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – a voluntary reporting system “that accepts any submitted report of an adverse event without judging its clinical significance or whether it was caused by a vaccination.”
The review found that many of the deaths reported to VAERS claiming to be linked to the MMR included children who has serious underlying medical conditions or had deaths that were unrelated to the vaccine, including accidental deaths.
“These complete VAERS reports and any accompanying medical records, autopsy reports and death certificates have been reviewed in depth by FDA and CDC physicians and no concerning patterns have emerged that would suggest a causal relationship with the MMR vaccine and death,” the review stated.
Questioning ‘benefits’ of measles and fatality rate
Kennedy claimed in an interview with Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Seigel over the weekend that is “almost impossible” for measles to kill a healthy individual.
Some people who contract measles may suffer severe complications as a result of infection. While those most at risk include children younger than age 5, pregnant people and those with weakened immune systems, anybody can experience complications.
About in 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who contract measles are hospitalized and about 1 in 20 children with measles develop pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death in young children who get infected.
About one in 10 children infected with measles develop ear infections as well, which can lead to hearing loss, data shows.
Additionally, about 1 out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop encephalitis — which is the swelling of the brain and can lead to brain damage — and up to 3 out of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications, the CDC says.
Recently, Texas health officials reported the death of an unvaccinated school-aged child, the first death from measles recorded in the U.S. in a decade. The child was healthy and had no preexisting conditions, officials said.
“The CDC estimates that 1 in 5 people [who] get infected with measles ends up in the hospital,” Hokeness said. “So, this approach to relying on sort of this natural immunity doesn’t make sense when we have a vaccine which prevents it in the first place.”
“But, in short, there’s really no benefit to this idea of natural immunity and naturally acquiring the virus. That’s why we’ve developed the vaccines that work so well,” she added.
Kennedy also claimed in his interview that natural immunity from measles may protect against cancer and heart disease. There is no evidence to suggest either of those are true, experts said.
“If you want to take your chances with getting natural infection, hoping that there might be some very small benefit to that, it’s a very big risk to take, because you may very well get severe measles infection,” Weaver said.
Overall, experts advised relying on scientifically proven medical information.
“We should leverage the knowledge that we’ve gained over the years and not spend our time focusing on alternative possibilities,” she said.
Web page for https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/ on April 18, 2025. Via The White House
(WASHINGTON) — The White House has redirected COVID.gov to a new landing page called “Lab Leak: True Origins of COVID-19,” which makes a five-point argument for the theory that COVID-19 originated from a mistaken lab leak in Wuhan, China.
The new site appears to use theories from the final report of the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released in December 2024. There has never been a consensus or a “smoking gun” to explain what started the pandemic.
The COVID.gov page, as recently as last week, listed resources for testing, treatment, and vaccination against COVID-19, as well as information for Long COVID.
The five pieces of evidence put forth by the White House for the theory include the following assertions: that the “virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature,” that data shows all cases “stem from a single introduction into humans,” that “Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab,” that researchers at that research lab “were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019,” and that “if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.”
The page includes claims that government officials, including former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, helped edit and then amplify a research paper on the origins of COVID-19 published in 2020 that supported natural origin theory.
The current page suggests this paper’s explicit intention was to discredit the lab leak theory and remove any doubt that the origins were of natural origin. This is not a new accusation and in the past Fauci and the paper authors disagreed with the accusations that the paper was manipulated or had any specific goal.
The origins of the pandemic have been hotly debated since its start.
The prevailing theories always seemed to focus on two scenarios: either natural exposure to an infected animal or an accidental lab leak.
With no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
In October 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report on the intelligence community’s views on the origin conundrum, which also leaned toward a natural spillover, but represented divided views. A subsequent declassified report released in 2023 also noted that most of the intelligence community was split on the origins of the pandemic. In reports, US agencies generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.
The new splash page features a photo of Fauci and the pardon that former President Joe Biden granted him, highlighting that it was for “any offenses.” The page also accuses federal agencies, including NIH and HHS, of breaking laws and violating rules about transparency and cooperation with Congressional investigation. The agencies complied with FOIA requests and other regulatory requests from the committee and also appeared before lawmakers when asked to testify.
The web page also calls into question the efficacy of social distancing, masking and lockdown. The White House also criticized the response from New York officials.
Fauci testified about the accusations before lawmakers in 2024, saying that accusations about him covering up or influencing research about the lab leak theory are untrue.
“The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false, and simply preposterous. I had no input into the content of the published paper,” Fauci said in June of 2024.
“The second issue is a false accusation that I tried to cover up the possibility that the virus originated from a lab. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite,” Fauci said during that 2024 hearing.
This is not the first time that the White House has made clear its position on the origins of COVID-19. In January, President Trump said that COVID-19 had “strained” his relationship with President Xi Jinping of China.
“But, I like President Xi very much. I’ve always liked him. We always had a very good relationship. It was very strained with COVID coming out of Wuhan. Obviously, that strained it. I’m sure it strained it with a lot of people, but that strained our relationship,” Trump said in remarks to the World Economic Forum.
ABC News’ Eric Strauss, Sony Salzman and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.
