Backlash to the idea was quick, with the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus immediately calling it “unethical.”
“Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical. It’s not an option,” Tedros said in a news briefing at the time.
“A risk”
In the letter on Monday, NIH researchers speak directly to Bhattacharya, writing, “We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration.” They titled the letter “The Bethesda Declaration,” named after the NIH’s location in Maryland.
“Standing up in this way is a risk, but I am much more worried about the risks of not speaking up,” Jenna Norton, a program officer at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, said in a statement. “If we don’t speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe. If we don’t speak up, we allow our government to curtail free speech, a fundamental American value.”
The organization leading the NIH dissent, Stand Up For Science, published a second letter on Monday in support of the Bethesda Declaration. The support letter is signed by over a dozen Nobel laureates and former NIH directors Jeremy Berg and Joshua Gordon.
Tomorrow, Bhattacharya will testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal for the NIH, which proposes a cut of about 40 percent to the agency’s $48 billion budget.
