The Department Of Health And Human Services Cuts 10,000 Jobs

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow, along with Flora Lichtman. It was no April Fools joke. Thousands of federal health workers woke up on April 1 to find that they had been fired or laid off. Scientists and civil servants at the FDA, CDC, NIH were let go as part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s pledge to cut jobs at the country’s most important disease fighting agencies. Here with more of that story, as well as some other news headlines of the week, is Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox in Washington. Umair, welcome back.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you back. All right, let’s get right into this. Umair, tell us what happened? What was going on in those layoffs?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, as you noted, a lot of workers got a very surprising message or found out when they were locked out of their computers that they were laid off. So these layoffs affected about 10,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services. And this comes after 10,000 job cuts that had already happened, or resignations from the earlier rounds of cuts. And so this includes job reductions at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the National Institutes of Health. So affecting a lot of different functions across the agency.

IRA FLATOW: Who are some of the big names that were let go?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, I think that’s kind of one of the unusual things here is these were not the probationary workers that were laid off. These were more senior staff, including agency heads. And so some of the folks that were laid off and reassigned, Jeanne Marrazzo, who leads the National Institute For Allergy Infectious Diseases. She succeeded Anthony Fauci in the role. She was reassigned. Peter Marks, who was the top FDA official seeing vaccines, was forced out. Peter Stein, who led the Office of New Drugs, was offered a demotion and chose to quit instead. And then Timothy Pohlhaus, who was the head of the Office of Manufacturing Quality, the division that looks at making sure drugs and medicines are safe. He was also forced out.

IRA FLATOW: What about the new head of NIH?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, so last week, the new head of NIH was sworn in. That’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. He’s a health economist from Stanford University. And he was very critical of the COVID-19 response, particularly the decisions to shut down public services and agencies and many of the provisions constituted as lockdowns. And he’s been a critic of a lot of how the agency is being run.

IRA FLATOW: How has Robert F. Kennedy Jr reacted to all of these firings?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, for the most part, he’s defended them. But this week, he actually started to walk them back. He acknowledged that some of those firings may have been a mistake, and said that upward of 20% of the people who were fired may have to be reinstated. So it looks like they’re already having some buyer’s remorse here.

IRA FLATOW: And so these firings, these layoffs, these lockouts affected all kinds of medical research that are going on at this time.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, that’s right. There were some clinical trials that were basically stopped in their tracks, people who were using medical devices that were implanted in their bodies. And it also means that a lot of ongoing functions are being degraded. So things like disease surveillance and also the funding for universities and other research institutions as well has also been stalled. The pipeline for training new scientists is kind of on pause right now. A lot people are just grappling with who they’re going to be hiring. And so it’s going to have a larger effect beyond the agency.

It’s going to have hiring effects throughout the private sector and throughout universities and other kinds of research institutions. And it also looks like that they’re rolling back a lot of research and development on some of these really promising techniques, like using mRNA platforms for other kinds of diseases and using those mRNA vaccine based technologies to treat other illnesses. Those were one of the big highlights of the first Trump administration. This was one of the big developments there. And it seems like they’re trying to dismantle that project as well.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So we’ll have to see how all this, I guess, filters out over the years.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah. And unfortunately, we are already seeing some of the effects, but the bigger effects will likely be down the line.

IRA FLATOW: All right, let’s move on to a Faustian bargain we’re having with pollution. Tell us about that.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Researchers in Norway were looking at some recently released data from China, and they found that they looked at the air pollution that was emitted from China, things like sulfur dioxide, particulates, and ozone. And they found that it tracked very closely the reductions in pollution with warming.

And it turns out that while burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, it also produces a bunch of other pollutants that mask the effects of carbon dioxide. And as we’ve been reducing some of these air pollutants that have immediate and very recognizable health effects, one of the consequences we’re seeing is that it’s kind of revealing that carbon dioxide was actually doing a lot more to warm the planet than we may have realized.

IRA FLATOW: Unexpected.

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, it is, but it kind of lines up with some of the other observations we’ve seen on smaller scales. There was a shipping regulation that went into effect a couple of years ago that told container ships that they had to stop emitting sulfur dioxide pollution. And we saw that over some of the busiest shipping routes, like the North Atlantic, temperatures in the ocean actually started shooting up pretty dramatically. So air pollution, definitely bad. But it was providing this sort of shielding effect that was kind of offsetting the effects of carbon dioxide. And now without that shield, we may see a stronger rebound than we have expected in terms of warming.

IRA FLATOW: That’s interesting. Let’s talk about something I’ve been reading about called a tiny pacemaker that’s not placed the way you think a usual pacemaker is.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. This is a very minimally invasive device that was developed at Northwestern University. It’s a few millimeters long. It’s about the size of a grain of rice. And you can inject it into the body with a needle. It’s just basically two electrodes. And they can actually dissolve over time, depending on the material between a few days and a few weeks. And essentially, it gives you a temporary, minimally invasive way of regulating the heartbeat.

IRA FLATOW: How is it injected? Where does it wind up? Tell me more about that. I want to know.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. You use a needle, basically, rather than doing open heart surgery. You just kind of have to point a needle directly at the heart, and you leave the device there. And it’s powered, or it’s regulated by a skin patch that uses infrared light, which can penetrate deep into the skin. And that skin patch basically will tell the pacemaker to send an electric current into the heart to help regulate the beating.

IRA FLATOW: And where does the current come from? Is there a battery or what?

UMAIR IRFAN: So the device itself is a galvanic cell. So it doesn’t have a dedicated battery, but the device generates a current inside itself. And that’s kind of one of the interesting features. And so that’s what lets you make it very small and very simple. And again, you can engineer how long it lasts in the body. So this doesn’t have to be a permanent fix. This can be a temporary thing that you can play around with and try to figure out what the optimal pacemaking routine may be for that patient.

IRA FLATOW: And how do you regulate the pacemaking of it?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, with that skin patch that we talked about. So you can also, again, by using these light flashes that go through skin that are invisible to the naked eye, that will trigger the pacemaker that’s implanted to send out electrical currents.

IRA FLATOW: Stranger than fiction, Umair, another one of your stories. OK, let’s talk about this famous asteroid that will miss us, won’t miss us, will come close? What’s the latest on this?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. This was this asteroid called 2024-YR4. And you may have heard a few months ago this was being described as a city killer asteroid. Not enough to destroy life on the planet, but enough to maybe ruin your day in a major city. But there was an estimate that it had maybe about a 3% chance of hitting Earth in around 2032. But now scientists report that it’s pretty close to 0. And so that’s some good news.

But additionally, they were also able to take pictures of this asteroid for the first time. And they were able to get a photo, which is this little blurry circle. But it does show that we were able to detect something that’s very small but potentially very dangerous.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. So if you look at it, it’s just a little blob. It’s not a tightly focused picture.

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, right, because it’s only about 200 feet across. And so we’re talking about a relatively, in terms of all the astronomical objects in space, this is tiny and it’s moving really, really fast. And it’s an asteroid, so it’s not emitting its own light. And so it’s a very difficult thing to detect. And so the fact that they were able to pick out this tiny object that was potentially threatening and get a photograph of it, that’s going to help us train our systems to detect maybe more dangerous asteroids that could threaten Earth in the future.

IRA FLATOW: Well, if it doesn’t hit us, could it hit possibly the moon next door?

UMAIR IRFAN: That’s what they’re thinking, that this is likely on a trajectory to hit the moon or in that vicinity. But fortunately, avoiding Earth. And so we may get a more close look of it than we had realized, but hopefully not in a dangerous way.

IRA FLATOW: All right, let’s move on to something called space miso. Growing miso in space.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Miso is this fermented soybean paste that’s commonly used in Japanese cuisine. You may have had miso soup at a sushi restaurant. It’s made with soybeans, water, salt, and koji. And what they did was scientists wanted to do was figure out, does it grow any differently in space than on Earth? This is a fermented product. And so what they did was they developed this batch of miso. They had set aside some here on Earth, and they sent some to the International Space Station to be fermented for 30 days. And then they came back and brought it down and did a taste test.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah? And it tastes like miso. [LAUGHS]

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, they found that the space miso tastes a little bit nuttier, that it had a stronger roasted flavor. And so scientists say that it indicates that the bacteria were producing different chemical products. And they think that one, it may have picked up some bacteria from the Space Station itself, some of the native microbiome that’s there in the Space Station. But also some of the bacteria may have mutated due to radiation in space.

IRA FLATOW: Now let’s talk about sea turtle tears.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Yeah, my colleague Benji Jones was looking into this, that basically scientists are really interested in the tears of sea turtles because they think that it may hold the key to how they’re able to navigate the world’s oceans. Sea turtles, they go all over the world, but they always come back to very close to where they were born to reproduce, to lay their eggs and so on. So they’re expert navigators, and scientists really weren’t sure why. And they think that the answer lies in their tears.

IRA FLATOW: Wait a second. You can’t stop there, Umair. What do tears have to do with navigation?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, it turns out that there might be bacteria that are living in the tears. And these bacteria are actually harnessing this mineral called magnetite that actually reacts to the Earth’s magnetic field. And so this is one of the earliest minerals that was harnessed to make compasses. And they think that this symbiotic bacteria is living in their eyes and is using the movement of this mineral within them as it reacts to the Earth’s magnetic field and sending signals somehow to the turtle’s brain and helping it orient itself on Earth.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. You always bring us such good stuff. How do you find all this? This is great, Umair. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

UMAIR IRFAN: My pleasure, Ira. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox in Washington, DC.

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