Scientists at the NIH had been told the communications pause put in place by the Trump administration last week covered all purchasing, including supplies for their ongoing studies such as test tubes and feed for lab animals, according to four sources inside the agency.
Researchers who have clinical trial participants staying at the NIH’s on-campus hospital, the Clinical Trial Center, said last week they weren’t able to order test tubes to draw blood as well as other key study components. One researcher who was affected said his study would run out of key supplies by this week. If that happened, the research results would be compromised, and he would have to recruit new patients, he said.
While it’s unclear if the communications moratorium was intended to affect purchasing supplies for NIH research, outside experts said the motivation wasn’t all that important.
“It’s difficult to tell if what’s going on is rank incompetence or a willful attempt to throw sand in the gears, but it really could be either, neither reflects well on them,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, who is president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Lurie was previously an official at the US Food and Drug Administration.
The clinical center only has a few weeks of medication on hand, according to a source who had knowledge of the pharmaceutical supply but was not authorized to speak with reporters.
Other studies were in danger of running out of supplies like animal feed or liquid nitrogen to cool samples, researchers said.
The communications pause also affects contractors working on campus. This includes lab workers, information technology staff who keep the computers running, as well as those who run security at the gates. If their contracts expire before February 1, they are at risk of losing their jobs because renewing those contracts would require outside communication, according to a source familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak to reporters.
- Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Friday from the CNN Health team.
One scientist at the agency said last week was the hardest of their working lives, worse even than working during the Covid response. They said it was a week filled with confusion and chaos, trying to respond to different orders, understand what they mean, and worry that they and their co-workers could lose their jobs, in addition to trying to do research in the midst of the disruption.
The researchers said that while some confusion was to be expected as administrations change, this was entirely different and felt hostile.
One scientist, who has been at NIH for more than 20 years, said he had never seen anything like this before. “It feels more like a government shutdown,” he said.