Max Kozlov
Appearances
Science Vs
The War on Science
Yes, exactly. And I was talking with the former NIH director, Harold Varmus, today, and he was wondering why industry, why pharma, why biotech hasn't been screaming, saying these changes are really bad because they're going to hurt industry, they're going to hurt the economy, and they're going to hurt people ultimately. Again, this culture of fear is very real.
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Nobody wants to draw a target to their back because they're worried that the administration, they've shown that they're interested in retribution, that they might be targeted next.
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Basically, NSF staff are going through all of the existing grants and looking for examples of these words being used. They're scouring tens of thousands of grants, and it's still unclear exactly what they want to do with them. Proposed actions were either modifying the grants so that these words are removed, or potentially in some cases, maybe if they have many of these different flags
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archiving or removing the funding altogether. It's still unclear. But just to say that even while that is happening, while the lawsuit keeps going on, the NSF staff are still kind of combing through the grants in preparation for the next step for whatever it is on this crusade to get rid of gender ideology terms. But
Science Vs
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I also want to push back on the idea, like you mentioned, that these are in some way promoting what they call woke gender ideology. You know, I talked with a researcher who works on women's health issues, and she was very frustrated that women's health was being equated with gender ideology because it is not gender ideology to study things like endometriosis or menstruation.
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And that was already... It was a huge hurdle to get funding for those kinds of projects in previous administrations, let alone now. And we're talking again about the lives of millions and billions of women around the world here.
Science Vs
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Yeah, and that's exactly what I've been hearing. I've been hearing from just so many postdocs who are like, shoot, I used one of these words in my grant application. They don't know what's next for them. And in some cases, they had their funding pulled in this whole roller coaster. So just everybody just has no idea what's coming next.
Science Vs
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Yeah, hit hard is an understatement. I mean, it's a whole scale dismantling is what it looks like. I mean, just again, there is litigation pending there as well. But even still, we're talking about We're talking about thousands of employees being put on administrative leave around the world. And USAID is important for so many reasons.
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So, for example, USAID leads the President's Malaria Initiative. It's a program that funds malaria prevention and research. And that program has also seen funding dry up as a result of all this.
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Yeah, I mean, and this program and PEPFAR, which is a big one that funds HIV research and prevention. Those were started by Republican President George W. Bush, and it's frequently cited as one of the most impactful programs. global health initiatives in the world. And to see it dismantled in this way, I think has been gut-wrenching to so many researchers.
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USAID funds a lot of clinical trials around the world. And because of the dismantling of USAID, participants were just left absolutely hanging in the middle of a clinical trial. Some people on experimental drugs, experimental treatments, and all of a sudden just abandoned. And what this does is it sows distrust of both science and in general, the United States.
Science Vs
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It's still unclear what will become of USAID. Again, there's litigation pending, but it's not a mystery what... the Trump administration is trying to do with USAID. I believe Elon Musk tweeted that it's time to get rid of it. Trump has supported this call. And you don't just try to gut an entire agency if you were trying to reform it. You're trying to burn it to the ground.
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You know, RFK Jr. has... frequently said that he's not an anti-vaxxer, that he doesn't want to take away vaccines from everybody. But his actions, his entire career would say the opposite. He has worked for an organization that has tried to remove vaccines from the childhood vaccine schedule. And a lot of people are worried that RFK Jr. has a tremendous amount of power.
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And one of the important things that come with the responsibility is overseeing a key scientific advisory committee called ACIP that makes recommendations as to what should be on the childhood vaccine schedule, what the flu vaccine composition looks like, the COVID vaccine composition, all of it. The The secretary is able to pick who's on that committee.
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The secretary is able to remove people from that committee. They have a tremendous amount of influence on that committee of scientists, and he can easily stack it with people who are more favorable to his opinions about vaccines. And in addition to that, he also oversees what's called the Vaccines for Children program,
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This is a program that provides vaccines to children whose parents might not be able to afford them. And it's a large part of the reason that we're able to achieve herd immunity, to achieve nationwide coverage for diseases like measles that we're now seeing resurgences of. And
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Anything that undermines this program, even if it's just casting fear or casting doubt about vaccines, can make a huge difference in how likely it is that there's a measles outbreak.
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If you asked me on January 19th, before this administration started, whether they would be taking down thousands of websites relating to a whole slew of random words, I would have said you're crazy. So I don't think that's an overreaction.
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I think that's a great question. I think that saving money is one... Saving money is the... most logical thing I can think of but this fundamental research pays dividends in a big way in industry in drugs that are brought to market it's absolutely essential to the pharmaceutical industry for this research to be going on
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I think people have all kinds of criticisms about how the NIH could be reformed, how we could be more effectively spending our our research money. But what we've seen here is not a what they would consider a good faith reform. efforts to try to reform the system. This is a dismantling of the system.
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You don't just stop funding projects, gum up the entire funding process if you're trying to reform it. I think some people have attributed it to retribution. I think the NIH caught a lot of flack after the COVID-19 pandemic by Trump and his allies. So it could be something along those lines.
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I've still yet to see kind of a full-scale explanation for what's going on.
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Yeah, I think that that's one interpretation of this all. And I think that people are really struggling to make sense of it. I think that's what hurts so much.
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The changes that have already been made in three weeks will have lasting implications. And so it seems to me that it's not just a threat of tariffs here. You know, I talked with researchers who were optimistic or who were optimistic willing to give this administration a chance.
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And I think that in just a few short weeks, that optimism has quickly soured once they realized just the tenor and the vitriol of some of the administration's actions. Who knows what will come after, but that is kind of the reaction I've been hearing so far.
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Oh, man, good jokes. I need I need a good one. My God. It's, you know, I live in Washington, D.C., and it's been particularly difficult. I know it's kind of, you know, maybe folks don't care about the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., but this is a whole scale dismantling of the scientific research enterprise. And I think that
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People, whether you're in a blue state, a red state, or you're living in another country, I think it'll be felt around the world, the impacts here. You asked about a funny joke, though. My God. I've just been relying on my plants to give me some peace and levity in these trying, trying times. They're trying their hardest, but, you know.
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I think those words would be absolutely accurate. I've heard harrowing tales of people getting fired. There have been grants frozen and then unfrozen and then refrozen. So there's just a lot of confusion right now because the Trump administration has acted very quickly in... Putting in putting out executive orders and directives. And at the same time, there have been a number of lawsuits.
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Those are still very much in process, given that, you know, we're only weeks into the administration. But because of that, there's been kind of this roller coaster of emotions because things have started, things have stopped. But what is very clear is the mass firings, the mass shootings. freezing of funds, the censoring of government websites, that is all unprecedented.
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This largely stems from a directive in Trump's first days in office that ordered certain terms related to gender ideology and woke terms and terms related to diversity, equity and inclusion to be deleted from any federal resources. And what has happened is they've taken a very liberal approach to scrubbing anything with these.
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I know, I know. And so it's been very difficult to keep track because it's just been thousands and thousands of websites that all of a sudden link to an error page.
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Yeah, and I don't know if you noticed, they come with a certain disclaimer on them now, but the disclaimer is pretty wild.
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Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.
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The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation and to women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration in this department rejects it.
Science Vs
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So I've covered a lot about the monkeypox outbreaks. People might remember in 2022 especially, this is a virus that swept the world. And it's a virus that has largely been endemic in parts of Africa, but now it caused a huge surge of infections all over the world, including in the United States. And with all of this data coming down,
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not only are entire datasets missing, but also certain classifiers, certain categories of data, for example, data about sexual orientation. And part of the reason that we were able to stop the monkeypox outbreak so quickly in the United States is because we had very detailed data on precisely who was getting infected
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and which communities it was infecting, we knew quite quickly that it was really the population of men who have sex with men who are at higher risk, and especially those who are HIV positive. And so because of that knowledge, we were able to redirect resources, vaccines, treatments, education materials to those communities.
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And if you look, you can look up a chart of the infections in the United States of monkeypox in 2022, and you'll see there's this big curve up and then almost immediately a steep decline down. And with this data getting fragmented and deleted now, it's basically shooting ourselves in the foot for being able to stop future outbreaks is what I'm hearing from public health officials and researchers.
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So my colleagues at Nature have reported that there are scientists who are banding together online to try to download entire websites, try to download these data sets before they go down. And in some cases, trying to access archived versions of the websites so they can actually save the databases.
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They have like terabytes and terabytes of data because these are such an important and incredibly useful resource for epidemiologists who monitor things like weekly flu infections to see if there is an uptick in cases or monitoring the latest with what's happening with H5N1 right now to make sure that that doesn't become a full-blown pandemic.
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Right. Yes, exactly. And even in some cases, I mean, entire anything with the word race or ethnicity and in a way that a lot of researchers say this is actually extremely inefficient.
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And it's a huge waste of resources for, you know, all these federal employees to be spending time just, you know, combing through website by website, data set by data set to see if it matches any of the keywords that the administration is looking for.
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Yeah, I mean, the CDC is a federal agency and it has to listen to federal directives. So that's why you're seeing what you're seeing right now. And I don't think that the researchers at CDC are thrilled with this for the most part. I think a lot of this has been very demoralizing
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for researchers there who have spent years getting the funding to do this research, to do the research itself, to write up the paper and then to be told in the final moments as the paper will be live in mere weeks that they can't publish it because it might use one of these words. I think that's extremely demoralizing.
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You know, I think there's a really a culture of fear that if they don't listen to these directives, they will be fired. And I think it's a difficult decision because so many people at CDC understand how important their jobs are, how many lives of Americans and people around the world depend on what they do.
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So it's a tough gamble because if you decide to disobey, not only is your paper still might still might not be published, but then you also might be out of a job.
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Yeah, thousands and thousands across agencies like CDC, NIH, you name it, have been terminated. And some actually were terminated. And I think they realized that their jobs were so important that they've tried to reinstate them in some cases.
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I know that a lot of these agencies, I've talked to people who have tried to argue that, you know, we can't fire these people because they're working on trying to stop H5N1 from becoming a pandemic. But a lot of those exemption requests have gone unanswered or gotten denied.
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Yeah, you ask a great question because, like I said, it's been a roller coaster. So pretty early on in the Trump administration, they tried to issue a funding freeze on all federal grants and foreign aid. And, you know, it was such an enormous directive that, you know, everybody was like, what do you mean? Like, it's especially confusing because in the United States, Congress controls...
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money, controls, appropriations. They have what's called the power of the purse. So we're talking about funds that have already been set aside to say, yes, this is going to the NIH for them to spend money on clinical trials, to spend money on research. And that's why courts in the United States issued a restraining order, a pause on the pause. You can see how this gets very confusing. Yes. So...
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But in this case, I know I don't envy people who cover the courts. So technically, any funds, any grants that have already been given out, they should be going to the universities, the institutions, to the researchers again. Is that happening in all cases? Not really.
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And that's why a federal judge last week was pretty scathing in his remarks and said, look, the Trump administration needs to start funding again, because I was pretty clear in that I issued a pause on the pause. So funding should be going out. But. Importantly, at the NIH, they have a very rigorous way of deciding which grants to fund.
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Basically, two separate panels of scientists have to say, yes, this is important research that we should fund. And all of that has been gummed up. Virtually none of those advisory council meetings where grants are... kind of given the stamp of approval to say, yes, let's fund this research have been happening.
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I mean, it's a slightly more boring thing, but essentially any time they... But it's this boring stuff.
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Yeah, well, let me tell you, I have a lot to tell you then. So basically there's this whole process. Anytime the government wants to hold a meeting, even if it's a meeting that's not open to the public, they have to basically post a notice to the federal register, basically saying to everybody, we're going to have a meeting. We're going to talk about grants.
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And at NIH, those federal register notices are not allowed to be posted right now.
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Yeah. And, you know, it's one thing for these meetings to not happen for a week or two weeks. But now that we're getting near the one month mark and then, you know, the longer that this happens, you know, the longer that researchers who submitted grants months ago wait to see if their projects even get funded.
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The War Keeps Raging Against Science
So to see that kind of language coming from HHS, I mean, that's just a slap in the face.
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Basically, it's something of a bipartisan issue. In fact, at RFK Jr. 's confirmation hearing, it was a Republican senator that asked him if he planned to support long COVID research, and he answered affirmatively.
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Fast forward a couple months, and NIH terminated some of the big, big initiatives to study long COVID. And... The long COVID community is like, wait, what the heck? We thought that you supported us. I can't even describe to you the fury and ire that people in this community felt, especially after feeling that the Biden administration also left them out to dry. So...
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The community, patient community, really rose up and called their congresspeople to try to slap some sense into RFK Jr. Next thing you know, about a week later, some of them were restored. Unfortunately, this is still a minority of all the research that's been terminated, but it is a nice story to hear that they restored the funding.
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Absolutely. I mean, there are so many cases where they quietly pull funding, and I think they're hoping that it stays that way. They want to capitalize on this culture of fear they've created. They know that people are scared right now, and they don't want to speak out because maybe the government will pull other funding or they'll come after your institution. And so I
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The more that this can stay in the public's eye, that's what really the administration is very sensitive to. And after they saw the outcry of the Women's Health Initiative funding being pulled, that's when they decided to reinstate it.
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Well, I will say, yeah, the nerds can pack a punch too.
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And there's not a whole lot of scientific evidence behind those claims. They're very tempting to believe because they're so weighty and so hefty. But there's not actually a lot of evidence beyond.
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I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at Donald Trump's, like he has like a body shot. It's like, I don't even know. It's like a reality TV show. But basically it just says, you know, that definitively the origin of COVID was in a lab.
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But it is already impacting how research, and specifically research on microbes and viruses, happen.
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So I think the devil will be in the details. If it's interpreted really broadly, that's definitely going to add even more uncertainty to a very, already a very uncertain time.
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I would say that people are... scrambling. They're afraid. And just to give you a statistic, since we last talked, we did a poll at Nature of how people are feeling and if they are thinking about leaving the country because of these policies. And of the 1,600 people that responded, 75% said they were considering leaving the country. 75%.
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And even if a fraction of that comes to pass, I mean, we're talking effects that will last for generations because all the young scientists right now, they're reading the writing on the wall. The funding's not there. Things are getting cut willy-nilly. And so there's a brain drain that's only just now beginning that we won't even see or appreciate the effects of for many years.
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Wannabe. Was it like wannabe Ryan Reynolds, I think? It's very strange, that whole situation.
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I mean, I feel like Ryan Reynolds isn't that far off from one of the nicest comparisons. I mean, I don't know, you know, man is pretty universally, if you're left wing, right wing, regardless of what state you're in, regardless of your sexual orientation, I feel like we can all agree that Ryan Reynolds is a pretty attractive man.
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Yeah, things have been so busy. It's crazy. The last time we talked, there was like the funding was paused and then restarted and then paused. And to a certain extent, that dance is continuing. But, you know, I feel like three quarters of the destruction and dismantling of science hadn't even happened yet. So I have orders of magnitude of destruction and dismantling to tell you about. Oh, gosh.
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One of the biggest stories that I've covered in the last few months was the fact that grants at the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, hundreds, 1,500 projects have now been terminated, which amounts to more than $7 billion of research money. And that is absolutely unprecedented.
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So there's kind of this laundry list of research topics that this administration doesn't want to fund. I mean, so it started with DEI. It started with so-called gender ideology. But it's grown to include some COVID-19 research. It's grown to include vaccine hesitancy research. Recent update.
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They're also terminating grants that quote unquote influence public opinion, which researchers are really confused about because they're like, isn't that all research? Isn't like the whole point of science is that we, you know, ask a question, we gather the data and then we make decisions based on what that data says.
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They're basically reframing the whole situation as extreme weather. They're not saying that the extreme weather is caused by climate, but just we'll still fund research about what wildfire smoke means for human health or flooding. Just don't say it was from climate change. And on top of that, we're also not going to be funding any research that investigates why the climate is changing.
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that provides any kind of climate change education or enhances climate change literacy. So all of this just kind of puts a political framing and lens on the kind of work that researchers can get funding for. And, you know, now you might look at a study and you might think twice.
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I mean, you might say, oh, did they have to delete the word climate change from this study because otherwise they wouldn't allow it to be published?
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Yeah, so this was a real head-scratcher when I found out about this. I mean, just astonishing after terminating nearly 100 grants that involve transgender people, all of a sudden they're saying, oh, we do want to fund one. And it's about...
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Drumroll, it's about regret after transitioning, which the researchers who I spoke with to this story who study trans health, they're like, okay, I mean, that's not a terrible thing to study. Patient satisfaction is an important thing to understand. But the big problematic thing is when you've terminated...
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virtually everything else in the field, and this is the only thing we're studying about trans health, that's what rubbed researchers really the wrong way.
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And I talked with people who were at the agency for decades, and they say, look, every administration comes in and they're like, okay, for example, President Biden, he wanted more research on cancer, especially with the experience of his late son. or he wanted more research on women's health. It's another thing to go in and say, we want research only about this one specific question.
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Yeah, yeah. Right now, I think researchers are just scrambling to find any other funding because they're desperate. I mean, there are human lives on the line here. And I think that's a tragedy.