The second official at the National Institutes of Health retired after abruptly resigning from government services on Tuesday.
Official Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, a dentist and researcher, has long been considered a stable force and has overcome past presidential transitions. In a letter Dr. Tabak sent to his colleagues on Tuesday, he gave no reason for his decision. Those familiar with the decision said they faced reallocation, which Dr. Tabak deemed unacceptable.
“It was a great privilege to work with each of you (and your predecessors) to support and further promote the important NIH mission,” wrote Dr. Tabak.
Dr. Tabak resigned at a chaotic time for the institute, one of the nation's leading biomedical research industries, consisting of 27 independent labs and centres that research and develop treatments for diseases such as cancer and heart disease. did. The NIH spends around $48 billion a year on medical research, many of which provide grants to medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.
President Trump's decision to cut billions of dollars in funding for NIH grants sparked a fierce court battle. And on Wednesday the Senate voted to advance the nomination of presidential election Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic for the Department of Health and Human Services secretary who oversees the NIH.
Kennedy said he would cut 600 NIH jobs.
The NIH said it will issue a statement about Dr. Tabak's decision soon.
Dr. Tabak was not well known to the public. However, his decision to leave is surprising and has become unstable due to the agency in the hot political seat. He was considered someone who could work across the party line. He had survived the recovery of both parties' presidents, indicating he had hoped he would stay after Trump was elected in November.
Usually, Dr. Tabak would have been promoted to the job of playing the NIH director during the transition from one government to the next. However, the Trump administration has set up another researcher, Matthew Memory, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as its proxy director. Dr. Memory, like Kennedy, criticized the order for the Covid vaccine.
As NIH's acting director last year, Dr. Tabak opposed Republicans' claims that labs derived from US taxpayer-funded research could have caused the coronavirus pandemic. He told lawmakers that the virus being studied at the Institute in Wuhan in China's, does not resemble the one that caused the world's worst public health crisis in the century.
Ellen Barry contributed the report.
