An NIH director joins MAHA, gets replaced by JD Vance’s close friend

The director of a federal health institute who may have authored two of the most controversial government studies in years has taken on a new federal role promoting the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Meanwhile, the man replacing him as director is a close friend of Vice President J.D. Vance and was appointed to the position in a process that experts describe as completely outside standard hiring practices.

The series of developments, which National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya told staff in an email last week, only adds to growing concerns that science is being deeply corrupted by politics under the Trump administration.

Richard Wojcik, a molecular geneticist, is the outgoing director of the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He has served as a director since 2020 and was recently appointed to a second five-year term, according to the company. Scientific journal. Wojcik was hired by the institute in 2010, when he came to the position of deputy director, and in 2019 he was appointed acting director.

While director of NIEHS, Wojcik also served as director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP). This is an interagency program that produced two highly controversial scientific reports during Wojcik's tenure at NIEHS senior management. One, originally released in 2016claimed that cell phone radiation caused cancer, based on results from studies on rats, but only on male rats. final reports were published in 2018. Another conflicting study completed this yearsuggested that high levels of fluoride lower the IQ of children. Both the cell phone radiation studies and the fluoride studies have been heavily criticized for flaws in their methodology and analysis, and have been largely dismissed by the scientific community.

However, the research is consistent with and supports the conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by the MAHA movement, led by outspoken anti-vaccination activist and current US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to remove fluoride from municipal water, which has been proven for decades to be safe and highly effective in preventing dental caries in children. He also suggested at various times 5G cell phone radiation causes cancer, a number of other diseases, changes in DNA and is used as mass surveillance.