Eight of the top ten leadership positions at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are now vacant or filled by replacements. Not through retirements. Not through the normal rotation that sees political appointees come and go with each administration. Through forced reassignment and dismissal, carried out steadily over the past 16 months.

The arithmetic is simple. The consequences less so.

The latest to go

Three more senior NIAID officials have been given a choice: accept reassignment outside the institute, or resign. The directive was confirmed by several NIAID staff members who spoke to Nature on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal.

The officials are Daniel Rotrosen, the top scientist for the Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation for nearly 30 years; Kelly Poe, director of the Division of Extramural Activities, which manages the institute’s grant policies; and Andrea Wurster, Poe’s deputy. All three worked under Anthony Fauci, who led the NIAID for 38 years before stepping down in 2022.

Rotrosen was offered a post in the NIH’s office for programme coordination and strategic initiatives. Poe and Wurster were offered roles at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities — an institute with roughly one-tenth of NIAID’s $6.6 billion annual budget, and one the Trump administration has twice tried to shutter. Jennifer Troyer, a former NIH official who resigned in December over concerns about political interference, described the moves as “major demotions” to Nature.

No reasons were given for the reassignments.

A parallel legal campaign

The institutional purge is running alongside a legal one. Last month, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against David Morens, a 78-year-old former senior advisor to Fauci, charging him with conspiracy and destruction of government records. The charges stem from Morens’ use of a personal email account to correspond with scientists during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic — a technical violation of records rules that, as the Los Angeles Times reported, is almost never prosecuted.

The maximum sentence: 51 years.

The indictment names Peter Daszak, president of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, and retired Boston University infectious-disease expert Gerald Keusch as unindicted co-conspirators. Neither has been charged with a crime. Daszak’s organization had managed government grants studying pandemic threats and sounded an early alarm about COVID-19. A $3.4 million NIAID grant to EcoHealth was canceled by Trump in 2020 after a Fox News report wrongly suggested most of the money had gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — in fact, roughly $600,000 had reached the lab, one of eight sub-grantees.

The lab-leak hypothesis that this legal action serves to revive has been largely discounted. A 2023 declassified assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found no evidence supporting the most common lab-leak claims, and the overwhelming scientific consensus remains that SARS-CoV-2 reached humans through infected wildlife.

A new vision, built on absences

NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya has described the shake-up as moving away from “politicized” science. At a 30 January meeting, he and other officials outlined a “new vision” for the NIAID: less emphasis on pandemic preparedness and biodefense, more on basic immunology and infectious diseases currently affecting Americans.

Staff have been instructed to remove the words “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from the institute’s web pages. About one-third of NIAID’s budget — roughly $2.2 billion — currently funds emerging infectious disease and biodefense research, including pathogen surveillance and development of medical countermeasures.

Nahid Bhadelia, director of Boston University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, told Nature the decision will leave the US more vulnerable: “Just because we say we’re going to stop caring about these issues doesn’t make the issues go away — it just makes us less prepared.”

Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity specialist at Johns Hopkins, called the approach “full of hubris,” noting that the anticipatory research NIAID funded was instrumental in developing COVID-19 vaccines in record time.

Who coordinates the next response?

The Bethesda Declaration, an open letter signed by roughly 500 NIH employees in June 2025, documented that the agency had terminated 2,100 research grants totaling $9.5 billion since Trump’s inauguration. Among those terminated, more than 700 targeted COVID-19 research, vaccine hesitancy studies, and environmental justice projects, among other topics.

Nearly 20 percent of the NIH’s workforce of 21,000 has been laid off or has departed voluntarily. The NIH’s own scientific integrity policy — designed to prohibit political influence on government science — was scrapped in March.

Betty Diamond, an immunologist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, put it plainly to Nature: “When you’ve spent years to put in place certain kinds of programmes and earn the trust and admiration of the scientific community, disruption for the sake of disruption is not useful.”

Which brings the question into sharp focus. If a novel pathogen emerged tomorrow — a new coronavirus, a hemorrhagic fever, an influenza strain with pandemic potential — who exactly is left at the NIAID to coordinate the response? The people who built the surveillance networks, managed the grant portfolios, and led the research into emerging threats have been scattered across other agencies or pushed out entirely. Institutional memory is not something you can rebuild with a memo.

An HHS spokesperson said the NIH “remains committed to maintaining strong scientific leadership across its institutes and centers.” The people who provided that leadership are, for the most part, no longer in the building.

Sources