STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about NIH directors on leave, a shaky start for the FDA commish, and more

Hello, everyone, and how are you today? We are doing just fine, thank you, especially since the middle of the week is upon us. After all, we have made it this far so we are determined to hang on for another couple of days. And why not? The alternatives — at least those we can identify — are not particularly appealing, as you might imagine. So what better way to make the time fly than to keep busy. So grab that cup of stimulation and get started. Our choice today is Tuscan tiramisu. And now, the time has come to get cracking. Here are a few items of interest to help you get started. We hope you have a lovely day, and do keep in touch. And we will once again remind you that we changed our settings to accept postcards and telegrams. Back to the future, as they say. …

Directors of five National Institutes of Health institutes and at least two other members of senior leadership have been placed on administrative leave or offered new assignments since Monday, topping a list of hundreds of employees notified in the last 24 hours that they had lost their jobs as part of sweeping layoffs across federal health agencies, STAT reports. The layoffs affected people across the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, including officials who help guide how the world’s largest funder of biomedical research makes decisions about what diseases to study and what medicines to develop, as well as staff who made the organization operate day to day and communicated with the public. The cuts go beyond administrative personnel, though, affecting key scientists who were overseeing projects on sickle cell disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, and pandemic preparedness, among other areas of research.

Meanwhile, amid the layoff notices sent to stunned employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday was yet another surprise: some of them, including top National Institutes of Health officials, were offered the chance to transfer to the Indian Health Service, STAT informs us. The email included a bulleted list of IHS territories where these jobs would be offered, including: Alaska; Albuquerque, N.M.; Bemidji, Minn.; Billings, Mont.; the Great Plains region; the Navajo reservation in the southwestern U.S.; and Oklahoma. It asked employees to indicate a preference for relocation among these regions by Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET. It is not clear why certain employees — many of them longstanding and possibly more difficult to dismiss outright because they are commissioned officers of the U.S. Public Health Service — were given the offer and not others, how accepting the offer or refusing it could affect employee benefits such as severance pay, and what work such regulators and researchers would do within the IHS.

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