It's not clear to me that this story falls into the category of corrupt/insane/petty that a lot of recent actions seem to.
I don't know about this particular lab, but when someone was trying to build a BSL-4 in a dense urban neighborhood of Boston, there were a lot of protests, including by medical workers and scientists. It seemed there's a history of BSL-4 incidents, and the facilities aren't as secure as the salespeople claim.
So, it's conceivable that the stand-down is warranted. If so, a different question is whether safety is the goal, or it's merely a convenient pretext for some other goal.
"was told to stop all experimental work" - the word 'experimental' makes me wonder if the title may be hyperbolic.
I don't infer from this story (article didn't feel right) that they will no longer be studying infectious diseases.
Does anyone have more information on what the experimental work actually is? Or how it relates to the body of work carried out by NIAID.
“NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick. This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.”
Moss did not elaborate on the nature of the personnel issues..."
I'd be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if their MO wasn't to make unspecified and/or undefended accusations about persons, as a way to avoid being accountable for their agenda.
Research can broadly be divided into three categories:
1. Experimental research: Form a hypothesis. Create datapoints by some process: could be mixing chemicals in test tubes, giving patients enrolled in a study a medication, pointing a telescope at the sky, or going out to the Amazon to count bugs. Use those datapoints to confirm or refute the hypothesis.
2. Retrospective research: Form a hypothesis. Use data that already exists and is archived somewhere to confirm or refute the hypothesis.
3. Descriptive research: No hypothesis. Look at existing data and/or published research and comment on trends or the patterns that exist therein.
"Experimental" covers everything and anything you would do in a wet lab. You don't need a wet lab to do research of types 2 or 3 - you can do that in an office or at home. That said, I don't believe we have any confirmation that they used the word experimental in the actual order.
It is our good fortune that we are not restricted to the headline.
In an emailed statement provided to WIRED, Bradley Moss, communication director for the office of research services at NIH, confirmed the halt in research activity. “NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick.
Maybe you're not from the US, or maybe you are haven't been paying attention, but during the entire election the party that won told us this is exactly what they were going to do.
The most obvious explanation is that this was what Trump promised to RFK in order to get him to drop out of the race and endorse him. Anyone voting for Trump should have known it would mean RFK in power.
I'm not too surprised but I can see how someone who gets most of their news from conservative or even main stream sources would be surprised at how far the Trump administration is going.
> It's also incredibly unpopular even among the right.
Where are you getting that impression? Sincerely curious, it seems to me most either don't offer an opinion or are in favor. Even in this comment section (or any other similar one on HN recently) you see people more or less saying this is a correct response to some covid conspiracy theory they're into. I would love for the right to turn on trump but I frankly haven't been seeing it, over this or any other issue.
I don't think that's exactly right. I think it's more like some of them were telling us they were going to do exactly this, and the rest vehemently denied it.
I am from the US and I have been paying attention.
That doesn’t mean I understand wtf is going on in RFK Jr.’s mind.
Trump is the autocrat of the bunch. I understand his thinking. He is just the enormous parasite all the other little parasites are feeding off of, but that doesn’t explain anything. I need more information on … actually I don’t. The entire party is corrupt. There’s no way to know their rationale other than “scrambling for power” I guess.
This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause.
The author of the article, Beth Mole, has a PhD in microbiology and her writing is generally detailed and pretty good. I hope he doesn't really not believe in germ theory, but if that's the case, it explains a lot of the decisions he's making.
The article title appears to be pure rage bait. Which from wired is not a surprise. That it actually induces rage on Hacker News is always a surprise to me.
I sincerely believe RFK's viewpoint is just straightforward old fashioned eugenics. He believes in "making america healthy" in that sense that if you die of something that's proof you weren't healthy.
Based on your post history, it seems like you’re a bad faith poster. Even so, let’s assume you want to learn to overcome your clear lack of knowledge about this
RFK Jr.’s statements on autism go beyond a generic interest in environmental causes. He has repeatedly promoted the thoroughly debunked theory that vaccines, especially those containing thimerosal, cause autism. This began with his 2005 Rolling Stone/Salon article Deadly Immunity, which was retracted due to factual inaccuracies. The CDC, WHO, and countless peer reviewed studies have confirmed no link between vaccines and autism.
He also made a widely criticized comment during a January 2024 town hall, saying:
“Kids with autism are never going to write a symphony, they’re never going to win the 100-yard dash at the Olympics, they’re never going to pay taxes.”
(Source: People Magazine, April 2024)
That kind of blanket characterization isn’t just false, it’s dehumanizing. Plenty of autistic individuals work, pay taxes, and thrive. I’d say a sizable minority of posters on HN are somewhere on the spectrum.
His statements on autism are part of a pattern: RFK Jr. has pushed for a national autism registry and appointed controversial figures like David Geier, who has faced sanctions for unethical autism “treatments” and also pushed vaccine-autism claims.
So it’s not just a different research focus, it’s a history of promoting discredited and harmful views while stigmatizing autistic people.
Ok, so your counter is an article which as you say was retracted due to inaccuracies, and then several statements which you categorise as him being down on autists. Neither of which support the previous eugenics accusation. These seem more like straw men.
If that's incorrect, please do back it up and say what the relevant argument is. I'll listen, but so far don't see any relevant points.
This isn’t a distortion or exaggeration of RFK Jr.’s record. It’s a direct response to what he’s publicly said and done. What you’re doing is refusing to engage with the actual evidence provided, while repeatedly shifting the frame to make that evidence seem irrelevant.
That’s not constructive, and it’s not in line with Hacker News’s guidelines for honest, good faith discussion, which is in line with your previous behavior on HN.
Eugenics today isn’t just about forced sterilization or selective breeding. Eugenics is a policy or ideology that seeks to reduce or eliminate traits deemed undesirable typically through systemic surveillance, control, or intervention based on a belief that certain lives or characteristics are less valuable or worthy.
That includes portraying a group as a burden, building systems to track them, and promoting ways to suppress or eliminate the trait.
RFK Jr.’s actions match this because:
He publicly described autistic people as non-functional and burdensome.
In January 2024, he said:
“These are kids who will never pay taxes, never hold a job, never go out on a date.”
This isn’t a one-off gaffe, it was part of a broader argument for policy action. That kind of language has always been the first step in eugenic thinking: define a group as a drain on society.
He proposed a national autism registry.
His HHS floated plans to aggregate autism diagnosis, medical history, and behavioral data into a federal database. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network and other disability rights groups condemned it as “deplorable” and eugenic because historically, surveillance of marginalized populations has paved the way for coercive or exclusionary policies.
He appointed David Geier to autism research leadership. Geier is not just “controversial”, he lost his medical license for administering Lupron (a hormone-blocking drug) to autistic children. That treatment was rightly deemed unethical and dangerous. RFK Jr. giving him influence signals approval of the idea that autism is something to be chemically suppressed.
This is a pattern.
First define a group as broken.
Then, build infrastructure to monitor them.
Finally, promote discredited interventions aimed at erasing the trait.
That fits the actual operational definition of eugenics in 2025. Whether or not RFK Jr. uses the word is irrelevant.
And no, this is not misrepresenting him.
Everything above is sourced directly from his public statements, government proposals, and appointments.
When you respond by waving it all away as “not relevant” or “just looking into causes,” without actually refuting a single point, you’re not having a real conversation. You’re dodging. That’s what makes your posts frustrating, and arguably against the spirit of this site.
Thoughtful, evidence driven discussion, not rhetorical evasion.
Ok, so you don't have evidence of his eugenics, and have instead created a far broader 'eugenics today' category which is to reduce undesirable traits (so broad that it's useless imo).
There's something to some of your descriptions, but they are largely subjective interpretations. When weighed against what anyone can listen to the guy talk about, they're obviously out of context - in that they are cherry picked.
I find all your gate keeping comments ironic given your own post history - which at a glance seems largely argumentative. Anyway, they're inaccurate - People can not have the same opinion as you and be genuine.
If you produced credible points, I'd respond. So far I just see politics. Sorry if that's not what you want to hear.
You’re not actually engaging with what I wrote. Instead, you’ve narrowed the definition of eugenics to exclude anything that doesn’t fit a 1920s textbook, ignoring how the term is used in current ethical, medical, and disability policy discussions. That’s not a rebuttal, it’s reframing the terms to make them easier to dismiss.
You claimed the quotes I cited are cherry-picked or out of context, but didn’t explain how. That’s just hand-waving. If there’s something inaccurate about them, point it out. Otherwise, saying “it’s all subjective” is just the typical maga evasion bs.
And finally you said if I made credible points, you’d respond… after ignoring multiple sourced, factual examples already given. You sound like a Markov chain Fox News talking point generator.
That kind of posture, where nothing is ever quite good enough to warrant engagement, is exactly the sort of bad-faith behavior we expect from conservative trolls.
If you disagree, fine. But engage with the content, not just the framing.
I heard what I wanted to hear, a confirmation you’re posting to troll and spread misinformation, not actually engage.
So... why exactly are we attacking NIH employees for the mistakes made by people living in Wuhan?
A sufficiently nefarious interpretation of events might even implicate China regardless of how much America pays them. It already happened in Russia with Biopreparat during the Cold War, no reason it wouldn't happen again.
The Chinese can impose their own consequences, I'm not opposed to it.
However, this is serious stuff, if accountability must be off the table we aren't ready as a civilization to mess with it. NIH did this under a "enhanced oversight" regime, the overseers need to be removed to start.
The Chinese will not punish Wuhan workers any more than Russia punished Sverdlovsk anthrax workers. And since you're not going to stop virology research by halting American capital, you're proposing a net-zero solution for America and a propaganda victory for the CCP.
How can you assert that Covid v2 would be "stopped" by withholding American capital? Coronavirus isn't American IP, and even if it was, you won't use that to force accountability.
Interestingly China just recently called out Fort Detrick and it's research goals specifically in their COVID-19 origins response white paper over this previous incident:
> In an emailed statement provided to WIRED, Bradley Moss, communication director for the office of research services at NIH, confirmed the halt in research activity. “NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick. This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.
So it's not clear that this is the result of HHS ordering NIH to do anything specific or that it will be permanent or related to planned job cuts in the future. This article seems to conflate two separate stories into one confused narrative.
I don't know about this particular lab, but when someone was trying to build a BSL-4 in a dense urban neighborhood of Boston, there were a lot of protests, including by medical workers and scientists. It seemed there's a history of BSL-4 incidents, and the facilities aren't as secure as the salespeople claim.
So, it's conceivable that the stand-down is warranted. If so, a different question is whether safety is the goal, or it's merely a convenient pretext for some other goal.
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