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

The director of a federal health institute that produced arguably two of the most controversial government studies in recent years has accepted a new federal role to advance the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Meanwhile, the person replacing him as director is a close friend of Vice President JD Vance and was installed in a process that experts describe as completely outside of standard hiring practices.

The series of events — revealed last week in an email to staff by National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya — only exacerbates growing fears that science is being deeply corrupted by politics under the Trump administration.

Richard Woychik, molecular geneticist, is the immediate past director of NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He has been director since 2020 and was recently appointed for a second five-year term, according to Science magazine. Woychik was hired at the institute in 2010, as deputy director, and was named interim director in 2019.

As director of the NIEHS, Woychik was also director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP). It is an interagency program that produced two highly controversial scientific reports during Woychik’s time as NIEHS senior director. One, originally published in 2016, claimed that cell phone radiation caused cancer, based on findings in rats, but only male rats. Final reports were released in 2018. Another controversial study, finalized this year, suggests that high levels of fluoride lower children’s IQ. The cell phone radiation and fluoride studies have been heavily criticized for flaws in their methodology and analysis, and the scientific community has largely rejected them.

However, the studies align with — and reinforce — conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by the MAHA movement, led by ardent anti-vaccine activist and current U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As health secretary, Kennedy pledged to eliminate fluoride from municipal water, which over the decades has been shown to be safe and very effective in preventing tooth decay in children. He has also, on several occasions, suggested that 5G cell phone radiation causes cancer, various other health problems, DNA changes and is used for mass surveillance.