Infectious Disease Committee’s “Save the NIH” Campaign

Beginning on Monday, April 14th, the Infectious Diseases committee is asking everyone to call their members of Congress to urge them to rescind the cuts to NIH and get political interference out of the agency.  A call script has been set up in collaboration with 5calls.org and is here. Call, get your friends and family to call.

View Call Script

Congress is in recess for the next two weeks—many members of Congress are having town hall meetings during this time—you can use the 5calls script for asking questions at town halls about the future of NIH. However, you have to figure out if, when and where your member of Congress is holding a town hall. Indivisible has some tips for doing this here.  Remember, you have to sign up for town halls, so do this quickly if you’re interested in meeting your member of Congress while they are back home.

We are in the process of developing additional questions beyond the 5calls NIH script, which we will share in a separate update in a few days. We have fact sheet on NIH issues in development here, which can also be a resource for meetings with members of Congress or during Q&As at town halls. In addition, Noam Ross and Scott Delaney have a database of terminated NIH grants by state/Congressional district/Representatives here and United for Medical Research has a map of states and NIH research dollars, jobs created by NIH grants for all states in the US here. Both are also great resources for making the local case for the NIH.

But the most important case to make is how NIH has affected you, your friends and family—those who have had cancer, diabetes, HIV, heart disease—biomedical research has saved millions of lives and now all this is at risk.

The Infectious Diseases/Pandemics/Vaccines Committee meets on Thursdays at 8PM Eastern. Come join us.