At MAHA Summit, the NIH head pushes for research that risks failure

The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Summit in Washington, DC, on Nov. 12 wasn’t supposed to go public.“Jay, we’re off the record. They didn’t let the press in,” Calley Means, a senior adviser in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during an onstage interview. Means acknowledged Bhattacharya’s history of criticizing the institution he now leads before asking, “What has been most challenging?”Within a week, Bhattacharya’s answer was available to all on YouTube.Their conversation about how the NIH has changed during the second Donald J. Trump administration was part of the daylong summit, which also covered food, lifestyle, and health technologies. With the exception of a conversation between Vice President JD Vance and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which was livestreamed on CSPAN, the conference was meant to be closed to the media. One attendee shared on Instagram that she was reprimanded for taking video. Yet within a week, the organizers had posted the whole six-and-a-half hour proceedings to its YouTube channel. Organizers at the group MAHA Action did not respond to C&EN’s questions about why they made the ostensibly closed-door meeting public, and a handful of invited speakers declined to comment on the meeting.Here are five takeaways for the biomedical sector.The MAHA Summit convened HHS officials; executives from the biotechnology, health technology, and food industries; health and wellness entrepreneurs; and wellness influencers. In his opening remarks, Tony Lyons, the CEO of MAHA Action, said he