Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Testified before the House Labor – HHS Appropriations Subcommittee for the NIH budget. As usual for the past few years, it was only a 2 hour Hearing with Francis Collins testifying and me backing him up at the table together with Gary Gibbons (NHLBI), Tom Insel (NIMH), Nora Volkow (NIDA) and Jon Lorsch (NIGMS). Hearing started early (8:30 AM) since Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking before a Joint Session of Congress at the invitation of Speaker Boehner and against the wishes of Obama. He was making the argument that the USA was making a “bad deal” with Iran on nuclear control versus sanctions. During the Hearing Congressman Andy Harris (R-MD) made the point that he felt that we were spending too much on AIDS compared to other diseases with much more of a morbidity and mortality impact on the USA. He wants to allocate money strictly according the disease burden in the USA. Hence, this would destroy funding for malaria and TB and greatly hurt funding for AIDS. Obviously, I will be opposing this. Still record cold weather and lots of snow in DC.