Katherine J. Wu

Senior Producer at The Story Collider

staff writer @TheAtlantic, covering science. also senior producer @storycollider, senior editor @Open_Notebook. (she/her)

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Articles

‘It’s All Cronyism Going Forward’

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

Matthew J. Memoli has had an exceptionally good year. At the beginning of January, Memoli was a relatively little-known flu researcher running a small lab at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health.
‘This Is Not How We Do Science, Ever’

2 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

One of the most notable things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency tasked with “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America”—is how confidently he distorts the basics of health, safety, and well-being.
Decades of Progress on HIV ‘Just Disappeared Overnight’

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

If the United States learned any lesson from HIV, it should have been that negligence can be a death sentence. In the early 1980s, the virus’s ravages were treated as “something that happens over there, only to those people,” Juan Michael Porter II, a health journalist and an HIV activist, told me. But the more the virus and the people it most affected were ignored, the worse the epidemic got.
The Trump Administration Is Abandoning People in the Middle of Scientific Studies

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost.
The Trump Administration Is Embracing Infection

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio, yellow fever, malaria, measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tuberculosis have either been obliterated or become vanishingly rare. America “led the charge,” Aniruddha Hazra, an infectious-disease physician at UChicago Medicine, told me.
A Decade of Cuts in a Matter of Days

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in the business of canceling its grants. Of the more than 60,000 research awards the agency issues each year, it goes on to terminate, on average, maybe 20 of them, and usually only because of serious problems, such as flagrant misconduct, fraud, or an ethical breach that could harm study participants.
America Is Botching Measles

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

Until this year, public-health officials have abided by a simple playbook for measles outbreaks: Get unvaccinated people vaccinated, as quickly as possible. The measles component of the measles, mumps, and rubella shot that nearly all American kids receive today is “one of the best vaccines we have,” William Moss, a measles expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Two doses in early childhood are enough to cut someone’s risk of getting measles by 97 percent.
America Is Botching Measles

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Katherine J. Wu

3 hours agoKennedy Center's New Shows Take A Super-Trumpian Turn In Brutal SpoofThe departure of "Hamilton" has apparently given way to some rather partisan fare at the Kennedy Center. No “Hamilton,” no problem, the Kennedy Center boasts in a “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” spoof on Thursday.
Inside the Collapse at NIH

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12. For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding.
The NIH Memo That Undercut Universities Came Directly From Trump Officials

2 months ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.