Tell me about how this story came about.

It all started because I received an email from a researcher at the University of Michigan.

He has this very special job because Michigan is such a big university.

He is the director of faculty honorifics.

So essentially, it's his job to... seek recognition for the achievements and research that the faculty at Michigan are doing.

So he's seen many awards, many fellowships, many of these societies.

He's very familiar.

What are these like? What have people told you about them?

So use that as a starting point and take us further.

Yeah.

So like you mentioned, so much of this research has focused on HIV and AIDS, on COVID-19.

And it seems to be a growing list of research topics that the administration finds problematic.

They've terminated grants about vaccine hesitancy.

They've terminated grants researching misinformation.

And the HIV AIDS grants like I said, make up a huge proportion of all the hundreds of grants that they've been terminating so far.

That's what the evidence seems to show you, huh?

This is, this is insane.

So I've covered, I've covered a lot, uh, about the monkeypox outbreaks.

People might remember in 2022 especially, um, this is a virus that swept the world, and it's a virus that has largely, uh, been endemic in parts of Africa.

But now it, it caused, uh, you know, a huge surge of infections all over the world, including in the United States.

And with all this data coming down, not only are entire datasets missing, but also certain classifiers, uh, certain categories of data.

For example, data about sexual orientation.

And part of the reason that we were able to stop the monkeypox outbreak so quickly in the United States is because we had very detailed data on precisely who was getting infected and which communities it was infecting.

So what is going on with this list? What do we know?