The Measles Uptick Edition

On American scientists, withheld funds, and brain drain.

Colin here. Odd Lots’ Joe Weisenthal, a friend of WITI, recently pointed out a great JP Morgan report. Inside, there’s a chart I surprisingly can’t stop thinking about.

It shows the weekly measles cases in the United States from 2024 to 2026. It also notes that from 1994 to 2024, the weekly average was four cases. Since January 2025, it’s fifty-eight.

Why is this interesting?

Measles is the visible symptom. The underlying condition is something larger and, I’d argue, more consequential for the country’s long-term position than any tariff or trade war: Brain drain, and scientific big bets.

In 2025, American scientists submitted 32% more applications to jobs abroad than the year prior. Eighty-five rising and established researchers — including an NIH neurobiologist and a Princeton nuclear physicist — moved to China. The EU launched a 500 million euro package specifically designed to attract US scientists to Europe. This is a structural reorientation of where the world’s best scientific minds believe their work can actually happen.

It’s not just that research budgets got cut, though this is certainly true in many categories. It’s that the rules governing how science gets funded are being rewritten in ways that make the entire enterprise structurally shaky. The proposed changes to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would give political appointees pre-approval authority over every discretionary grant, explicitly forbidding them from deferring to peer reviewers. Active grants can be terminated mid-award for any reason, and applicants can be denied based on organizational affiliations. To be clear, this is an inversion of the post-WWII compact that made American science the envy of the world in the first place.

Elias Zerhouni, who ran the NIH under George W. Bush, put it with unusual directness: the people executing these changes think they’re making the system stronger. They don’t understand the second- and third-order effects. And unlike a factory or a supply chain, you can’t just rebuild a scientific ecosystem once you’ve dismantled it. The timelines are long. Clinical trials that were halted don’t resume cleanly, and the PhD students who didn’t enroll don’t come back. The researchers who left for Zurich or Shanghai don’t return because a new administration promises stability.

The super reductionist version of the story that gets a lot of airtime is a political fight between the administration and elite universities. That framing is too narrow. Two-thirds of all terminated research funding, according to an American Progress analysis of government data, went to public colleges and universities, not Harvard or Columbia. This is as much a middle-American science story as an elite institution story.

The US built its scientific leadership over eighty years through a simple and elegant idea: the government funds the basic research that no private actor has the time horizon or risk tolerance to fund, and that foundational work eventually becomes the commercial infrastructure that generates returns for everyone. NIH funding underpinned basic or applied research related to 99% of newly approved medicines. The NSF’s history includes the groundwork for the internet, Doppler radar, supercomputing, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence.

By disrupting this in the short term, we cut off the supply of downstream things we keep saying we want more of — biotech innovation, AI leadership, energy breakthroughs.

You can’t defund the headwaters and then wonder why the river runs dry. (CJN)