Nearly five years ago, as the pandemic continued to claim the lives of thousands of Americans every day, the public was confronted with a highly controversial joint statement called the “Great Barrington Declaration.” While the statement endorsed protections for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, it simultaneously argued that public health officials should pursue a radical version of “herd immunity” by allowing Covid to spread untrammeled through the rest of the population.

When Donald Trump effectively stopped trying to deal with the Covid crisis, White House officials said it was because he liked the policy indifference recommended by this “declaration.”

After the president won a second term, he tapped Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of its signatories, to serve as the next director of the National Institutes of Health.

Now the “Great Barrington Declaration” has prompted a sensible bookend called the “Bethesda Declaration” that’s worth paying attention to. The Washington Post reported:

More than 90 staffers at the National Institutes of Health signed their names to a letter of dissent to Director Jay Bhattacharya in a rare sign of open resistance by career government employees. The letter warns that Trump administration policies such as terminating peer-reviewed grants, interrupting global collaborations and firing essential staff are wasting public resources, undermining the NIH’s mission and harming the health of people in the United States and beyond.

“The life-and-death nature of our work demands that changes be thoughtful and vetted. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the three-page letter says. “Many of us have raised these concerns to NIH leadership, yet they remain unaddressed, and we are pressured to implement harmful measures.”

The document is called the Bethesda Declaration, of course, because the NIH headquarters are located in Bethesda, Maryland. (Its unsettling 2020 predecessor was prepared at a gathering in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.)

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It argues that the administration’s actions are causing “a dramatic reduction in life-saving research,” with signatories adding that “For staff across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

In case this isn’t obvious, such a statement is far from normal. On the contrary, it’s unprecedented for so many current NIH officials not only to denounce their own agency’s leadership and the White House’s agenda publicly, but to warn the public that the administration is making decisions that put Americans at risk.

As for what might happen to those who put their names on the Bethesda Declaration, Bhattacharya said during his confirmation hearings that he would remain open to those with competing ideas. “Dissent,” he said, “is the very essence of science.”

As The Associated Press reported, “That commitment is being put to the test.”