Trump’s Leg Condition Isn’t the Only Vascular Crisis He’s Caused

He Needs Compression Socks. They Needed NIH Funding.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

Don’t worry — I’m staying on the Epstein story. I’m working on exclusive reporting right now. As you know, this is one of the most fraught investigations for an independent journalist to pursue — a story that pits me and others against some of the most powerful people in the world.

But while I’m pulling threads behind the scenes, I want to take a moment to talk about the real-life fallout of the DOGE cuts — and how the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk’s political tantrums is hurting actual Americans.

It might feel like a lifetime ago when Musk was chain sawing his way through Washington, but the wreckage is very real. Case in point: a $2.6 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health, which quietly gutted research that could save lives — including those dependent on blood thinners.

This story hits close to home. My father suffered two back-to-back mini strokes or transient ischemic attacks caused by blood clots passing through a congenital heart defect. He was told he’d need to be on blood thinners for the rest of his life — and even then, there was no guarantee. (I eventually convinced my very stubborn father to cheat on his community hospital doctor and be treated by Dr. Robert Sommer at Columbia, who’s basically known as “the stent guy.” If you’ve got a hole in your heart, he’ll plug it, and then you’re in and out of the hospital in a day. I credit him with saving my father’s life.)

But for millions of others who rely on blood thinners, the future just got a lot more uncertain.

One program at Harvard — yes, the liberal institution so often targeted by this administration’s “stick-it-to-the-man” mentality — was led by vascular surgeon Dr. Anahita Dua, who had been developing personalized blood thinners based on individual clotting profiles. Think: the blood version of personalized cancer therapy. A billion-dollar industry in oncology. Still a pipe dream in vascular medicine. And now, thanks to these cuts, progress is on hold.

“Even if labs have money from the NIH, we don’t have the bodies to do the work,” she told on me on The Tara Palmeri Show which you can listen to on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Many of her lab techs are on J-1 visas — and Trump’s ban on certain countries, combined with frozen visa appointments, has made it impossible to get talent into the lab.

The result? Seven years and a million dollars worth of research on personalized blood thinners — stalled. A Randomized Control Trial that could prove the therapy works — suspended. The potential to bring the rate of clotting down from 20 percent to 4 percent — shelved. She predicts that it will impact research five years from now.

[🔓 Keep reading with a subscription to The Red Letter]

What happens when the White House plays science policy like culture war? A vascular surgeon weighs in on why Trump’s leg condition could turn ironic — and what happens if U.S. science loses its global edge...