Dr. Joseph Allen, Associate Professor of Exposure Assessment Science, Environmental Health at Harvard University, is amplifying the work of his colleague Dr. Sarah Fortune, a Full Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases also at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Allen reported on X that Fortune “was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis. But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump.”
Famed Harvard cognitive scientist Dr. Steven Pinker reshared Allen’s post about Fortune and added: “The stupidity of indiscriminately canceling grants to punish an entire university for a shifting mixture of grievances, mostly fictitious or distorted.”
Note: Pinker penned an op-ed essay in The New York Times in May entitled Harvard Derangement Syndrome.
The stupidity of indiscriminately canceling grants to punish an entire university for a shifting mixture of grievances, mostly fictitious or distorted. https://t.co/pQa3PW7ubN
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 4, 2025
In addition to pulling billions of dollars of federal funding from Harvard, the Trump administration has ordered the Ivy League institution to stop enrolling foreign students.
The order came after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded information on Harvard student visa holders, saying that the college had “created a hostile learning environment for Jewish students,” and was not satisfied with Harvard’s response.
(A U.S. district judge issued a preliminary injunction that allows Harvard to continue enrolling international students — “halting, at least for now,” NPR reports, “the Trump administration’s efforts to ban the practice” of enrolling foreign students.)
Note: In 2014, Harvard’s public health school was renamed Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for Chinese-born real estate developer Chan Tseng-hsi, after his family donated $350 million to Harvard, the largest donation in Harvard’s history at the time. (In 2021, the Chan family also made an unrestricted gift of $175 million to the UMass Medical School.)
According to his son Gerald Chan (Harvard SM ’75, SD ’79), his father (T.H. Chan) was a man “unfailingly committed to enabling others to become educated” and his mother was trained as a nurse in a British hospital in Northern China in the 1940s.
According to a Harvard profile of the Chan family: “It was a time when infectious diseases were the leading cause of death in the world. In the 1950s, government vaccination programs in Hong Kong had not yet achieved universal coverage. Gerald remembers his mother giving cholera vaccinations to the neighborhood children in the kitchen of their home.”
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