Dr. Lawrence Tabak testifies before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education on Capitol Hill on May 4, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Tabak's resignation comes amid a shakeup within the Health and Human Services Department, the NIH's parent agency, that occurred once President Donald Trump took office in January. Under Trump, the agency has faced cuts to programs and reports have indicated the administration has plans to fire a trove of HHS employees. Typically, Tabak would have been promoted to acting director while Trump's nominee awaited confirmation. However, the position was instead assigned to Dr. Matthew Memoli, a former top researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a known critic of COVID vaccine mandates.
Tabak was part of a group of agency leaders, including Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, who congressional investigators accused of trying to manipulate the narrative around the origins of the COVID-19 virus. Through GOP investigations, it was determined Tabak was part of a controversial phone call with Fauci, Collins and several prominent scientists that critics have argued was a catalyst for the publication of a scientific paper that was released positing that it was not plausible the virus originated in a lab.
SCIENTISTS EXPECT MAJOR ‘MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS’ DESPITE TRUMP'S CAP ON NIH RESEARCH FUNDING
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
He was also front-and-center when it came to GOP probes into whether risky gain-of-function research was occurring at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and faced criticism for slow-rolling the release of information requested by Republican investigators for these concerns.
Tabak "[dealt] with all of the messy or intractable problem[s]" and was "often… the fall guy when things [went] sideways," Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, said on social media following news of Tabak's resignation. "Larry has shoveled so much s--- over the years that he would have been well qualified to work behind the elephants in an old circus."
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Fox News Digital reached out to the NIH for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nih-principal-deputy-director-who-led-agency-during-covid-resigns-abruptly