Saying 'pandemic is over,' NIH starts cutting COVID-19 research

[Nevilledog]

https://www.science.org/content/article/saying-pandemic-over-nih-institute-starts-cutting-covid-19-research

The White House appears to have a new target for its cuts to research funding: Grants linked to COVID-19, which President Donald Trump and his appointees have decided are a waste of money because the pandemic is over.

Science has learned that grant termination letters went out last night to principal investigators of 29 awards made by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), including nine grants that were part of a program hoping to deliver antiviral drugs to prevent future pandemics. “The end of the pandemic provides cause to terminate COVID-related grant funds,” the notification states. “These grant funds were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary.”

NIAID did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the grant cancellations, but a spokesperson for its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), sent Science an emailed statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” it said. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”

One major NIAID program that began in May 2022 and was just killed, Antiviral Drug Discovery Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern, promised to spend $577 million on nine U.S.-based efforts to develop new drugs to treat COVID-19. Part of that program was also aimed at designing antivirals to target entire families of disease-causing viruses, including bunyaviruses (Rift Valley fever), filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), flaviviruses (yellow fever, dengue, Zika), paramyxoviruses (measles), picornaviruses (common cold), and togaviruses (chikungunya). The termination of the program has a “misleading rationale” and is a “pointless, ill-advised move that will hurt U.S. science and pandemic readiness,” says Charles Rice, a Nobel Prize–winning virologist at Rockefeller University who co-leads one of the nine centers that was funded under that program.

*snip*

[Karasu]

1. Oh yeah, this is going to end REAL well.

[Solly Mack]

2. ...

[OAITW r.2.0]

3. Trump will be killing more of his voters. Those that get their medical opinions from RW outlets.

You'd have thunk that these people learned something from the 2020 COVID epidemic. Apparently not. I'll listen to my PCP for advice to remain alive.

[electric_blue68]

4. 😑 🙄 just "great"...

[yellow dahlia]

5. Anti virals could save us from so much.

And Covid isn't gone. I believe there has also been work on a nasal vaccine, which might work better for some people. Long Covid research is critical.

Fuck them!

[Botany]

6. Are they trying to kill us all?

The C-19 virus is still around and can still mutate into new strains that are resistant to
the current vaccines. BTW 14 million is the
real # that were killed worldwide in the 1st go
round with C-19. 8 million diagnosed, 5 million undiagnosed, and at least 1 million who died because they didn't get the needed medical care because it was all being used to.treat covid cases

Science works what kind of mad house are we in?

[0rganism]

7. So that, 10 years from now, anti-vaxxers can complain about a lack of long-term outcome data

Perhaps I'm over-optimistic, thinking such things will matter in a decade.

[ecstatic]

8. way too optimistic

The things he's doing right now will cause millions of deaths. Harsh but true. He learned absolutely nothing from his actions predating the pandemic in 2018.

[flamingdem]

9. Eugenics

We can't stand for this.