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.

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