Covid investment to be taken energetic, NIH documents show
Covvid studies, replacement and South Africa climate are on the last list of discarded subsidies through the National Health Institutes of the United States, according to the documents updated through nature
By Max Kozlov
Colored electronic exploration micrography with a strongly inflamed apopaptotic (greenish brown) with Sars-Cov-2 virus debris (pink), traced from a patient sample.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH/Flickr
The National Health Institutes of the United States (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun to cancel billions of investments for research related to COVID-19.
The CovVI-19 “Research Budget” was issued for a limited purpose: for the effects of the pandemic, “according to an internal NIH document that nature has received and which provides members of the firm with the updated recommendation on how to rescind those subsidies. “Now that the pandemic has been overcome, the grant budget is not necessary, the document said.
The repression occurs when the NIH, under President Donald Trump, interrupted only about 400 subsidies in the last month. An earlier edition of the documents, received through nature on March 5, ordered the body of workers to identify and potentially cancel projects in transgender populations; gender identity; Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the clinical workforce; and environmental justice.
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The NIH, which is the largest public financier in the Global of Biomedical Research, has granted subsidies to approximately six hundred projects in progress that come with “Covid” in the title, value approximately $ 850 million. Together, these projects constitute almost 2% of the budget of $ 47 billion in NIH. And the CDC plans to cancel $ 11. 4 billion in response pandemic, reports NBC News.
SARS-COV-2, the virus that Razon Covid-19 has killed more than 7 million people worldwide, adding more than 1. 2 million in the United States, and continues to infect and kill other people. The virus examination, its mode of infection and the reaction of the Government to the pandemic is to save the following, the scientists say.
Among the NIH terminations, there is a $ 577 million program to identify and expand antiviral medications opposed to the coronavirus Sras-COV-2 and six other viruses with pandemic potential.
“These finals are obviously in the short term: we desperately want new remedies opposite to viruses,” explains Jason McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of Texas, Austin, whose assignment to expand wide spectrum remedies that paintings opposed to several types of viruses were competitive of the program programs and March 24 “. Long -term preparation for pandemic. “
NIH has responded to nature requests on subsidies ‘dismissals or scientists’ considerations about them. His organization of the parents, the American Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS), told nature that “the Covid-19 pandemic has ended, and the HHS will no longer waste billions of dollars of taxpayers who respond to a non-existent pandemic that Americans have replaced years ago. “
The updated documents that nature has received (see more data below) were sent on March 25 to “subsidy control specialists,” NIH personnel who oversee the publicity aspect of the funding allocation. This document includes CoVID-19 in a list of “Study Activities that NIH no longer supports,” in addition to studies on China, DEI, “transgender issues,” and vaccination hesitancy. The most recent directives also imply that subsidies connected to South Africa and the climate replace must be ended.
The document also describes a new category of studies that is canceled: any task in a list sent through the NIH or HHS director, which is recently directed through the long -standing anti -cacuna lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
These final giant subsidies are not preceded; The company cancels only a few dozen projects every year in reaction to serious considerations regarding the misconduct or fraud of studies, and only does, after taking other movements, such as suspension.
Gose specialists will be guilty for identifying and putting an end to the projects, because the existing NIH control considers that its clinical members are too partial to make those determinations, explains a NIH official who asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to the press.
But some scientists worry that the recommendation for NIH workers is too indistinct and that any study assignments related to safe keywords may be on the block without their merits. “They brought a chainsaw to grants and not a surgical laser,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskoon, Canada, Canada, the WHO studies Sars-Cov-2.
As a component of the new directive, it is not transparent if the NIH plans to close long -term studies, adding its recovery initiative of $ 1. 6 billion, whose objective is to locate the reasons and deep remedies of the disease. Trump’s management is to depreciate the long characteristic: this week, HHS will close its long -term practice and long -term studies office, which coordinates the reaction of the US government to the disease, according to correspondence through the email that nature has obtained.
It is a “real slap on the face of the many patients who suffer with the long -term aptitude of limited infections,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic center of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kennedy promised to “make America in intelligent aptitude,” partly review US fitness agencies to concentrate on chronic diseases. This “wholesale repression” of coconut studies is not in the spirit of the field, says Nuzzo. “We will have to examine how infections cause some of the worst diseases that society supports,” he said, adding that studies have connected infections with a non -unusual herpes called Epstein – Barr for the progression of multiple sclerosis.
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at the New Haven Yale School of Medicine, Connecticut, who studies immune responses in other people with stuck and post-viole conditions, “if we do not perceive this now with this pandemic, I am worried that we are much less ready for long-term pandemics. “
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 26, 2025.
Max Kozlov is a Nature clinical journalist whose paintings have given the impression in Atlantic, Nature, Magazine Quanta and Science, among other publications.
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