Covid investment to be taken energetic, NIH documents show
Studies on COVID, the replacement and South Africa climate are on the newest list of authorized subsidies through the US National Health Institutes. UU. , According to the updated documents received through nature.
By Max Kozlov
Electronic colorful scanning micrography of an apaptotic mobile (greenish brown) very inflamed with remains of Sars-Cov-2 virus (pink), traced from a patient sample.
National Institute of Infectious Allergies and Diseases, NIH / Flickr
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun writing off billions of dollars in investment for studies related to CoVID-19.
The “research budget” of COVVI-19 was issued for a limited purpose: for the purposes of the pandemic “, according to an internal NIH document that nature has received and provides the members of the firm of the firm of updated recommendation on how to rescind those subsidies. ” Now that the Pandemic has been overcome, the subsidy 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 funder in the Global of Biomedical Research, has awarded grants to approximately six hundred projects in progress that come with “Covid” in the title, worth approximately $850 million. Together, those projects make up nearly 2% of NIH’s $47 billion budget. And the CDC plans to write off $11. 4 billion in pandemic response, NBC News reports.
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 is a $577 million program to identify and expand antiviral drugs opposed to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus 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 “Subsidies Control Specialists”, NIH personnel who supervise the advertising aspect of the financing allocation. This document includes COVID-19 in a list of “studies activities that NIH no longer supports”, in addition to China, Dei studies, “transgender problems” and vaccination doubt. The most recent directives also imply that subsidies connected to South Africa and the climate replace should be completed.
The document also outlines a new category of studies being rescinded — any assignment on a list sent through the director of NIH or HHS, which is recently directed through former anti-vaccine attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
These giant grant finals at scale are unprecedented; The company cancels only a few dozen projects each year in reaction to serious considerations regarding studio misconduct or fraud, and only does so, after taking other moves, such as suspension.
Gose specialists will be guilty of identifying and ending the projects, because the existing NIH control considers its Clinical members too biased to make those determinations, explains an NIH official who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to speak 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 block without regard to their merit. “They brought a chainsaw to subsidies and a surgical laser,” explains Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, 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.
This is a “royal slap in front of the many patients with the aptitude of long -term infections,” explains Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center of the University of Brown 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, immunologist at Yale’s Faculty of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies immune responses in other people with long-term situations of very tense and post-viral, says: “If we do not perceive this now with this pandemic, I am involved that we are much less ready for long-term pandémicas. “
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 26, 2025.
Max Kozlov is a clinical journalist for Nature whose paintings have been printed in Atlantic, Nature, Magazine Quanta and Science, among other publications.
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