Covid investment to be taken energetic, NIH documents show
Studies on Covid, Climate Replacement, and South Africa are on the newest list of grants authorized through the U. S. National Institutes of Health. According to updated documents received through nature.
By Max Kozlov
Colored electron scanning micrograph with an apoptotic (greenish-brown) mobile strongly inflamed with SARS-CoV-2 virus debris (pink), removed from a patient sample.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH/Flickr
The U. S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun canceling billions of investments for COVID-19-related research.
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 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. Aluminating the virus, how it is infected and the reaction of the government to the pandemic is to prevent the next one, 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. “
The NIH has responded to nature’s requests about grant layoffs or scientists’ considerations about them. His parents’ organization, the American Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told nature that “the Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent 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 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 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 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 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.
According to the new guide, it is not clear if the NIH plans to close the long -term research, adding its recovery initiative of $ 1. 6 billion, whose objective is the deep reasons and remedies of the disease. Trump’s management seems to be pointing out the long characteristic: this week, HHS will close its long investigation and the office of practice of the office, which coordinate the reaction of the US government to the disease of the disease, according to the correspondence of nature, the correspondence of nature.
This is a “real slap in the face to the many patients with the aptitude for long-term infections,” explains Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kennedy promised to “make America on smart fitness,” in part overhauling American fitness agencies to focus on chronic diseases. This “wholesale crackdown” on coconut studies is not in the spirit of the field, Nuzzo says. “We’re going to have to examine how infections cause some of the worst diseases that society endures,” he said, adding that studies have linked infections to 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 well arranged and post-viral, “if we do not perceive that now with this pandemic, I am involved 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 clinical journalist for Nature whose paintings have been printed in Atlantic, Nature, Magazine Quanta and Science, among other publications.
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