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
Electron micrograph of colorized scanning of an apoptotic (greenish-brown) mobile phone heavily inflamed with traces of SARS-CoV-2 virus (pink), removed from a patient sample.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious 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 Covid-19 Studies Budget “was issued for a limited purpose: for the purposes of the pandemic,” according to an internal NIH document that nature received that the members of the supply company personnel of the updated management company on how to finish how to finish these subsidies. “
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 reasons 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 others. Testing the virus, how it is infected, and the government’s reaction to the pandemic is to save the next one, scientists say.
Among the NIH’s 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 short-term: We desperately want new remedies opposed to viruses,” explains Jason McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of Texas, Austin, whose assignment to expand broad-spectrum remedies that paints opposed to various types of viruses were comprising the program’s programs and on March 24. Long-term pandemic preparedness. “
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 canceled: any assignment on a list sent through the NIH or HHS Director, which is recently directed through former anti-vaccine attorney 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 are concerned that the recommendation for NIH workers is too indistinct and that any study task related to safe keywords can block without having their merit in mind. “They brought a chainsaw to the 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.
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, 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 Nature clinical journalist whose paintings have given the impression in Atlantic, Nature, Magazine Quanta and Science, among other publications.
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