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.
Other terminated grants involved research to develop improved COVID-19 vaccines and to address Long Covid, the mysterious lingering aftermath of some SARS-CoV-2 infections. “The research is being treated like we already have all the answers we will need in the future and that the current vaccines work well enough and don’t need improvement, which we know is not true,” says an investigator involved with one of the NIAID grants who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. “Some of the studies being canceled were attempting to make a pancoronavirus vaccine, which would hopefully be available the next time a novel coronavirus jumps species into humans.”
According to the grant termination letter Rice and colleagues received, the researchers were told they could appeal but were discouraged from trying to fight the termination. “Although ‘[the National Institutes of Health] generally will suspend (rather than immediately terminate) a grant and allow the recipient an opportunity to take appropriate corrective action before NIH makes a termination decision,’ no corrective action is possible here,” the termination notice said. “The premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”
Science has separately learned that at least two of the eight federally funded Serological Sciences Centers of Excellence were terminated. This network was set up to study immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, what leads to its transmission between people, and what drives disease progression in the infected. The U.S. National Cancer Institute–organized program involved 26 institutions, from academic labs to hospitals, and had been authorized to receive more than $150 million from an emergency congressional appropriation made in 2020.
On top of the terminated NIH research grants, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun cutting $11.4 billion in pandemic response funds allocated to state and country health departments and nongovernmental organizations, according to NBC News. HHS provided NBC News with the same statement about the pandemic being over.
