The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) highly regarded Vaccine Research Center (VRC) once had a roughly 400-person workforce that helped develop and clinically test vaccines and antibody treatments for Ebola and host of dangerous infectious diseases. Now, after a steady firing of key contractors by President Donald Trump’s administration, VRC is reeling.
“I am writing at the end of another very difficult week for the VRC,” Director Ted Pierson wrote in a 28 April email seen by Science. He noted the center had just lost another 15 contract staff, on top of 48 other contractors let go since late January. Contractors make up half of VRC’s workforce.
Across all of NIH more than 2000 contractors have been laid off since Trump took office, according to previously unreported information from late April obtained by Science. Those losses come on top of comparable numbers of NIH workers who were let go because they had probationary status or were part of the agency’s reduction in force, or who have left because of the chaos or retired by taking White House buyout offers.
At VRC, the “process of terminating [the latest] contracts was sudden, impersonal, and profoundly distressing,” Pierson wrote. “It is understandable to be discouraged, angry, and anxious.” Key programs at VRC are now hobbled, according to details in his memo.
Launched 25 years ago by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), VRC does “Manhattan Project–like science” on vaccines and related immune therapeutics, says University of Pennsylvania immunologist John Wherry. Its “mission-oriented teams” groups tackle “big problems,” Wherry says, such as producing novel vaccines and antibodies to treat diseases such as malaria, as well as conducting clinical trials. VRC’s website lists six trials underway, including for a flu vaccine and an HIV antibody treatment, both developed in-house at NIH.
The center’s past efforts include devising Ebola treatments and helping Moderna develop its messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine within months, saving millions of lives. “Its overall economic value is orders of magnitude in favor of the investments we made,” Wherry says. Its basic research, too, has been invaluable, he says, from tailoring a SARS-CoV-2 protein for use in mRNA vaccines to immunology findings that have influenced cancer treatments.
The center originally employed about 200 contractors as scientific staff, sources there say. The rest included about 100 federal employees, as well as research fellows and postcollege trainees. Because of a Trump policy that has effectively barred renewals of the “task orders” for individual contractors’ terms, VRC has been losing contractors since early February—some 32% of its total.
“Since January, it has been controlled despair, coming in each day seeing which colleague is gone,” said a VRC worker on a contract who was let go in April. Now, 15 more VRC contractors have been dismissed under a mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for NIH overall to cut contract spending by $2.6 billion or 35%.
The Vaccine Immunology Program and Vaccine Production Programs have been especially affected by the continuing losses, Pierson’s memo says. One immunology lab, which has lost 40% of its workers, has stopped developing antibody tests for some future clinical trials and could soon have to stop testing blood samples from ongoing trials and simply store the samples, a VRC scientist says. Various NIH-wide purchasing restrictions have also slowed research at a place that uses large quantities of reagents and other supplies, scientists say.
VRC leaders have avoided speaking to reporters because they worry the center will become a target for Trump officials, say their colleagues in the academic community. NIAID has had several leaders removed by the Trump administration and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, depending on the critic, a vaccine skeptic or outright opponent.
Across NIH the contractor purge—some 2200 contractors since January, according to data shared last week with staff at one institute—now rivals the 2500 NIH staff lost to two rounds of layoffs of federal employees since mid-February. According to a website that pulls in data on contract cuts listed by DOGE, NIH has so far cut more than 400 contracts totaling about $780 million, including ones that provided repositories for biospecimens and support for long-term health studies. One cut, to the long-running Women’s Health Initiative, was reversed this week after a public outcry.
VRC finally had some good news this week: The task orders for individual contractors can now be renewed, which should staunch the loss of scientific workers, a scientist says. Still, the center is bracing for more cuts in mid-May to another contract, Pierson’s memo says.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-key-vaccine-center-slammed-contract-cuts
