In 2019, President Donald Trump launched an ambitious new health program with a singular aim: reduce HIV transmission in America by 90 percent. Six years and a change of president later, in his new administration, Trump appears to have all but given up on that idea.
On Friday, research programs at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute that are working to deliver an HIV vaccine were told by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that their $258 million funding would be stopped. The vaccine manufacturer Moderna said that their clinical trials, funded by the NIH, have also been paused.
“The consortia for HIV/AIDS vaccine development and immunology was reviewed by NIH leadership, which does not support it moving forward,” a senior official at the agency told The New York Times.
“NIH expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate HIV/AIDS,” they added.
The news comes at “a terrible time” for HIV vaccine research, an immunology professor at Scripps told CBS News. “This is a decision with consequences that will linger. This is a setback of probably a decade for HIV vaccine research.”
This is just the latest round of funding cuts to HIV research, part of a vast swath of grant terminations undertaken by the NIH. Forty percent of the health bodies’ $47 billion budget is expected to be cut by Republican lawmakers, with 20,000 jobs on the chopping block as HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledges to shrink the size of the government and “make America healthy again.”
More than 230 of the nearly 800 research grants that have so far been cut were HIV and AIDS-specific. The impact of the cuts is expected to be global. While HIV infections have been on the decline since 2010, in 2023, there were 1.3 million new cases around the world, with 120,000 of those in children, the World Health Organization reports.
“The HIV pandemic will never be ended without a vaccine, so killing research on one will end up killing people,” John Moore, an HIV researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, told The New York Times.
“The NIH’s multiyear investment in advanced vaccine technologies shouldn’t be abandoned on a whim like this,” he said.
A spokesperson for the HHS defended the cuts to CBS News, saying the “complex and duplicative health programs have resulted in serious duplication of efforts” and that “27 separate programs that address HIV/AIDS” have spent $7.5 billion.
Critical HIV/AIDS programs “will continue,” the spokesperson said, under the proposed Administration for a Healthy America. Still, with current research on ice, experts are saying that the ongoing (and expected-to-continue) cuts to this necessary research have “destroyed with an e-mail in a day” what the research community has spent 25 years building.
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