Trump Administration Cuts $258M Program Crucial To Discovering HIV Vaccines

Two days before the beginning of Pride Month, President Donald Trump’s administration terminated a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine for HIV.

On Friday, the program’s two leaders, from Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute, heard the news from the HIV division of the National Institutes of Health—their work was no longer supported.

“The consortia for H.I.V./AIDS vaccine development and immunology was reviewed by N.I.H. leadership, which does not support it moving forward,” a senior official at the agency who was not authorized to speak on the matter and who asked not to be identified told The New York Times. “N.I.H. expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate H.I.V./AIDS,” the official said.

The researchers’ work also improved treatments for other illnesses, including COVID-19, snake bites, and autoimmune diseases. The NIH also paused funding for a separate clinical trial of an HIV vaccine made by Moderna.

“The H.I.V. pandemic will never be ended without a vaccine,” John Moore, who researches HIV at Weill Cornell Medical in New York, told the Times. “So,” he continued, “killing research on one will end up killing people.” “The N.I.H.’s multiyear investment in advanced vaccine technologies shouldn’t be abandoned on a whim like this.”

The Trump administration’s removal of funding for HIV vaccine research and development is the latest in their wide-reaching attacks on efforts to mitigate a virus that around 40 million people live with worldwide. A virus that, in 2023, led to an estimated 630,000 deaths from AIDS-related illnesses in 2023, according to UNAIDS. That number could be as high as 820,000. In 2023, globally, almost half of new HIV infections were among women and girls of all ages.

Prevalence and risk continue to be disproportionately high for gay men, men who have sex with men, transgender people, intravenous drug users, and sex workers around the world.

“I find it very disappointing that, at this critical juncture, the funding for highly successful H.I.V. vaccine research programs should be pulled,” Dennis Burton, an immunologist who led the program at Scripps, said.

According to the Times, the two research programs, funded from seven-year awards made back in 2019, “focused on so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have been shown in animal studies to provide long-lasting protection against exposure to multiple H.I.V. strains.” Clinical trials based on the Duke and Scripps work may continue, but now that they’ve lost the funding, future trials may be non-starters. “Almost everything in the field is hinged on work that those two programs are doing,” Mitchell Warren, executive director of the HIV prevention organization AVAC, said. “The pipeline just got clogged.”

Since taking office in January, Trump and his administration have taken aim at local, national, and global programs aimed at preventing and treating HIV—cuts that both derail progress that has been made over decades and slow down future medical advancements and social mitigation.

In January, Trump’s team halted disbursement of funds from Pepfar, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the $7.5 billion program that supplied most of the treatment for HIV in Africa and developing countries around the world. While the State Department issued waivers for treatments to continue, it didn’t restore funding moving forward—a move that risks the health of tens of millions of people in these areas.

Also in January, less than two weeks after Trump was inaugurated, a slate of public health information was taken down from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website—including contraception guidance, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people, and details about National Transgender HIV Testing Day, amongst other information related to gender identity.

In March, the NIH withdrew millions of dollars from a program dedicated to understanding how to diagnose, treat, and prevent HIV infections and AIDS in adolescents and young adults. Trump’s cuts also targeted multiple grants focused on PrEP, a medicine taken by people who do not have HIV that reduces the risk of getting the virus from sex or injection drug use, by about 99% and at least 74%, respectively.

Just this week, the administration withheld funds for local prevention work, including in Texas, where the State Department of Health Services directed grantees to stop their work “until further notice,” and in North Carolina, where a lack of funds spurred 10 health department staffers to be laid off.

Federal health department officials have said that some of the work related to HIV prevention and treatment will be shifted to the Department of Health and Human Services’ new Administration for a Healthy America. Yet, that agency hasn’t been formed, and no details were provided about how it could serve communities impacted by HIV and AIDS.

“It’s just inconceivable,” Warren from AVAC began, “how shortsighted this is.”