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https://www.science.org/content/article/saying-pandemic-over-nih-institute-starts-cutting-covid-19-research>
"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.”"
Via Joyce Donahue.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
