The Trump administration has moved to end funding for a broad swath of HIV vaccine research, saying current approaches are enough to counter the virus, several scientists and federal health officials say.
Notifications that the funding would not be extended were relayed May 30 to researchers, who were told by National Institutes of Health officials that the Department of Health and Human Services had elected “to go with currently available approaches to eliminate HIV” instead.
The cuts will shutter two major HIV vaccine research efforts first funded by the NIH in 2012 at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Scripps Research Institute, scientists said. A Moderna spokesperson said the vaccine manufacturer’s clinical trials through the NIH’s HIV Vaccine Trials Network have also been put on pause.
One senior NIH official said the HHS had instructed the agency not to issue any more funding in the next fiscal year for HIV vaccine research, with only a handful of exceptions.
A budgetary rule change specifically targeted at HIV vaccine research is also expected to lead to another cut to the NIH’s awards for studies initiated by scientists, an official said.
The change, to be finalized shortly, inflates the accounting for the upfront cost of studies into HIV vaccines funded by the agency. Instead of the cost of a five-year grant being spread over five years, the NIH plans to make HIV vaccine dollars from multiyear grants all count toward a single year, the official said, making it harder for them to get funded.
A spokesperson for HHS told CBS News that “complex and duplicative health programs have resulted in serious duplication of efforts,” saying that “27 separate programs that address HIV/AIDS” had spent $7.5 billion.
“The Administration believes the United States should have the best medical research in the world. To that end, we are advancing policies to maximize the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar and ensure proper oversight of this funding,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said.
Hilliard claimed “critical HIV/AIDS programs will continue” under the new agency that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed creating, dubbed the Administration for a Healthy America.
“For HIV vaccine design and development, we’ve begun to see light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research. This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close. We’re getting good results out of clinical trials,” said Dennis Burton, an immunology professor at Scripps Research.
Burton warned that his institution’s HIV vaccine research could not simply be turned back on, even if a future administration decided to change course on HIV funding. He said that ongoing experiments would be shuttered and that researchers assembled to study the issue would be forced to refocus their careers on other topics.
“This is a decision with consequences that will linger. This is a setback of probably a decade for HIV vaccine research,” Burton said.
The cancellation of the funds comes weeks ahead of the FDA’s June 19 deadline for deciding on approval of lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable drug to prevent HIV.
The drug, which is being brought to the commercial market by drugmaker Gilead Sciences, builds on NIH-backed research into earlier HIV medications. The drug’s availability could lead to a significant drop in HIV cases worldwide, since a study found it was 100% effective in preventing transmission.
An NIH official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, rebuked the claim that the effectiveness of current HIV prevention strategies meant a vaccine was no longer needed. “The only way of ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S. and AIDS pandemic worldwide” is with a vaccine, the official said.
Developing an effective HIV vaccine has been an elusive target for researchers, though scientists have hailed recent breakthroughs in the field.
“HIV has established roadblocks to us fighting it off, which are unparalleled in vaccinology. We’ve had to learn what each of the roadblocks are and to devise ways to overcome it. This virus mutates so quickly,” said Duke professor of medicine Barton Ford Haynes, who is part of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute.
Haynes said his institute’s work was essentially combining different vaccines as part of a strategy to design an effective HIV vaccine.
He praised lenacapavir as a “wonderful development for the field” but said there was still a need for a vaccine. Lenacapavir requires injections every six months to remain effective, a challenging proposition even before steep cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s domestic HIV programs and U.S.-backed HIV/AIDS foreign aid programs.
“The hope was that adding an HIV vaccine to all the preventive measures that we have would finally allow us to end the pandemic,” Haynes said.
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