The Trump administration has dealt a sharp blow to work on H.I.V. vaccines, terminating a $258 million program whose work was instrumental to the search for a vaccine.
Officials from the H.I.V. division of the National Institutes of Health delivered the news on Friday to the program’s two leaders, at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute.
Both teams were collaborating with numerous other research partners. The work was broadly applicable to a wide range of treatments for other illnesses, from Covid drugs to snake antivenom and therapies for autoimmune diseases.
“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,” said a senior official at the agency who was not authorized to speak on the matter and asked not to be identified. “N.I.H. expects to be shifting its focus toward using currently available approaches to eliminate H.I.V./AIDS,” the official said.
The program’s elimination is the latest in a series of cuts to H.I.V.-related initiatives, and to prevention of the disease in particular. Separately, the N.I.H. also paused funding for a clinical trial of an H.I.V. vaccine made by Moderna.
“I find it very disappointing that, at this critical juncture, the funding for highly successful H.I.V. vaccine research programs should be pulled,” said Dennis Burton, an immunologist who led the program at Scripps.
The cuts will derail hard-won progress against H.I.V. over the past few decades, public health experts said. This week, the administration also withheld funds that were due to states and territories for H.I.V. prevention work. In Texas, the State Department of Health Services asked grantees to pause all activities “until further notice.” In Mecklenberg County in North Carolina, the health department has already had to lay off 10 staffers. Already, many African countries have reported serious disruptions in their efforts to curb the epidemic. “It’s just inconceivable how shortsighted this is,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the H.I.V. prevention organization AVAC.
The number of new H.I.V. infections had been declining steadily since 2010. Still, in 2023, the World Health Organization reported 1.3 million new cases, including about 120,000 children.
“The H.I.V. pandemic will never be ended without a vaccine, so killing research on one will end up killing people,” said John Moore, an H.I.V. researcher at Weill Cornell Medical in New York.