Another senseless attack on public health from RFK Jr. and his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign
By Jon Cohen
The notification, which was communicated verbally by NIAID
program officers, “couldn't have happened at a worse time, because the recent
clinical trial results [for candidate HIV vaccines] are very promising,” says
Dennis Burton of Scripps Research, who heads one of the two Consortia for
HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD).
Although researchers in the field acknowledge a vaccine for
the AIDS-causing virus remains far off, the new leads have brought a fresh
sense of optimism, and many scientists say they demand vigorous follow up.
“This sets us back at a pivotal moment,” says Mitchell Warren, executive
director of AVAC, a nonprofit that advocates for HIV prevention. The consortia
“really have been pioneers in vaccine discovery,” says Warren, who is not
involved in their work.
The consortia, initially formed in 2005, have more than a
dozen institutional partners between them. They have moved what are widely
considered the most cutting-edge, experimental HIV vaccines into clinical
trials. In 2019, NIAID awarded 7-year grants worth $129 million each to two
consortia leaders: Scripps Research and Duke University. Today’s notification
means that they will not have a chance to renew the funding when those grants
end in June 2026.
Burton said he was told NIAID was directed to do this, but
it's unclear whether the decision to stop funding the consortia was made by the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), which oversees NIAID. When asked specifically about this, HHS
spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not answer the question but instead emphasized
that the department will continue to fund “critical” HIV/AIDS work. “We must
end this wasteful and inefficient model of health programming in favor of
strategic, coordinated approaches,” Nixon wrote.
Barton Haynes, the head of the CHAVD at Duke, says he had previously been told that NIAID’s advisory council last year approved a plan to fund similar consortia, at more than $30 million annually for 5 years, and the agency would send out a request for proposals. But today NIAID told Haynes and Burton that was not going to happen. An email sent by NIH’s acting director of extramural research, which Science verified, said “NIH leadership” did not support this moving forward and that it quashed the plan because “NIH expects to be shifting its focus towards using currently available approaches to eliminate HIV/AIDS.”
The decision has left CHAVD researchers uncertain about how
to proceed with just 1 year of funding left. “There's been a massive investment
over the years in this, and it's really starting to pay off, and now, boom,
it’s just stopped,” Burton says. “Projects will now be terminated or splintered
and there won't be cohesion. We rely on multiple different teams working
together to advance quickly, and that's likely to be lost now.”
“It’s devastating, and we’re going to have to find new
partners,” Haynes says.
Burton also worries that NIAID’s pullback could extend to
HIV vaccine research beyond the consortia. “It would seem from the [email] that
they're going to reduce HIV vaccine funding greatly overall,” he says. “This
will become a fragmented field, if indeed it continues at all.” Both Burton and
Haynes also stress that the investments in their consortia have led to findings
aiding the development of vaccines for other conditions, including COVID-19 and
respiratory syncytial virus disease.
Researchers for 40 years have sought to develop an HIV
vaccine that could provide years of protection against infection and, before
there were good HIV antivirals, the ravages of AIDS. Current treatments can now
powerfully control the virus and stave off disease –and can prevent uninfected
people from catching the virus if used prophylactically–but they require daily
pills or relatively frequent injections. And despite progress in HIV
prevention, 1.3 million people became infected by the virus last year
An analysis done by AVAC showed that in 2022, NIH was the
largest single funder of HIV vaccine research, providing 70% of $740 million
spent globally on the effort that year. The agency’s prominent role means the
end of CHAVD will be a big blow to the field, says immunologist John Moore, a
veteran HIV vaccine researcher who is not part of the consortia. “It's very
difficult to compensate for the volume of NIH dollars,” says Moore, who
believes “The agenda at HHS is to eliminate vaccine science, so this is one
opportunity for them to do so.”
Each of the CHAVD consortia have set their sights on
designing vaccines that guide the immune system to develop what are called
“broadly neutralizing antibodies” that work against a wide range of HIV
variants. “It's taken a long time, and I think that's frustrated the field and
certainly has frustrated us, but the good news is now that [both consortia] are
making progress,” Haynes says. “It’s still very difficult, and we’re committed
to finishing the job,” perhaps by finding other funders to fill the gap left by
the lack of NIAID support.
NIAID separately has notified three of its Simian Vaccine
Evaluation Units that it will no longer issue contracts for them to use monkeys
to test vaccines that come out of these consortia and other NIH-funded grants.
“This will definitely slow things down,” says Mark Lewis, an immunologist and
virologist who is CEO of Bioqual Inc., one of these three groups. “They're
throwing nuclear bombs in the scientific community. It's going to be totally
shocking, and it will take decades to rebuild.”
doi: 10.1126/science.z3s9dsj
Jon
Cohen, senior correspondent with Science, earned his B.A.
in science writing from the University of California, San Diego. He can be
reached on Signal at bval31.65 and on Bluesky at
@cohenjon.bsky.social.
