‘Act Up. Fight Back.’ Hundreds of Scientists and Clinicians Protest Funding Cuts

By Marie Rosenthal, MS

Hundreds of researchers, clinicians and scientists joined HIV activists in San Francisco during CROI 2025 to protest President Donald Trump’s cuts to research funding, including defunding PEPFAR (the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). 

This has been a running theme throughout CROI as speakers raise concerns about decreased funding for HIV and other research, as well as the loss of government scientific researchers to layoffs and firings. The Trump administration and Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, stopped funding all foreign assistance, including projects coming from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and PEPFAR. 

The rationale for the executive order that put a 90-day pause on PEPFAR and other foreign aid appears to be based on economics and ideological grounds. According to a media note issued by the State Department, the executive order is aimed at “rooting out waste” and “blocking woke programs.” The note added that “every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.”

Following these cuts, they aimed their cuts at domestic federal employees, including researchers and scientists at the nation’s leading departments like the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. Finally, they began to stop funding for scientific research at various institutions.

Why protest these changes? Much of the funding decreases are cutting HIV research dollars. This is lifesaving research that has spared millions of lives around the world, the speakers said. In addition, these foreign aid programs improve America’s standing and reputation in the world, and the results of studies not only benefit people with HIV but also those with cancer or immunologic disorders.

All of the speakers said decreased funding will affect the United States in countless ways.

Carlos del Rio, MD, a distinguished professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory School of Medicine and a professor of global health and epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, in Atlanta, reminded everyone why the scientists were there because scientists don’t typically join protests.

“I remember my early years of taking care of people with HIV where basically everybody died,” Dr. del Rio said. HIV research, much of it funded by the U.S. government, has changed that death sentence into a chronic disease—one where people can live long, meaningful lives.

But also important from a country perspective is the increased standing that these international programs award the United States, he emphasized. In the 1940s, a presidential advisor told the president that investing in research would transform the United States, and it has. The government invests about $47 billion in the NIH and other federal health and science programs. “The NIH money has really attracted researchers into this country and has paid dividends,” Dr. del Rio said.

“Seventy-one percent of Nobel Prize winners are American or were foreigners who moved to America and won the Nobel Prize. There’s a reason for that. The U.S. has become a leader in biomedical research. You cut the NIH funding, what’s going to happen? Well, somebody else is going to be the leader. And who do you think is going to be a leader? China. China’s going to be the leader,” he said.

The second issue is that NIH research creates jobs here in the United States. “It is calculated that the current money that is invested in research creates approximately 400,000 jobs in this country. Those are jobs funded by money that if it goes away, those jobs will go away. Every dollar of NIH research pumps approximately $2.50 into the economy,” he said.

In towns like Birmingham, where the University of Alabama is the largest employer in the state, the state economy is in danger of collapsing because of the withdrawal of U.S. funding and the firing of scientists, he explained. “I think supporting jobs is one of the most important things that the government ought to fund.”

Finally, he discussed the importance of PEPFAR, which “really has transformed the way we think about global health. And I think every American should be incredibly proud of what has been accomplished with PEPFAR,” he said.

He told an anecdote about his early work in Ethiopia in the early 1980s: He had been driving in a cab and it felt as if there were funeral homes everywhere. He asked about it, and the driver told him that AIDS was causing a lot of deaths, and people could not take much time off from work to attend them, so the funeral homes basically were coming to them, so there was easy access.

Years later, he rode through the same area of Ethiopia, and the funeral homes were gone. “He stopped the taxi. He turned around and said, ‘Are you an American?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Don’t you know about PEPFAR?’”

He explained that “people are not dying because of what Americans have done for us.”

Dr. del Rio said the U.S. prestige has grown around the world because of soft diplomacy like PEPFAR. He urged scientists to contact their elected officials and explain the advantages to this funding.

Tyler TerMeer, PhD, the CEO of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and co-chair of the AIDS United Public Policy Council told the crowd that the stakes were too high to remain silent. “I stand before you today as a researcher, as a person, as a person of color and as someone who has lived with HIV for the last two decades. I know firsthand what HIV research has made possible. I’m standing here today because of the lifesaving advances made by dedicated researchers, scientists who never gave up on us, who never stopped pushing even when the world turned its back,” he said. “HIV research has transformed what it means to live with the virus. It has given us treatment that allows people like me to not only live and survive, but to thrive. It has led us to PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis], to U=U [Undetectable = Untransmittable], to new prevention tools that protect the most vulnerable among us.”

He said the field of HIV is at a crossroads because the administration is putting politics before science. “We risk halting progress that could bring us closer to a cure, to a vaccine, to a future where no one has to fear this virus ever again.”
“Research is resistance. Science is survival,” the crowd chanted over and over again.

Franco Chevalier, MD, is an infectious diseases clinical fellow and TAPS research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. He discussed his immigrant journey from a small Caribbean island to UCSF having to take ESL classes to study medicine. “As an immigrant of humble beginnings, I had to navigate a system that wasn’t always designed for people who looked like me and who had to endure the things that I had to. I came to UCSF with a burning desire of wanting to be an HIV researcher and pursue a career in public health [with a focus on HIV],” he said. “None of this would’ve been possible without the investment of the U.S. government in research.”

The loss of NIH and CDC funding, as well as PEPFAR and USAID, are not just the loss of grants and opportunities for researchers; it’s a threat to countless lives who have benefited from this research, he said. “Cutting research funding means destroying the opportunity for new breakthroughs and treatments that can save many. This isn’t just about the science. These are real lives, real families, entire communities whose survival depends on our ability to continue advancing research and providing the support that they need,” Dr. Chevalier said.

Another important message, which has also been reinforced during the conference itself, is that HIV funding has helped other areas of research, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell gene therapies and mRNA technology for vaccines. Hepatitis B and C treatments also can thank HIV research for their existence.

They ended the protest with: “See you in the voting booth. Act up; fight back.”