Funding for research on viruses like HIV and COVID-19 is on the chopping block. Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, the director of the Duke Global Health Institute, in Durham, N.C., talked to Infectious Disease Special Edition about what these cuts mean for his research.
This transcription was made with Temi.
Meaghan Lee Callaghan: [I heard] you were having a bad morning?
Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH: Yeah, we've just seen an updated list of the grants and contracts that have been recently canceled. Specifically speaking about the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. This has been going on for some weeks now. We expected that it was going to accelerate once the new NIH director had been named and Dr. Charia has been named, and he has been confirmed, but he has, as far as I know, not been sworn in yet, but nevertheless, the acting director has been very actively cutting a number of grants and contracts.
On the list that I saw this morning is the HIV Prevention Trial Network. That's the Leadership and Operations Center. That's the main NIH network that does HIV prevention trials, primary prevention trials, and has led some of the most important trials in our field. ...
I am on the executive committee of the [HIV Vaccine Trials] network, and so I had a leadership award through that. And I'm also the co-chair of a large HPTN trial, HPTN-O96 with my co-chair, Laron Nelson at Yale. That study is officially on pause, but if indeed the [Letters of Collaboration (LOC)] has been terminated then it makes it extremely difficult to think about how we would be able to get that study off pause and carry it forward. In addition, a number of studies and trials have been stopped or on the list for termination from what was called the Covid Vaccine Prevention Network, the COVPN and the COVPN was, again, an incredibly important network that was stood up very quickly by NIAID and some of the other NIH institutes as part of Operation Warp Speed.
I worked on it as an epidemiologist, and ... as so many of us who worked on it, just incredibly proud of that achievement.
The current leadership of the NIH and their colleagues, particularly people associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, which includes the incoming NIH director, consider the NIH response to Covid to have been a failure. And I think that is a an absolutely false narrative. It undermines the extraordinary achievements of so many people, and it flies in the face of the evidence, which is that the mRNA vaccines were safe and effective and helped deliver us out of the most severe pandemic since the great influenza of 1918. That is a matter of history. We all saw it. We watched it unfold and no attempt at fictitious narratives can undermine that achievement in my view.
