The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding on research related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic”, according to an internal NIH document that Nature has obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many COVID-19 grants will be terminated.

‘Boggles the mind’: US defence department slashes research on emerging threats

The crackdown on COVID-19 research comes as the NIH under US President Donald Trump has halted nearly 400 grants in the past month. An earlier version of the documents, obtained by Nature on 5 March, directed staff to identify and potentially cancel projects on transgender populations; gender identity; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce; and environmental justice.

The NIH, which is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, has awarded grants to nearly 600 ongoing projects that include ‘COVID’ in the title, worth nearly US$850 million. Together these projects make up nearly 2% of the NIH’s $47 billion budget. And the CDC plans to cancel $11.4 billion in funds for pandemic response, NBC News reports.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has killed more than 7 million people globally, including more than 1.2 million people in the United States, and continues to infect and kill people. Studying the virus, how it infects people and the government’s response to the pandemic is also crucial to preventing the next one, say scientists.

Among the terminations at the NIH is a $577 million programme to identify and develop antiviral drugs against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and six other types of viruses with pandemic potential.

“These terminations are clearly shortsighted — we desperately need new treatments against viruses,” says Jason McLellan, a structural virologist at the University of Texas, Austin, whose project to develop broad-spectrum treatments that work against multiple types of viruses was part of the programme and terminated on 24 March. “To cancel the entire grant because a small portion involved SARS-CoV-2 is going to be dangerous for future pandemic preparedness.”

Neither the NIH nor its parent organization, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), responded to Nature’s queries about the grant terminations or scientists’ concerns about them.

Updated guidance

The updated guidance document that Nature obtained (see Supplementary Information below) was sent on 25 March to NIH staff members who oversee the business side of awarding research grants, called ‘grants-management specialists’. This document includes COVID-19 on a list of “research activities that NIH no longer supports”, in addition to research on China, DEI, “transgender issues” and vaccine hesitancy. The latest guidance also says that grants related to South Africa and climate change should be terminated.

In addition to these research topics, the document outlines a new category of research that should be terminated: any project on a list sent by the NIH director or the HHS, which is currently helmed by longtime anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

NIH has cut one mRNA-vaccine grant. Will more follow?

Such large-scale grant terminations are unprecedented; the agency typically terminates only a few dozen projects each year in response to serious concerns about research misconduct or fraud — and does so only as a last resort, after taking other actions such as suspension.

Grants-management specialists will be tasked with identifying and terminating projects, because the agency’s scientific staff members are considered to be too biased by the NIH’s current leadership to make these determinations, says an NIH official who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.