The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has expanded its cuts to science funding, terminating a growing list of research projects that now encompasses hundreds of grants funding studies on a wide range of topics — from HIV in children to reducing mould exposure and its effect on asthma. And concern is growing among scientists that research investigating mRNA vaccines might be next.

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants

Nature has learnt that the agency has already terminated at least one grant that supported a scientist at Columbia University in New York City who was investigating the body’s immune response to an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19.

The fears over mRNA-vaccine grant cancellations come after NIH staff members were instructed to compile a list of grants for studying the technology, according to an e-mail sent on 6 March that Nature has obtained. Acting NIH director Matthew Memoli “has requested information on NIH’s investment in mRNA vaccines research” — including current and planned grants, the e-mail said, setting a one-day deadline. By the time the deadline came around, a spreadsheet with more than 130 entries had been compiled, according to an NIH official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Although grants on mRNA-vaccine research have not yet been terminated en masse as they have for other topics — including LGBT+ health — the request is an ominous sign, says Justin Richner, a viral immunologist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago.

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NIH workers are worried enough that they have started advising grant applicants not to mention mRNA vaccines in their research proposals, according to reporting by KFF Health News, a health-care and policy news outlet in Washington DC. Sources who spoke to Nature have indicated that this wasn’t an official directive from NIH leadership, but a recommendation from individual programme officers.

“To take away a tool to fight infectious diseases that has been shown to be effective — it’s hard to fathom that we’d do this as a society,” says Richner, who is designing an mRNA vaccine against dengue virus.

The NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, did not respond to Nature’s queries about whether mRNA-vaccine research will be terminated or about scientists’ concerns over political meddling in scientific research.

Turning against research

The panic over mRNA-vaccine grants comes hot on the heels of the agency’s termination of more than 40 grants for studying vaccine hesitancy. Similarly to the call for a list of mRNA-vaccine projects, the agency asked for a spreadsheet containing all active projects on vaccine hesitancy. NIH workers were informed that certain grants should be cancelled by the end of the day in a 10 March e-mail that Nature has obtained. “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses [sic] gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the termination letters said.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a long-time anti-vaccine advocate, was chosen by US President Donald Trump as the nation’s health secretary, and now runs the NIH’s parent agency. In 2021, he unsuccessfully petitioned government regulators to rescind approval of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and falsely claimed that this type of jab is the “deadliest vaccine ever made”, pointing to unverified claims of side effects on a government-run database.

mRNA vaccines rose to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, not only for their safety and efficacy in preventing severe disease, but also for the speed with which they were developed and deployed — mostly during the first Trump administration. The jabs include genetic instructions that tell a person’s cells to create copies of viral proteins, also known as antigens. This process stimulates the body to generate protective antibodies and virus-fighting immune cells.

Modelling studies suggest that, worldwide, mRNA vaccines saved more than 14 million lives in the first year they were administered¹, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are now testing the technology against a litany of conditions, including mosquito-borne diseases and cancer, for which there are more than 100 ongoing trials. Yet some US officials, including Florida’s surgeon general, have called for a moratorium on the technology and have made baseless claims that the jabs cause cancer and are not safe.

“Never in my life did I think that the government would turn against a field of research for non-scientific reasons,” says Drew Weissman, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for laying the groundwork needed to create mRNA vaccines. “I feel mostly bewildered, because the potential for RNA is so enormous.”