US funding cuts have crippled our HIV work – what’s being lost

The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for scientific research have left many scientists reeling and very worried. At the National Institutes of Health in the US, which has an annual budget of US$47 billion to support medical research both in the US and around the world, nearly 800 grants have been terminated. The administration is considering cutting the overall budget of the National Institutes of Health by 40%.

In South Africa, where tensions are running high with the new Trump administration over land reform and other diplomatic fault lines, scientists have had research grants from the National Institutes of Health suspended. Glenda Gray, who has been at the forefront of HIV/Aids scientific research for decades, assesses the impact of these cuts.

How have the cuts affected your research? When did you start worrying?

There was subliminal fear that started to percolate at the end of January. I said to my team, we need to start looking at our grants. We need to start looking at our exposure.

The first institute to go under the Trump administration’s cuts was USAID. The multibillion-dollar agency that fought poverty and hunger around the world was the first to face the chop.

As a result, a USAID-funded US$46 million consortium on HIV vaccine discovery and experimental medicine to evaluate first in Africa or first in human HIV vaccines was terminated.

Then in mid-April, funding for a clinical trial in Soweto near Johannesburg in South Africa was marked as “pending”. The unit was involved in trials for HIV vaccines. On top of that, ?four global research networks on HIV/Aids prevention and treatment strategies were told by the National Institutes of Health in the US that they could no longer spend any money in South Africa. The Soweto unit was affiliated with those networks.

So basically you can’t start new studies in South Africa?

There is a great deal of uncertainty. I’m sitting on many calls, working out how we survive in the next couple of months.

I’m going from bankrupt to absolutely bankrupt in terms of our ability to do work.

We’ve been doing scenario planning, looking at all our contingencies, but it’s very hard to know exactly what you’re doing until you have the relevant documentation in front of you.

To all intents and purposes for the next period, South Africa is eliminated from the National Institutes of Health networks and its scientific agenda.

How is the South African government responding?

The government doesn’t have the kind of money to replace the substantial amount of finances that we got through the National Institutes of Health competitive processes. However scientists have been working together with the Medical Research Council, Treasury and various government departments to plot the best way forward.

Everyone’s been writing grant proposals, speaking to the Gates Foundation, speaking to the Wellcome Trust, looking at public-private partnerships, talking to other philanthropists. But the bottom line is that funding is never going to be at the kind of level that will replace the research infrastructure that we’ve got.

To get money from the National Institutes of Health we had to compete with all scientists all over the world. This wasn’t just aid being doled out to us.

Where does this leave the future of research in South Africa for HIV vaccine trials?

South Africa has been able to contribute to global guidelines to improve care. The loss of research capability means that you lose the knowledge or the value of understanding HIV prevention, HIV vaccines or therapeutics.

We in South Africa have the infrastructure, we have the burden of disease, the sciences, the regulator and ethical environment and the ability to answer these questions. And so it’s going to take the world a lot longer to answer these questions without South Africa.

If we slow down research, we slow down HIV vaccine research, we slow down cures and we slow down other HIV prevention methodologies.

And so basically you slow down the process of knowledge generation.

What does it feel like to be a scientist right now in South Africa?

South African scientists are resilient. We’ve had to weather many storms, from the explosion of HIV to Aids denialism … watching people die, getting people onto treatment, having vaccine trials that have failed.

You have to be resilient to be a scientist in this field.

It’s going to be very hard to bring the fight against HIV/Aids back to the current level again.

It feels now like we are deer in the headlights because we don’t know how to pivot.

This is an edited transcript of an interview with Professor Gray aired in a podcast produced by The Conversation UK. You can listen to the full podcast here.

Glenda Gray receives funding from US-NIH which is currently being evaluated. .