SARS-COV-2 virus that causes Covid to be killed by more than 1.2 million people in the United States.Credit
The National Institutes of American Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began canceling billions of dollars in financing on research related to Covid-19.
COVID-19 research boxes for a limited purpose: to improve the effects of the epidemic, “according to the NIH Decoration that nature It has been obtained and provides the agency’s employees updated on how to finish these grants. “Now after the epidemic is over, grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document says. It is not clear the number of Covid-19 grants will be terminated.
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The campaign comes on Covid-19 research at a time when US President Donald Trump stopped nearly 400 grants last month. A previous version of the documents, obtained by nature On March 5, the employees identified and canceled the projects on the numbers of transgender people; Sexual identity diversity, fairness and integration (DEI) in the scientific workforce; Environmental justice.
The National Health Institutes, the largest general financier in biomedical research, have granted grants of about 600 continuous projects that include “Covid” in the title, at a value of approximately $ 850 million. These projects together constitute approximately 2 % of the National Institutes of Health of $ 47 billion. The Disease Control Center plans to cancel 11.4 billion dollars of money to respond to the epidemic, NBC news reports.
SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has killed more than 7 million people worldwide, including more than 1.2 million people in the United States, and continues to injure people and kill them. Scientists say that studying the virus, how people affect and the government’s response to the epidemic is crucial to preventing the coming scientists.
Among the fines at the National Health Institutes of Health are a program worth $ 577 million to determine and develop antiviral drugs against SARS-COV-2 and six other types of viruses with the potential of the epidemic.
Jason McLillan, a structural virus at the University of Texas, Austin, who was a project to develop wide-spectrum treatments that work against multiple types of viruses, are part of the program and ended on March 24. “To cancel the entire grant because a small part includes SARS-COV-2 will be dangerous to prepare in the future for the epidemic.”
NIH nor its mother organization, the US Department of Health and Humanitarian Services (HHS) did not respond, nature Inquiries about ending grants or scientists’ concerns about them.
An updated guidance
The updated guidance document nature (See supplementary information below) was sent on March 25 to the employees of the National Institutes of Health who supervise the commercial aspect of research grants, called “Grant Management Specialists”. This document includes Covid-19 in the list of “research activities that NIH is no longer supported”, as well as research on China, Dei, and “Sexual Issues” and the frequency of the vaccine. The latest guideline also says that grants related to South Africa and climate change should be terminated.
In addition to these research topics, the document determines a new category of research that must be completed: any project in a list sent by the Director of the National Institutes of Health or HHS, which is currently governed by a long -term anti -accurate lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Junior.
The National Institutes of Health cut one bitter grant. Will more follow?
An unprecedented large -scale curricula; The agency usually ends only a few dozen projects every year in response to dangerous concerns about the misconduct or fraud behavior – and does not do so except as a last shelter, after taking other measures such as comment.
Grants management specialists will be assigned to determine and end projects, because scientific employees at the agency are considered very biased by the leadership of the current National Health Institutes to make these decisions, says an official at the National Health Institutes of Health, who asked not to disclose his identity because they were not bumps to speak to the press.