Trump creating a global health crisis by withdrawing funds from HIV vaccine research

The LGBTQ community is facing a grim future in America as all avenues are being closed

- BY C.J. ATKINS

Just in time for Pride month, President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have apparently decided it’s a good time to sentence more people to death in the future. That will be the result of the administration’s $258 million cut to HIV vaccine research, according to experts in the field.

“The HIV pandemic will never be ended without a vaccine,” Cornell University researcher John Moore told the New York Times, which broke the story of Trump’s funding cuts on May 30. “So, killing research on one will end up killing people.”

The National Institutes of Health notified scientists at the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD) last week that funding for its vaccine research programs was being terminated, effective immediately.

The CHAVD is a consortium of specialists at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Dennis Burton, an immunology professor at Scripps, said, “This is a decision with consequences.” He predicted that HIV vaccine research will be set back by at least a decade.

The goal of the scientists working at CHAVD is to develop an HIV vaccine that can be used around the globe and hopefully bring an end to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has plagued the world since the first case was reported on June 5, 1981. Since then, at least 42 million people have been killed by AIDS, and another 39 million are estimated to be currently infected with HIV.

The research at CHAVD consists of multi year investments in advanced HIV vaccine technologies, but it has also already yielded improvements in treatment of other conditions, including COVID-19, snake bites, and a number of autoimmune diseases that share some similarities with AIDS. Burton said that he and his colleagues were beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research. “This is a terrible time to cut off” funds, he said.