Research for new drugs and medical treatments is seeing huge federal budget cuts
The Trump administration had barely taken office a year ago when its top officials launched an aggressive and multi-faceted attack on the nation’s scientific and medical research programs, including life-saving research.
Explanations were few and vague. Then, thinly supported allegations were made of antisemitism, excessive “wokeness,” and a lack of “alignment” with never-defined “national priorities” of those in charge of the federal government.
Billions of dollars for research funding suddenly stopped. Medical studies that had taken years to conduct were abruptly halted. Thousands of patients in clinical studies learned that promising therapies would no longer be available to them. Talented young researchers and their seasoned superiors saw invaluable career pathways melting away.
Before lasting harm happened, a coast-to-coast furor rose up in response. Lawsuits flew. Courts rejected the administration’s demands. Professional and legal organizations rallied their influential members to oppose the harms that were occurring.
And, surprise! The clamor in recent days nudged a largely do-nothing U.S. Congress to mount a rare bipartisan pushback against the administration’s anti-science anti-medicine campaign.
Some experts say the worst may have been averted for now. But major damage has occurred already. It is still up in the air, though, whether one of the three co-equal branches of government — the executive — will heed the law and the actions of lawmakers and courts. These continue to be perilous times that cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to see better ways to stay healthy, live longer, and help the sick and disabled.
Photo credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
World’s No. 1 funder of medical research became administration’s top target
Over decades, the National Institutes of Health developed a system for medical research that was the envy of the world.
Unlike in, say, the former Soviet Union, U.S. lawmakers and presidential administrations agreed that this country would not build and maintain a huge state apparatus for scientific and medical studies. Instead, the federal government partnered with colleges and universities, hospitals, businesses, and private centers to undertake the time- and resource-intensive labor of rigorous research. The U.S. system, with government funding at steady but still relatively confined levels, became a model for the world. It achieved a long catalog of breakthroughs in combatting diseases and increasing Americans’ health, well-being, and longevity.
The NIH also became its own hub of research and treatment, particularly on rare and difficult cases in its big campus in Bethesda. More critically, working with Congress, the national institutes — focused on more than two dozen centers and institutes that targeted specific illnesses and conditions — became a brain trust. The NIH, with Congress as partner and ultimate funder, decided where to invest billions of dollars for the best outcomes from studies in basic and translational (so-called bench-to-bedside) medical science.
Make no mistake: Recipients of the institute’s grants undergo tough vetting. Their proposals, which often describe studies lasting for years, must be clear, detailed, and supported by hard evidence. NIH operated as the world’s biggest funder of medical-scientific research.
That reality alone appears to have provoked extremists eager to make the national institutes a prime target. This was brewing for a long time. Some Republicans long have opposed almost any federal role in medicine. They have argued that the government should be small and take on minimal responsibilities, leaving medical care and research to private industry, philanthropy, or charity. This view has metastasized, with some advocates bristling at a perceived excess in power wielded by what they viewed as smug elites. In the much-reported blueprint for the administration’s second term, known as Project 2025, one of the many goals was to cut down to size the NIH and other places that were conducting invaluable work.
Russell Vought, a Project 2025 leader and now head of the Office of Management and Budget, has been quoted as saying that “funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders.” He advocated for “more modest federal funding through” NIH.
Funding fell off a cliff without warning
And so NIH, without warning and with only dribbles of explanation, moved to eliminate billions of dollars of research funding. Principal investigators who had worked for years on important studies, such as on the illnesses that are the leading killers in this country, suddenly had to halt their projects.
They also saw their young, talented colleagues facing sudden, ruinous shocks to their already difficult careers. The path to a Ph.D. or an M.D. is long, costly, and demanding. Those who conduct medical and scientific studies invest not only their professional experience and expertise but also years or even decades of their lives in their work. If prestigious, NIH-funded studies went unfunded and off a cliff, it was taking careers with it.
Prominent institutions outside the United States, including in France, Britain, and Canada, soon began luring medical-scientific talent away from this country. International researchers who had studied in this country and stayed legally to make major contributions to medical and scientific knowledge considered departing. Graduate and post-grad programs, which provide not only the stars of tomorrow but also the worker bees for today’s studies, fretted about keeping programs together if students, fellows, and other scholarly aspirants decided U.S. medical science was too political and risky.
The long knives that attacked the NIH took another big stab at the way federal funding would occur in this administration. Officials told recipients that they no longer would receive crucial support for “indirect” research costs. These sums include expenses for infrastructure and equipment expenses and would be capped at 15%, half the existing average of 30%. Federal officials asserted this would be a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, as it would assure that larger portions of grants would be applied more directly to research and not overhead.
Many NIH grant recipients had received as much as 50% of their money for overhead costs, and the proposed cap caused an uproar. Research institutions argued that it upended their historic deal with the federal government for a reasonable sharing of expenses. The institutions argued that they had paid extensively already for buildings, labs, equipment, heating and cooling, lighting, and all the other costs for research. They footed the bill if studies required animals, ensuring their humane care and feeding. If research required expert oversight by Institutional Review Boards, recipient institutions covered this cost, too.
Institutions, professional groups, and states took the administration to court, contesting the NIH cuts, especially the cap on indirect costs. The courts came down against the White House, blocking the cap and ordering that grant funding be restored in many cases.
But the damage had been done. Not all studies that were halted could be resumed. The legal battles had created a harmful break — not only a work stoppage but also in confidence that U.S. medical-science systems could resist harsh policies. As administrators at grant-receiving institutions tried to work with the NIH, uncertainty still reigned. Because little or no explanation had been given as to why federal support had been eliminated, it was murky as to which grants would be restored, how quickly, and for how much.
As researchers have sought to tally the effects of the administration’s moves, they have found that the NIH surprisingly spent its 2025 budget. As the science and medical news site Stat reported:
“While the agency distributed a similar amount of grant money as in recent years, the number of awards made from January through the end of the fiscal year in September (right before the government shutdown) dropped 11.6% in comparison to the same period last year, and 8.2% compared to the average for the same months in the previous nine years. The shift cut across the agency’s $37 billion extramural portfolio, largely driven by a switch to paying for many multiyear grants entirely up front — which left money for fewer projects, according to STAT’s analysis of grants approved by scientific review panels for those disease areas.
“There has also been a drop in high-risk, high-reward grants, which are intended to incentivize scientists to take big swings on creative ideas. [NIH chief Jay Bhattacharya] previously studied the agency’s ability to fund novel ideas, and in his Senate confirmation hearing, he said his ‘plan is to ensure that the NIH invests in cutting-edge research in every field to make big advances rather than just small, incremental progress over years and sometimes decades.’ But grants in that vein, too, have seen cuts. In the first nine months of 2024, the NIH funded 406 high-risk, high-reward grants; in 2025, that fell to 364. In a response to STAT’s questions received after this story was published, NIH said, “The assertion that there is less high-risk, high-reward science taking place is incorrect. Innovative, groundbreaking research — driven by bold ideas and rigorous inquiry — is actively pursued across all 27 NIH institutes and centers.”
A credentialed and highly controversial chief
The chaos was complicated due to upheaval within the NIH itself, with top leaders departing and declining to work with the administration-appointed chief, Bhattacharya. He came to the NIH from Stanford, where he was a Ph.D. health economist and medical doctor. He was affiliated, too, with the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Although he is highly credentialed, his appointment caused unrest at the NIH because he had been an outspoken opponent of the measures taken to address the coronavirus pandemic. That response had been directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a longtime leader of NIH’s infectious disease research and treatment.
Bhattacharya co-wrote the controversial Great Barrington Declaration. It asserted that the nationwide pandemic lockdown was wrong, and officials should have protected the most vulnerable but opened society otherwise, allowing natural immunity to establish itself. Fauci and others disputed this notion, arguing that this approach would have sharply increased deaths and debilitation. Bhattacharya, at one point, asserted the pandemic was less serious than officials had said and would result in 400,000 deaths at most. The pandemic toll is estimated to have been 1.2 million deaths. In 2020, Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, criticized Bhattacharya and his co-authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” The new chief, once viewed as a leader who could mitigate the damage at the organization, has grown even more unpopular for adding to the hundreds of staff cuts at NIH.
In recent days, the NIH has been hobbled by a lack of leadership, critics say. As NBC News reported:
“Of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH, 16 were missing permanent directors as of [Feb. 13]… All but two of the vacant director positions at NIH have opened during [the administration’s] second term — the result of a combination of terminations, resignations, and retirements. Acting directors are filling in temporarily. ‘It’s like going to battle with half your generals in place,’ said Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who led NIH from 2002 to 2008 under President George W. Bush. ‘I don’t think it’s precedented to have so many vacancies so fast.’ NIH director positions are some of the most powerful and prestigious in medicine, in some cases overseeing multibillion-dollar budgets and helping to decide how federal research funding is allocated for the country’s biggest health threats, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease. They are typically nominated by the NIH director and then approved by the health secretary.”
The NIH leadership challenge grew as the administration announced that Bhattacharya also would serve as interim director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He will be its third leader in year. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has assailed that agency and began dismantling it over its role in overseeing and encouraging public health measures such as vaccinations. The CDC is based in Atlanta, while the NIH headquarters are in Bethesda. Bhattacharya now will be running a much-diminished CDC and a much-criticized NIH until a new CDC chief is nominated and U.S. Senate confirmed
The administration in 2025, of course, opened a second front in its assault on health and medical research with its attack on colleges and universities.
As they cut off billions of dollars in federal support, administration officials slammed institutions of higher education with allegations of antisemitism, racial bias, and what was called an extreme of advocacy of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Sometimes, officials didn’t explain at all why federal aid ended.
While some of the nation’s best-known colleges dominated the news about the campaign against schools, the harm was broader than the public might have been aware, as the left-leaning Center for American Progress reported last July:
“Over the past few months, a great deal of national news has focused on the federal funding terminations targeting Ivy League institutions and the political retribution against them, especially Harvard. While the Trump administration has claimed to pursue ‘woke’ universities and colleges and taken aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, federal data on grant terminations show that the administration has targeted more than 4,000 grants for termination to over 600 universities and colleges across the country, affecting institutions in every state. These data do not account for the billions more of additional funding the administration hasfrozen for colleges and universities. According to the Trump administration, it has terminated awards valuing between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion; based on how much of the grants had already been spent by institutions, the administration has targeted between $3.3 billion and $3.7 billion for cuts.”
Academic medical centers and affiliated hospitals hit, too
By yanking NIH and other federal support for colleges and universities, the administration inevitably also damaged the academic medical centers of leading institutions, as well as their affiliated hospitals and research centers. This undercut their capacities to undertake medical research and provide medical care.
“From the end of February to August [2025], grants for 383 clinical trials were terminated, and the funding disruptions affected more than 74,000 trial participants … Approximately 1 in 30 trials lost funding, according to the study … More than 100 of the canceled grants were for cancer research.”
A related JAMA editorial criticized the funding cutoff, noting how the cancellations or suspensions of clinical trials dashed patients’ hopes for new therapies. Other experts pointed out that trials and other clinical research are tough, if not impossible, to stop and start because they involve real people — subjects who must be recruited and then followed, sometimes for long periods. They often are ill and debilitated and participate in trials with difficulty.
Academic medical centers and university-affiliated hospitals confronted a multi-front peril to their finances: the overall funding slashes for higher education, big cuts occurring in support from the National Institutes of Health, and changes reducing Medicaid funding. The centers had no choice but to retrench, as the American Assn. of Medical Colleges reported:
“Vanderbilt University’s medical center made plans in March to cut its budget by $250 million because of the spending cuts, and in June raised that figure to $300 million, with a statement citing federal reductions to research funding and patient care. The hospital system reductions included layoffs of 650 staff, working primarily in research, administrative, and other support areas. UC San Diego Health decided in June that it would eliminate about 230 positions fromacross its clinics and hospitals. ‘The difficult decision was made solely in response to mounting financial pressures caused by federal impacts to health care, regulatory uncertainty, and rising costs of providing care,’ the health system’s statement said …
“Yale New Haven Health — citing ‘significant financial and operational challenges, including low Medicaid reimbursements’ — offered voluntary retirement packages ‘to a variety of employees across the system.’ …Dartmouth Health instituted a partial hiring pause this spring for dozens of ‘non-patient facing’ positions in response to concerns about financial challenges, including changes in traditional revenue streams, impending Medicaid changes, loss of government funding for research, and labor and supply cost increases, says Chief Executive Officer Joanne M. Conroy, MD.”
A painful break for Johns Hopkins
Locally, Johns Hopkins didn’t have a bullseye drawn on it by administration officials. Still, it became a victim of its excellence in medicine, science, international health, and other fields. It became too successful in winning federal funding and had embraced the longstanding relationship between the government and colleges and universities, the New York Times reported.
Johns Hopkins said almost half of its almost $4 billion in annual operating revenue came from federal funding. The school’s esteemed public health program, with its high-profile international involvement, was hit hard when[“DOGE” leader Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down USAID, the newspaper reported. It also said of announced staffing cuts at the institution, one of the largest employers in its area: “In addition to the more than 2,000 employees whose jobs have been eliminated, the university said that an additional 78 domestic employees and 29 international would be furloughed at reduced schedules.”
Courts have overturned many of the administration’s funding freezes and proposed changes in the way money flows to colleges, universities, and research institutions. Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Virginia, and other schools have negotiated with the administration. Universities, like Northwestern, have agreed to pay big fines, for example, to go into funds for workforce development. In turn, the schools have seen their federal funding restored. It will take time, though, to see if deeply discouraged faculty, students (including grads, post-grads, med students and others, particularly from overseas) have had their faith shaken so much that they change course to the detriment of future scientific and medical research. and treatment.
The administration’s battle with Harvard goes on. And attacks at this research flagship, combined with the fighting and slashing at other institutions, Wired magazine reported last summer, had all but “killed” cancer research. The magazine reported that important work would be hard to bring back. Tallies of lost federal funding show that studies on heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other leading causes of death and debilitation have suffered setbacks.
Was this really the campaign for which patients had elected a Republican Congress and this administration?
Photo credit: Johns Hopkins medical school
An uproar, a pushback, and a restoration
Although the administration, in following the Project 2025 blueprint, has sought to slash federal support for medical and scientific research, respondents to national surveys give such work resounding support.
Indeed, in a Pew poll, 84% of adult respondents said they thought it worthwhile for the nation to invest in research, with 93% of those identifying as Democrats supporting the work and 76% of Republicans backing investments that increase knowledge through studies. The pollsters reported this:
“According to Pew’s survey of 5,111 American adults, Republicans and Democrats alike support government investment in scientific research and want to see the U.S. as a leader in the field. Nearly half told Pew that the U.S. is losing ground in scientific achievements when compared to other countries, a notable increase from 2023 and 2024. Pew also found that 84% of Americans believe investments in scientific research aimed at advancing knowledge are usually worthwhile. Where Democrats and Republicans tend to differ, according to the Pew survey, is how much of this innovation should come from institutions of higher education versus private companies. While Democrats are more likely to say colleges and universities contribute to science, Republicans are more likely to attribute this research to private companies.”
But as the administration quickly found out, its funding cuts, their execution, and budget proposals for more reductions aroused great opposition, including from Republicans. Last summer, after many of the administration’s Draconian steps against medical and scientific research had launched, members of Congress began to push back — with bipartisan anger. As a new article from the Inside Higher Education publication reported:
“Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that ‘this is not the first time that Congress, on science-technology policy issues, has pushed back on the Trump administration.’ It happened during Trump’s first term. And, going back to the 1970s and ’80s, research and development ‘has been a strong bipartisan area of agreement … R&D money goes all over the country,’ Pielke said. ‘It does kind of have a built-in support structure.’”
The country witnessed tensions rising between congressional Democrats and Republicans, especially as the president and the GOP shoved through a giant spending bill and a battle over health care insurance subsidies led to a long government shutdown. But even as the partisan tussles went on, it became clear that Congress was rejecting the administration’s attacks on scientific and medical research, as NBC News reported:
“In its budget request last spring, the Trump administration came out swinging against science funding, proposing dramatic cuts to many agencies. The administration asked to cut the National Science Foundation by nearly 57%, NASA by 24% and the NIH by more than 40% in fiscal year 2026. Overall, it sought a nearly 36% cut to non-defense-related science research and development funding, according to AAAS. But Congress has largely rebuffed Trump and kept science funding mostly consistent in spending bills negotiated between Republicans and Democrats. The NIH is scheduled to receive $48.7 billion — a $415 million increase over 2025, according to a bill summary from Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash,, vice chair of the Appropriations Committee. Roughly three-quarters of that money will go to outside research grants. NASA’s budget is set for just a 1.6% cut, according to AAAS, and the NSF will take a 3.4% cut.
“At the NIH, Congress increased funding for cancer research by $128 million, added $100 million to the budget for Alzheimer’s disease and boosted ALS research by $15 million. Lawmakers even added language designed to prevent the administration from again trying to cap spending on indirect research costs.The legislation also requires NIH to report monthly to Congress about grant awards, terminations and cancellations so Congress can better track its spending. ‘It illustrates that there’s still strong bipartisan support for the federal government playing a critical role in supporting research,’ said Toby Smith, the senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.”
In January, Congress averted another full shutdown of the federal government, advancing to the president for his signature funding for most U.S. functions (save for the budget for the Department of Homeland Security.) The president accepted and signed all the budget packages sent to him by Congress, including those with much higher funding for medical and scientific research.
Still, he has shown that he holds little regard for lawmakers’ constitutional appropriation authority. He or others in his administration, with our without explanation, at any point may decide to impound money Congress wants to spend or refuse to follow budget deals he already has signed on to. More court battles would be launched. The courts already have dozens of cases to consider about medical-scientific research funding blocked or ended by the administration. Judges also have cases pending involving the administration’s battles with colleges and universities. The sweeping, increasingly unpopular immigration crackdown has added to the unease in research institutions with many international personnel working in them.
Who is served by all this upheaval? How will researchers keep up their best work when experiencing sustained uncertainty during this administration’s term? Will the world’s best stay and thrive here? Just how much will patients and providers be harmed, even fatally by the tumult in research and caregiving institutions? Will this country find itself trailing other nations in breakthroughs that improve the nation’s health?
As shortages loom, nurses and doctors hit with loan cuts
Even as a major shortage of nurses and doctors looms for this country, the administration managed to insult medical pros and injure the educational opportunities they need to best protect the graying population.
This slap at aspiring doctors and nurses, especially those seeking advanced training, occurred with the U.S. Education Department’s decision to change student lending plans. Officials asserted the change would lower costs and keep individuals from taking on excessive debt. But as NBC News reported, the move — which takes effect in July — infuriated educators, students, and a range of folks in medicine:
“The Trump administration’s plan to redefine what constitutes a professional degree would exclude nursing and limit access to student loans — outraging national health care groups and leaving nursing students questioning how they will pay for graduate degrees. The change stems from President Donald Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill,’ the U.S. Department of Education said in a Nov. 6 news release. Students in graduate programs will now be capped at $20,500 per year with a lifetime limit of $100,000. For students seeking a professional degree, loan limits are higher, at $50,000 per year, with a lifetime limit of $200,000, the news release states. The Education Department’s list of professional degrees includes pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry and theology … The American Nurses Association quickly sounded the alarm on leaving nursing out of the proposal, saying it will ‘severely restrict access to critical funding’ for students who wish to seek an advanced nursing degree.”
The news article points out that nursing schools say their average cost for educating a nurse runs around $30,000. The administration has not explained how imposing a lower loan limit will cause the cost of educating caregivers to drop. Aspirants for advanced education in nursing, however, will be forced to take on more — not lesser — loans because they will be forced to seek help from private lenders who charge more.
For patients, curbing more education for nurses is a problem, say critics, such as the head of the American Nurses Association, as quoted by NPR news. She and others note that the demands are spiking for nurses to provide more and more complicated care — especially as technology and economics change medicine. As doctors grow short and demands on their time and capacities also increase significantly, more highly trained nurses become a must, experts say. They point to the rise of nurse practitioners and how they are taking a greater load in frontline patient care. As the forecast nursing shortage hits this country, critics also question why the administration would want to potentially diminish the numbers of aspiring Ph.D. nurses — yes, the professionals who will train the nurses of tomorrow.
As for med students training to be doctors, the administration’s loan changes also pose problems. NPR reported this of the post-July implications:
“[Soon] med students won’t be able to borrow more than $50,000 a year — or more than $200,000 over the four years. Many private med schools already cost north of $300,000, including living expenses. ‘That will automatically give a lot of people some pause to think about where they’re accepted and what their finances are,’said Vineet Arora, vice dean of education, at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. Given that most medical students already come from the upper 40% of family income, Arora added, ‘we already have fewer medical students coming from sort of middle class and lower income families.’ Lack of access to loans, she said, may well skew it even more.
“On top of those new restrictions, a federal regulation posted Oct. 30 — already facing a court challenge — adds new conditions to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which enables health workers who work in high needs areas and make payments for 10 years to erase debt.The new Trump administration policy said loan forgiveness won’t be an option for people working for an entity engaging in, among other things, illegal activities involving immigration, gender-affirming care, or ‘terrorism’ aimed at ‘obstructing or influencing’ federal policy. It will be up to the Education Secretary to decide which organizations will be ineligible. These limits on how aspiring doctors or other health providers — nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, dentists and more — can finance their education likely foretell a more affluent, and less diverse, health care work force in the future, said Atul Grover, who recently stepped down from his long-time policy post at the Association of American Medical Colleges.”
The federal Human Resources and Services Administration tracks national workforce trends and in December 2025 projected that by 2038, this country faces a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors. The agency sees a shortage of more than 350,000 nurses (both registered and licensed practical nurses), with shortfalls higher in rural than metropolitan areas.
Less diversity among doctors could be bad news for black patients. Research shows that having even one black doctorin a hospital, clinic, or office significantly benefits the longevity and lowers the mortality of black patients.
Turning a blind eye to inequities in medicine
In the wake of the upheavals that occurred after the2020 killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd and with the coronavirus pandemic easing, modern medicine seemed to be reckoning at long last with its legacy of allowing problematic inequities to persist.
Researchers were providing hard evidence that differences exist for patients who are female, white, black, brown, and yellow. Studies were showing how inequitable care and therapies harmed individuals and groups because of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Earlier newsletters have described these troubling issues.
The administration’s assault on medical and scientific research has raised particular red flags as researchers have found more specifics about the campaign. It has targeted “wokeness,” diversity, equity studies, and efforts to address unfairness in medicine, news organizations have reported:
“According to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times, as of mid-June the NIH had terminated at least 616 projects focused on closing the health divide between black and white, and rich and poor, Americans. The NIH had earmarked about $407 million in funding for the projects, nearly 45% of the approximately $913 million in total awards terminated by the Trump administration before court rulings ordered that some be reinstated. About half were aimed at supporting researchers from underrepresented backgrounds. These training and recruitment programs, seen as a form of affirmative action, have long drawn conservative ire.”
Nature magazine, with the help of upset researchers with analytic expertise, delved into the NIH funding cuts. The news article on this topic reported that the specialized center at the national institutes that took the biggest cut focused on minority health and health disparities. Further, the researchers found this:
“Nature’s analysis shows that, looking at just the projects terminated so far, 17% are related to Covid-19, and 29% to HIV/AIDS … although this represents less than 4% of all the grants awarded to each of those topics that the agency funded in 2024.
“One reason for the focus of these cuts is that the Trump administration has said that the Covid-19 pandemic is over and people in the United States have moved on from it. Another potential reason is that HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects sexual and gender minorities (LGBT+); Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office on 20 January, directing the US government to stop acknowledging the fact that a person’s gender can differ from their sex at birth.The scientific fields hit hardest by the NIH’s cuts are those related to the health of transgender people, and the broader LGBT+ community, where around half of grants have been cut compared with what the NIH funded in 2024 ….”
“Of the 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, more than 60% are black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.”
Researchers have developed prescription medications that assist those with HIV-AIDS, turning the disease into a chronic controllable condition. They also have powerful preventative drugs. But critics say cutting funds for research in this field, including determine why certain individuals and groups don’t treat or protect themselves as well as they could, only allows the disease to continue as a major health problem.
Recent Health Care Developments of Interest
Here are some recent health- and medical-related news articles that might interest you
§ Doctors are human and they age and experience professional declines. But with MDs in short supply, depending on geography (say, rural and exurban areas) and specialty (like primary care physicians), it is tough for patients, hospitals, clinics, and academic medical centers to determine how and when to encourage seasoned practitioners to reckon with age. A news article posted by KFF Health News reported that a rare few institutions have launched late-career programs involving doctors. These efforts encourage doctors to undergo testing to see if they are maintaining the capacities to keep providing safe, quality patient care. They seek to provide accommodations for those who may need help but can still provide invaluable experience and knowledge. The issue of doctors aging out of practice is fraught, as federal laws prohibit discriminatory practices against seniors in the workplace. This issue only will increase in concern, the news article reported, as just under a quarter of doctors practicing now are 65 or older.
§ While the administration had counted on support from the loosely organized, so-called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition, its members are furious with the president and his advocacy for a controversial pesticide. Big Agriculture and ordinary farmers have lobbied the administration hard over the herbicide glyphosate. Its major maker is Monsanto, which is involved in multibillion-dollar lawsuits asserting that Roundup causes cancers. The president, in an executive order issued in the night, promoted a major ramp-up of glyphosate making, arguing such a move would address a national security concern in ensuring steady supplies of one of its main ingredients of phosphorous. It is used in the production of weapons and semiconductors. But MAHA supporters have argued that Roundup, which agriculture interests say is sorely needed to keep them in business and the nation’s food affordable, is one of the major toxins that harms consumers’ health. A mainstay of the MAHA movement is its opposition to pesticides and other chemicals added to food. Movement leaders have ripped the president and threatened to yank support for the GOP in the days ahead.
§ The chaos sown in the country’s federal health establishment continues to show clearly, notably whenever the topic of lifesaving vaccines arises. The administration’s nominee and likely soon-to-be-confirmed Surgeon General — the “nation’s doctor” — spent much of her U.S. Senate hearing dodging questions about vaccines. They’re sort of ok, she testified, declining to discuss the health secretary’s contention that they are a causal factor in autism. She also mostly ducked senators’ questions on measles and flu vaccines.
On the other hand, Mehmet Oz, the cardiac surgeon who heads the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, issued an appeal for more people to get immunized against measles. That’s because the nation is dealing with big and uncontained outbreaks of the highly infectious illness in South Carolina and Texas. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the powerful chief of the Health and Human Services department, created more “jab” nonsense by attacking flu vaccines. He blames them without evidence for causing his grave voice and other unsubstantiated problems.
The federal Food and Drug Administration had its own blowup when one of its top deputies, Dr. Vinay Prasad, overruled the agency’s experts and declined a common consultation with drug maker Moderna over a possible mRNA vaccine against the flu. The company has been in discussions with regulators for awhile now, including on how clinical trials should be run to test the new vaccine. Prasad, though, was unhappy with already-approved plans, telling the company and his staff he knew better about how the trials should be run. Moderna went public with the dispute. Prasad backed down. But news reports said the damage already had occurred. Companies may skip pursuing new mRNA vaccines that can be made faster to adapt to rapidly changing infections like the flu and the coronavirus.
Although he is highly credentialed, his appointment caused unrest at the NIH because he had been an outspoken opponent of the measures taken to address the coronavirus pandemic. That response had been directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a longtime leader of NIH’s infectious disease research and treatment.
