The current presidential administration has ended funding for the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD), a move that researchers say will likely set efforts to end HIV globally back by a decade.  

The two teams leading the $258 million vaccine program at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute were informed of the move on Friday, May 30, by officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The New York Times and CBS News reported. A senior NIH official told the Times that the agency’s leadership had reviewed the program and “does not support it moving forward.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has also instructed NIH not to fund HIV vaccine research in the next fiscal year, with some exceptions, CBS News said.

An HIV vaccine has proved elusive, both aforementioned news outlets reported. But Dennis Burton, an immunology professor with the Scripps team, told CBS that researchers have “begun to see light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research.”

“This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close. We’re getting good results out of clinical trials,” Burton said.

“The HIV pandemìc will never be ended without a vaccine, so kìlling research on one will end up kìlling people,” John Moore, an HIV researcher at Weill Cornell Medical in New York, told the Times. “The NIH’s multiyear investment in advanced vaccine technologies shouldn’t be abandoned on a whim like this.”

While a senior NIH official told the Times that the agency expects to shift its focus away from vaccine research and “toward using currently available approaches to eliminate HIV/AIDS,” the president’s second-term administration has essentially reversed course on the president’s first-term plan to end HIV by 2030.

Following the president’s January executive order calling for a 90-day hold on all U.S. foreign aid, the administration shut down United States Agency for International Development’s operations, including those of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPRAR). In February, the State Department backtracked slightly, announcing that the program to prevent HIV in low- and middle-income foreign countries could provide PrEP medications to pregnant and breastfeeding women, but not to LGBTQ+ people and other high-risk groups for contracting HIV.

As the Times reported in March, the NIH terminated several grants related to PrEP, and the administration is also reportedly considering shutting down the CDC’s HIV prevention division.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told CBS News that “critical HIV/AIDS programs will continue” under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposed new agency, the “Administration for a Healthy America.” But as the Times notes, details about the new agency are scarce.

Meanwhile, Scripps Research’s Burton warned that shutting down crucial HIV vaccine research would have consequences that linger for years, even if a subsequent administration were to restore funding. “This is a setback of probably a decade for HIV vaccine research,” he told CBS.

While the Times notes that clinical trials based on CHAVD’s work may continue if NIH continues funding for its HIV Vaccine Trial Network, a spokesperson for pharmaceutical and biotech company Moderna said that the agency also paused funding for its own clinical trial for an HIV vaccine last week. Mitchell Warren, executive director of the HIV prevention organization AVAC, warned that even if funding for clinical trials is maintained, research out of the Duke and Scripps programs is crucial to developing vaccine candidates for those trials.

“As they take a wrecking ball to HIV treatment & prevention, they’re now ending the work to create an HIV vaccine,” California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) wrote in a Bluesky post responding to the news of the CHAVD funding cut. The current presidential administration, he added, “truly [doesn’t] care if HIV surges. They don’t care if people die.”