Too High A Price: The Consequences of Defunding Infectious Disease Research
The following was written in January of 2025. It was intended to be an OpEd that was never published.
“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” I tweeted this exact sentence in February 2020 after coming down with the 5th viral infection in about as many weeks. I had recently relocated from California back to the East Coast with my husband and 15-month-old son. While I was technically working my postdoc at UC Davis and planning to shift from lab work to data analysis for the remainder of the contract, we had only managed to find childcare coverage at the local daycare part-time. We were splitting daycare between two different facilities about 15 minutes apart. In addition to being a logistical shit-show, it also meant exposing our young child to two sets of daycare germs. As a result, we were getting pummeled with illness. At the same time, unbeknownst to us, SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, was secretly spreading through the country. This included New York City, where my husband was now working. As a virologist, I found it ironic that my family and I were getting jumped by the very thing I had been studying for the past 10+ years. I also felt, having been trained in infectious disease epidemiology and public health microbiology, that we would have SARS-CoV-2 contained in no time. The Obama administration had a whole plan for what to do should there be a substantial pandemic risk. Surely, those same protocols would still exist and be followed; such misplaced confidence.
In March 2020, when SARS-CoV-2 infections were climbing exponentially, many U.S. states were shutting down non-essential businesses and activities to reduce infections and contain the virus. Our daycares were shut down and my husband was ordered to work from home. This threw my world into chaos. On the one hand, my child and husband were now home ALL DAY. My husband and I were desperately trying to balance childcare and work. On the other hand, people were desperate for more information and guidance on what to do in the face of a novel virus sweeping the country. In turn, much of the time I managed to squeak out to work was spent doing science communication around basic virology, how best to prevent infection with the limited information we had, and what we could expect in the coming months.
About a 3.5 hour drive down I-95, Drs. Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, and the other researchers in their NIH lab were taking their research on a SARS-CoV-1 mRNA vaccine and applying it to SARS-CoV2, a genetic cousin. Within less than a year we had several vaccine candidates and later, actual vaccines. My son, now almost 2.5, accompanied me and his father to get our first in a series of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. My husband with his severe needle phobia sat in a chair as a nurse prepared to give him his vaccine and my son walked over to his dad and held his hand. That moment wrapped up so many things, the hope that we would soon be able to return to a normal life, the love for this child and the love that this child had for his father, and the brighter future we all had. That moment was made possible by NIH-funded infectious disease research.
Many of the vaccines and other pharmaceutical drugs we use today have been made possible by investment from the federal government. Federally funded research has brought us so much: from GPS and MRIs to the magic school bus. These all began as ideas in someone’s head. These projects were funded and the scientists behind the ideas, along with their research teams brought those ideas to life and have revolutionized how people live their lives here in the U.S. and globally.
My appreciation for science and scientific discovery, my love for infectious disease research, and the potential to change the world and improve local and global health are leading me to ask; Why is the current Trump administration trying to take away infectious disease and other federally funded research? Elon Musk, the unofficial head of the non-congressionally approved Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been on a rampage tearing through federal institutions in an attempt to withhold the funding designated by Congress for scientific research and stifle communications from the NIH, CDC, USAID, and other institutions that help to prevent and reduce infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. Through a flurry of executive orders, interagency memos, and unauthorized coding sessions, workers enlisted by Elon Musk have been wreaking havoc spearheaded by Russell Vought, and his brainchild Project 2025.
But it’s not just Vought and Musk who are putting infectious disease research at risk. Recently, RFK Jr., the current nominee for Director of Human Health Services, and strong advocate in the anti-vax movement, has spoken openly about his desire to shift the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the institutes that would fall under his direction, away from infectious disease research for “..8 years.” The current nominee for the head of NIH, Jay Battacharya, was a staunch advocate against COVID lockdowns and vaccines and made massively inaccurate predictions about COVID casualties. What would have happened if the NIH researchers working on SARS-CoV-1 had their funding paused for 8 years? What will happen if we pause infectious disease research while on the precipice of avian influenza becoming our next pandemic? From my research on human and avian Influenza, I know it only takes a minimal shift in the circumstances before we start seeing the 1918 flu pandemic redux. As we see rising cases of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, a wildly contagious virus that can wipe out existing immunity to any pathogen, and hard-to-combat diseases like tuberculosis, which requires months of antibiotic treatment without a guarantee of being cured, how do we move forward?
The regular seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Many of those deaths are children and elderly people. An avian influenza pandemic that is allowed to spread unchecked could be even worse than the COVID pandemic, which at its peak was killing 25k+ people a week and still results in 2,000 deaths a month. If infectious disease research has been decimated how will we design and manufacture new flu vaccines? Given the anti-vaxxer stance of our HHS and NIH directors, if we managed to do that, will those new vaccines be approved? Will the American people have access to them? Reducing scientific research funding will not move us forward as society only leaves us behind nations like China, which are investing more and more into research. Pausing infectious disease research and allowing anti-vaxxer conspiracies not based on sound science to become the mainstream would be a catastrophic misstep that would result in American citizens paying the ultimate price with our lives. Personally, that is not a price I am willing to pay. Are you?