Trump’s cuts to international aid are stifling Africa’s HIV research (20 May 2025)
Cuts to international aid ordered by Donald Trump have caused many African HIV researchers to fear for the future of long-term research programmes.
In January, as one of his first acts after taking office, the US president froze all foreign aid and announced a 90-day review. That move and the firing of all but 15 employees at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) mean the agency has, in effect, been closed down.
Also under threat are US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that support HIV research in Africa: cuts have affected funding for HIV-related research in specific populations, and a mechanism that awards grants to international collaborators has been suspended. US dollars have been key in mitigating the scourge of the virus, both through research and by providing lifesaving antiretroviral drugs.
Salim Abdool Karim is co-founder and director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He says three USAID-funded collaborative grants for HIV research and one NIH grant related to tuberculosis have been terminated, totalling US$1.4 million.
The public-health physician, who founded CAPRISA with his wife Quarraisha Abdool Karim, an infectious-disease epidemiologist, says that these funding cancellations will stymie the centre’s research, which prioritises slowing the number of new HIV infections in young women and reducing deaths from HIV–tuberculosis coinfections in Africa.
“All our HIV-vaccine trials, and most of our HIV-treatment trials, will be stopped as these are funded by the NIH,” he says. Although he does not expect the suspended work to result in increased deaths, “it will, however, slow scientific progress on HIV vaccines and treatment”, he adds. He doesn’t think that USAID funding will be restored. “Although it has many great scientists, the United States government is now an unreliable funding partner. We have to mobilize our own resources.”
Source: Nature, 20 May 2025