President Donald Trump has cut $258 million from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget that funded researchers working to create an HIV vaccine, CBS Newsreports.
Researchers were told Friday by officials from the National Institutes of Health that the HHS would not renew funding for programs at Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Scripps Research Institute first funded in 2012 during the Obama administration.
“The Administration believes the United States should have the best medical research in the world. To that end, we are advancing policies to maximize the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar and ensure proper oversight of this funding,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in a statement, according to the outlet.
Hilliard described the existing HIV vaccine efforts as “complex and duplicative health programs [that] have resulted in serious duplication of efforts.” She said HHS had spent $7.5 billion on 27 different programs researching HIV/AIDS.
Instead, the government intended “to go with currently available approaches to eliminate HIV.”
“For HIV vaccine design and development, we've begun to see light at the end of the tunnel after many years of research,” Dennis Burton, an immunology professor at Scripps Research, told CBS News. “This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close. We’re getting good results out of clinical trials.”
