Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) – President Donald J. Trump’s administration this week abruptly terminated funding for a slew of studies designed to learn how to better treat the viral condition long COVID.
They include studies funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative called Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER, a $1.7 billion program that serves as the single largest federal funding mechanism for long COVID research.
According to Megan Fitzgerald, a researcher and advocate who works closely with RECOVER-funded researchers and who has long COVID herself, all grants for pathobiology studies that RECOVER funded in 2022 and 2023 were canceled this week.
That amounts to 45 different studies that were designed to uncover the biological mechanisms that may drive various manifestations of long COVID.
Fitzgerald emphasizes that these studies were nearly complete. In most cases, researchers had already finished data collection. They needed only to analyze those data and publish their findings.
“It’s crazy to cut off a study at this point,” Fitzgerald tells C&EN. “I know there’s pushback, saying we need to have more fiscal responsibility. But this is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. You’re just burning dollars here.”
David Warburton is a pediatrician at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine who was running two RECOVER-funded studies as a principal investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
One study was aimed at uncovering whether people with long COVID have any underlying genetic particularities that make them susceptible to the condition, which is a chronic, systemic illness that can involve persistent inflammation, circulatory issues, and extreme, debilitating fatigue that leaves people bedbound in the most severe cases.
Warburton’s other study, which involved teens and young adults, was designed to look at the physiology of brain fog—a common phrase for cognitive difficulties that include memory and recall issues and tiredness …
