Trump administration threatens future of HIV research hub
Source: The Washington Post
By Amy Goldstein December 4 at 10:54 PM
The Trump administration has thrown into doubt a multimillion-dollar research contract to test new treatments for HIV that relies on fetal tissue — work targeted by antiabortion lawmakers and social conservatives aligned with the president.
The turmoil over the National Institutes of Health contract with the University of California at San Francisco is part of a building battle between conservatives opposed to research using fetal tissue and scientists who say the material is vital to developing new therapies for diseases from AIDS to Parkinson’s.
The UCSF research laboratory and an affiliated institute have been instrumental in testing virtually all HIV therapies subsequently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since the 1990s, and NIH provides all the support for this work.
Last week, an NIH contracting official told the principal investigator at UCSF that the government was ending the seven-year contract midstream and that the decision was coming from the “highest levels,” according to a virologist familiar with the events. Five days later, the university received a letter from the AIDS division of NIH’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases saying the government would continue the contract for 90 days rather than the expected year-long renewal, with no forecast of its prospects after that, according to an individual with knowledge of the letter.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-threatens-future-of-hiv-research-hub/2018/12/04/f2e8e0ec-f7dd-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
There... fixed it.
when crackpot religious fundies--of any stripe--control public policy.
And, of course, the findings of this research would have myriad benefits, through better understanding of viral diseases.
