The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has long been a global leader in disease tracking and evidence-based medical guidelines, but recent funding cuts and firings have caused many to wonder whether the institution is still a trusted source. CBC’s Nisha Patel breaks down how some of those changes could put Canadians at risk.
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Topic: war on scienceView all posts for the topic: war on science
Six Nobel laureates speak out against Trump: ‘The closest analogy is with the Hitler regime’
In recent weeks, EL PAÍS contacted most of the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine from the United States over the past 20 years with a questionnaire about Donald Trump’s policies on science, research, and health. The vast majority are established researchers — some even retired — who should not fear retaliation; but only a handful of them agreed to respond.
“Why am I sad?” writes Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “We came to the U.S. when I was 11. Even as my parents could not work making full use of their training and talents, the country gave their child, me (and my sister, born here), a chance to get an education and to do wonderful research with talented coworkers from all over the world. If the Trump policies are carried through, the full flow of what I experienced will be very unlikely in the generation of my scientific grandchildren.”
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Public Health Agency of Canada cutting hundreds of jobs
Approximately 320 jobs will be cut at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) as part of a “post pandemic calibration” at the federal department.
The Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed to CTV News Ottawa a review of programs will result in job cuts to align department spending with approved funding for the 2026-27 fiscal year.
“As part of PHAC’s post-pandemic recalibration and ongoing efforts to adjust to new salary allocations, the agency must focus resources on government-funded priorities. This means re-prioritizing and streamlining some programs, and in some cases discontinuing work,” a PHAC spokesperson said in an email.
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RFK Jr. pulls $500 million in funding for vaccine development
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects, totaling $500 million, to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted.
Kennedy’s decision to terminate the projects is the latest in a string of decisions that have put the longtime vaccine critic’s doubts about shots into full effect at the nation’s health department. Kennedy has pulled back recommendations around the COVID-19 shots, fired the panel that makes vaccine recommendations, and refused to offer a vigorous endorsement of vaccinations as a measles outbreak worsened.
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US aid cuts halt HIV vaccine research in South Africa, with global impact
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Just a week had remained before scientists in South Africa were to begin clinical trials of an HIV vaccine, and hopes were high for another step toward limiting one of history’s deadliest pandemics. Then the email arrived.
Stop all work, it said. The United States under the Trump administration was withdrawing all its funding.
The news devastated the researchers, who live and work in a region where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world. Their research project, called BRILLIANT, was meant to be the latest to draw on the region’s genetic diversity and deep expertise in the hope of benefiting people everywhere.
But the $46 million from the U.S. for the project was disappearing, part of the dismantling of foreign aid by the world’s biggest donor earlier this year as President Donald Trump announced a focus on priorities at home.
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Destroying 50 years of women’s health samples is like ‘burning the Library of Congress’
For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger.
When nurses Patricia Chubb, 70, and her mother, Charlotte Mae Rohrbaugh, 98, joined the fledgling Harvard University-led Nurses’ Health Study in 1976, they had no idea it would last for nearly 50 years.
“It’s probably the longest, if not one of the longest, prospective health care studies for women that’s ever been done,” said Chubb, who lives in Pennsylvania. “They picked nurses to do the study because they know how to answer health questions correctly and can draw their own blood and the like — it’s very cost-effective.”
Study data gathered through the years from some 280,000 nurses in the United States has contributed enormously to improving how we live. The work has informed dietary recommendations, including national dietary guidelines led to hormonal therapies for breast cancer prevention and treatment; and contributed to research about how nutrients, inflammatory markers and heavy metals influence disease development.
Yet all of that priceless data may soon be discarded due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard over what Trump claims is a failure to protect Jewish students during campus protests.
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The U.S. is cutting billions from science. Canadian researchers say it’s time to step up
Scientists in Canada are scrambling. Over the past few months, the U.S. government has cut billions of dollars in funding from scientific research as part of sweeping cost-cutting measures.
“It’s really shocking. It’s really like this big cloud over science,” Kate Moran, CEO of Ocean Networks Canada, told Quirks & Quarks. Ocean Networks Canada participates in a project called the Argo system, an international program that collects information from on and under the ocean using a fleet of robotic instruments that drift with the ocean currents.
But that program, which is led by researchers in the U.S., could be at risk.
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Topic: N95 respiratorsView all posts for the topic: N95 respirators
Federal cuts threaten to close Pennsylvania lab that certifies N95s and other respirators in June
The Pennsylvania laboratory that certifies all of the country’s NIOSH-approved respirators is on the chopping block. HHS is stonewalling employees who raise questions.
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Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts
The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a preliminary budget document obtained by The Washington Post.
The HHS budget draft, known as a “passback,” offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress. It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research.
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Top scientists pen letter calling for end to ‘assault on U.S. science’
Nearly 2,000 doctors, researchers, and scientists have signed an open letter calling for an end to what they describe as the Trump administration’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science.”
The letter, written by 13 scientists from disciplines including medicine, climate science and economics, urges Americans to demand their Congress protect scientific funding and integrity.
The signatories, all members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, wrote that the Trump administration is “destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”
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Rollout of ‘miracle’ HIV prevention drug is threatened by Trump cuts to global AIDS relief program
The Trump administration’s enormous cuts to a global AIDS relief program threaten to upend the planned rollout of a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug that was expected to save countless lives.
The medicine, lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, has caused a stir because clinical trial data showed a single set of injections every six months could provide virtually complete protection against infection, a form of prevention known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or (PrEP). The drug, which is under regulatory review, has raised hopes that the deadly infectious disease can be mitigated around the globe. Early data for an even newer formulation suggest it might need to be given only once a year. “This is magical,” UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima declared last year.
Comments closedTopic: pro-virus policiesView all posts for the topic: pro-virus policies
US cutting Gavi vaccine alliance aid may cause ‘over a million deaths’
Paris (AFP) – The United States cutting funding to Gavi, an organisation that provides vaccines to the world’s poorest countries, could result in more than a million deaths and will endanger lives everywhere, the group’s CEO warned on Thursday.
The news that Washington is planning to end funding for Gavi, first reported in the New York Times, comes as the two-month-old administration of President Donald Trump aggressively slashes foreign aid.
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CDC is pulling back $11B in Covid funding sent to health departments across the U.S.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds allocated in response to the pandemic to state and community health departments, nongovernment organizations and international recipients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Tuesday.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”
HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the CDC, which is tasked with protecting the nation’s health. Notices began going out Monday, and awardees have 30 days to reconcile their expenditures. Figures are subject to change.
Continue readingCDC is pulling back $11B in Covid funding sent to health departments across the U.S.
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Long Covid office ‘will be closing,’ Trump administration announces
The Trump administration is shuttering HHS’ long Covid office as part of its reorganization, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO.
The email was sent Monday by Ian Simon, the head of the Office of Long Covid Research and Practice. It said the closing is part of the Department of Health and Human Services’ reorganization.
Comments closedTopic: AIDSView all posts for the topic: AIDS
UN warns millions more will die from AIDS after US cuts
The UNAIDS program head has said millions more will die as a result of the sudden cuts to funding by the Trump administration. She also warned that the AIDS pandemic could return to 1990s levels.
The head of the United Nations program on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, said on Monday that over 6 million additional deaths from the disease are expected after the US slashed its funding.
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Trump’s EPA aims to cut pollution rules projected to save nearly 200,000 lives: ‘People will be hurt’
A push by Donald Trump’s administration to repeal a barrage of clean air and water regulations may deal a severe blow to US public health, with a Guardian analysis finding that the targeted rules were set to save the lives of nearly 200,000 people in the years ahead.
Last week, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provoked uproar by unveiling a list of 31 regulations it will scale back or eliminate, including rules limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams.
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Trump’s staggering offensive against science
The blitzkrieg launched against science by the Trump administration is unprecedented, and all the more shocking as it comes from a democratic country. The brutality of the layoffs of civil servants, the halting of funding and the blocking of research programs is astounding. The Orwellian dimension of the move came to light with the publication of a list of terms that must no longer be used in research and working papers – climate, pollution, injustice, reference to gender or race… So much so that some scientists are beginning to devise different phrases to pass Trump’s censors.
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‘Get in Dorks’: Stand Up for Science rallies spread to 32 U.S. cities
Since Donald Trump took office in January, researchers across the U.S. have been waiting for scientific leaders to forcefully speak out against the administration’s grant freezes, research funding cuts, and targeting of diversity in their field. Frustrated that there seemed to be no large-scale movement coalescing, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in clinical psychology, took matters into her own hands.
She posted on Bluesky, now the social media of choice for many scientists, “Get in Dorks, we are going protesting.” At the time, “I really thought 500 people might show up to D.C., that’s where I was in my head,” she said.
But little more than three weeks later, what began as an effort by five early-career researchers has exploded into a global movement called Stand Up for Science — with 32 coordinated rallies planned across the country on Friday, and affiliated walkouts and protests across the globe. The largest events are slated for Washington D.C., New York City, and Boston.
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