Photo: CalMatters
Over the last few years, the Trump administration has tried to defund research programs that seem to not be productive. Or more importantly, to save money. Recent news reports have shown that the Trump administration has defunded specific programs aimed at fighting/preventing rare diseases from entering the United States of America to save pennies (annually $200 million). The programs defunded by the Trump administration (or attempted to do so) were serious bang for our bucks in terms of saving lives. These days with the Coronavirus, one cannot help thinking that the current administration does not care about American lives. People are dying. Why cut research funding to save lives?
News arrived in my email inbox on last Tuesday from Politico Prescription about the cancellation of a multiyear research contract with a research institute in Wuhan (China) on Coronavirus:
TRUMP CUTS CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH OVER CHINA TIES — The Trump administration abruptly cut off funding for a project studying how coronaviruses spread from bats to people after reports linked the work to a lab in Wuhan, China, at the center of conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic's origins.The National Institutes of Health on Friday told EcoHealth Alliance, the study's sponsor for the past five years, that all future funding is gone and it immediately had to stop spending more than $300,000 left on this year's grant. The group caught national attention after reports swirled that millions from its NIH grants had been sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility in the city where the coronavirus pandemic originated."We will end that grant very quickly," Trump said when asked about it during a briefing just a week before. "It was granted quite awhile ago," he added, referencing the Obama administration. "Who was president then, I wonder?"The NIH awarded the original grant for the project during the Obama administration, but renewed it in July 2019. The funding allotted this year, and cut last week, came from the Trump administration.Within days of Trump's comments, an NIH official emailed EcoHealth employees asking for a list of all Chinese sites "that have been in any way linked to this award." EcoHealth's president categorically denied giving funding this year to the Wuhan lab.NIH killed the project days later, despite coronavirus origin and transmission being one of its top research priorities. The EcoHealth Alliance has received more than $3.7 million since 2015 for its research on the risks of coronavirus spread through bats and the potential for spillover into humans. The effort has produced at least 20 scientific papers, including several published in prominent journals such as Nature.
On Wednesday, reporting from Morning Joe highlights the emerging information war on the optics of the Coronavirus research that was funded in part by the United States through the National Institutes of Health:
Instead of addressing the main issue at stake -- which is funding for research surrounding the Coronavirus, the situation reported above has turned into a finger-pointing match. Some countries must be blamed. A country other than the U.S. must be blamed -- is the Trump administration strategy.
How has a research funding story turned into a shouting (and blaming) match between superpowers?
Each was funding and tracking research done in Wuhan. Researchers have been conducting research that will yield results in a timely manner. The problem is that the world is now seeing the timeline of such research. Further, the conversion of scientific research into a marketable item (i.e., a vaccine) is longer than most Americans envision.
In the meantime, instead of fighting over the origin of a pandemic, fund international collaboration in scientific research to speed up a vaccination that will ultimately reduce the total number of deaths in the end. We, as a nation, should be building collaborations intra-country and inter-country to solve a growing crisis.
Science does not care about emotion or feeling. Scientific research produces data. And data leads to outcomes whether positive or negative for a given problem. Ultimately, through research and discovery, more positive has emerged than negative. The scientists of the world have solved a range of problems over decadess.
Why stop funding science now because the optics do not look good? Research should be conducted at the site of origin. If Wuhan is the ground zero for the outbreak, we should have scientists living there now conducting research. Finding solutions rather than complaining about problems.
Just because our administration has failed us in the past, does not mean that the future needs to entail more failure on their part. Wake up and take a valid temperature of the world. We are in need of a solution rather than hearing about ongoing problems. Take action!
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