Biology

The National Institute of Health’s (NIH’s) highly regarded Vaccine Research Center (VRC) once had a roughly 400-person workforce that helped develop and clinically test vaccines and antibody treatments for Ebola and host of dangerous infectious disease. Now, after a steady firing of key contractors by the Trump administration, the VRC is reeling.

“I am writing at the end of another very difficult week for the VRC,” wrote its director Ted Pierson in a 28 April email seen by Science . He noted that the center had just lost another 15 contract staff, on top of 48 other contractors let go since late January. Contractors make up half the VRC’s workforce.

Across all of NIH more than 2000 contractors have been laid off since Trump took office, according to previously unreported information from late April obtained by Science . Those losses come on top of comparable numbers of NIH workers who were let go because they had probationary status or were part of the agency’s reduction in force, or who have left because of the chaos or retired by taking White House buyout offers.

At the VRC, the “process of terminating [the latest] contracts was sudden, impersonal, and profoundly distressing,” Pierson wrote. “It is understandable to be discouraged, angry, and anxious.” Key programs at the VRC are now hobbled, according to details in his memo.

Launched 25 years ago by the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the VRC does “Manhattan project-like science” on vaccines and related immune therapeutics, says University of Pennsylvania immunologist John Wherry. Its “mission-oriented teams” groups tackle “big problems,” says Wherry, such as producing novel vaccines and antibodies to treat diseases such as malaria, as well as conducting clinical trials. VRC’s web site lists six trials underway, including for a flu vaccine and an HIV antibody treatment, all developed in house at NIH.

The center’s past efforts include devising Ebola treatments and helping Moderna develop its messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine within months, savings millions of lives. “Its overall economic value is orders of magnitude in favor of the investments we made,” Wherry says. Its basic research too has been invaluable, he says, from tailoring a SARS-CoV-2 protein for use in mRNA vaccines to immunology findings that have influenced cancer treatments.

The center originally employed around 200 contractors as scientific staff, sources there say. The rest included around 100 federal employees as well as research fellows and post-college trainees. Because of a Trump policy that effectively has barred renewals of the “task orders” for individual contractors’ terms, the VRC has been losing contractors since early February–some 32% of its total.

“Since January, it has been controlled despair, coming in each day seeing which colleague is gone,” said a VRC worker on a contract who was let go in April. Now 15 more VRC contractors have been dismissed under a mandate from HHS and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for NIH overall to cut contract spending by $2.6 billion or 35%.

The Vaccine Immunology Program and Vaccine Production Programs have been especially affected by the continuing losses, Pierson’s memo says. One immunology lab, which has lost 40% of its workers, has stopped developing antibody tests for some future clinical trials and could soon have to stop testing blood samples from ongoing trials and simply store the samples, a VRC scientist says. Various NIH-wide purchasing restrictions have also slowed research at a place that uses large quantities of reagents and other supplies, scientists say.

VRC leaders have avoided speaking to reporters because they worry the center will become a target for Trump officials, say their colleagues in the academic community. NIAID has had several leaders removed by the Trump administration and Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, depending on the critic, a vaccine skeptic or outright opponent.

Across NIH the contractor purge—some 2200 contractors since January, according to data shared last week with staff at one institute--now rivals the 2500 NIH staff lost to two rounds of layoffs of federal employees since mid-February. According to a web site that pulls in data on contracts cuts listed by DOGE, NIH has so far cut more than 400 contracts totaling about $780 million, including ones that provided repositories for biospecimens and support for long term health studies. One cut, to the long-running Women’s Health Initiatives was reversed this week after a public outcry.

The VRC finally had some good news this week: The task orders for individual contractors can now be renewed, which should staunch the loss of scientific workers, a scientist says. Still, the center is bracing for more cuts in mid-May to another contract, Pierson’s memo says.

For decades the National Science Foundation (NSF) has employed hundreds of scientists on leave from their academic positions who help the agency choose the best research to fund. The extensive use of these so-called rotators is designed to keep the 75-year-old agency on the cutting edge of all fields of science.

But today NSF officials announced they are essentially abandoning that approach for a new strategy they say will both save money and focus on a handful of areas President Donald Trump has identified as priorities for his administration. “These actions are necessary … to reduce the size of government and reduce federal spending,” according to a memo from Micah Cheatham, NSF’s chief management officer. The move is part of a plan to radically restructure and downsize the agency, as reported yesterday by Science .

NSF now hosts 368 scientists who are not classified as federal employees but who typically stay from 2 to 4 years under a governmentwide program known as the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA). By 9 June, NSF plans to slash the number of IPAs to 70, according to Cheatham. That shrunken crew, he writes, will help manage research portfolios covering one of five areas: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science. “Those positions will be filled with existing IPAs to the maximum extent possible,” Cheatham adds.

Simultaneously, NSF also plans to reduce by 60% the number of administrators classified as senior executive service (SES) employees, who earn salaries much higher than the regular federal pay scale. NSF’s current roster of 143 SES positions will plunge to 59, a number Cheatham says is commensurate with NSF’s “new organizational structure and proposed future budgets.”

That restructuring would abolish NSF’s current 37 divisions spread across the agency’s eight directorates. Science has now learned that the new structure will retain the existing directorates but replace divisions with “clusters” that fund research in the president’s five priority areas. Unlike the current divisions, which are led by an SES director and an SES deputy director, the new clusters will be headed by non-SES supervisors.

In advance of adopting its new structure, Cheatham announced NSF is eliminating the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM (EES) and firing its entire staff, believed to number between 15 and 20. The reduction in force, in effect immediately, will be completed by 12 July.

EES is one of four divisions within NSF’s $1 billion education directorate, and last week NSF foreshadowed its demise by terminating 331 of its grants. They were seen to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion that bans any research that preferentially favors one demographic group or excludes participation of other groups.

Twenty years ago, when the painful viral disease chikungunya exploded on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion and sickened hundreds of thousands, doctors longed for a vaccine. Now the virus is surging again, causing 50,000 confirmed cases and 12 deaths on the island, a French department, and spreading on neighboring islands including Mauritius. This time a vaccine called Ixchiq is readily available. But safety problems have cropped up, and on Wednesday, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) suspended the vaccine’s use in people 65 years and older after two deaths and several serious adverse events.

The outbreak on Réunion may be showing signs of ebbing. But need for the vaccine may not, as the virus is expected to spread beyond the Indian Ocean, imported with travelers returning from that region. Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI) at Stellenbosch University, notes, “There’s a special concern when summer is starting in Europe and there is higher susceptibility for chikungunya transmission.”

Caused by a virus transmitted by Aedes aegypti and A. albopictus mosquitoes, chikungunya causes fever, excruciating joint pain, headache, joint swelling, and rash. People usually recover within a week, but some develop heart and brain inflammation, and severe pain can last for months and even years. (The word means “disease that bends up the joints” in Kimakonde, an East African language.) It is endemic in parts of Latin America and Asia, and across central Africa in a belt that extends to the Indian Ocean islands, where warm, wet conditions are especially hospitable to the mosquitoes that transmit the virus.

The disease exploded on Réunion in 2005–06 after the virus acquired a mutation in its envelope gene that is thought to make it more readily transmitted by A. albopictus , also known as the Asian tiger mosquito, which predominates on Réunion. The virus causing the new outbreak “evolved a bit [since 2005–06], but the circulating lineage now still carries [that mutation],” Muriel Vincent, an epidemiologist on Réunion with Public Health France, said at a World Health Organization (WHO) webinar on 7 May. “We assume that’s why we saw such an explosive circulation.”

Houriiyah Tegally, a bioinformatician who is head of data science at CERI, believes there is another factor. “It’s been a really long time now, 20 years” since the last big outbreak, enough time for an entire generation of young people to be born without immunity to the virus, says Tegally, who with colleagues is studying the genetics of the virus on Réunion and Mauritius and supporting the outbreak response. In addition, she says, French people and other Europeans often retire to Réunion, providing an additional population of immunologically naïve people.

The new vaccine promised to help stem the spread. Made of a live, weakened version of the virus, Ixchiq was approved last year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for those ages 18 and older in the United States and by other regulators for use in this age group in the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Last month, it was approved for those ages 12 to 17 in the EU.

But earlier hints of safety problems had led a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee to recommend on 16 April that the vaccine be used with caution in people 65 years and older. The problems became clearer in recent weeks as Réunion launched an emergency vaccination campaign against chikungunya with a priority, according to a Valneva press release, on older, more at risk adults. But now, because of the adverse events, including two deaths, “Ixchiq must not be used in adults aged 65 years and above” or in people with weakened immune systems, EMA wrote, saying the halt is a temporary measure while it conducts an in-depth review. The recommendation followed a similar one made by the French vaccine regulatory agency on 25 April, which stopped the administration of vaccines to those in that age group on Réunion. And h ours after this article was published, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended pausing the use of the Ixchiq vaccine in people 60 years and older while the agencies investigate the serious adverse events."

The adverse events in the elderly are “pretty big news [but] not so surprising,” says David Hamer, an infectious disease physician at Boston University who is surveillance lead for GeoSentinel, an infectious disease surveillance network. Hamer notes that similar problems have emerged with the yellow fever vaccine, which also consists of a weakened virus that can sometimes cause problematic infection in recipients. In people with weak immune systems because of age or immunosuppression for other reasons, Ixchiq “may not be a safe vaccine,” he says.

In a press release on 7 May, Valneva asserted that all of those affected by adverse events had “significant underlying medical conditions and/or co-medications.” EMA noted that the two deaths, both on Réunion, occurred in an 84-year-old man who developed brain inflammation and a 77-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease.

But the vaccine’s limitations worry public health experts. “The age range for which it’s approved and the safety concerns are limiting the ability to use the vaccine in people at highest risk of severe disease,” says Philip Krause, a physician and former vaccine regulator with FDA who participated in a recent WHO consultation on chikungunya vaccines. Very young children, for whom it is not approved, along with the elderly, are most vulnerable to the disease. For instance, of 70 patients hospitalized with severe disease on Réunion, 23 were infants less than 6 months of age.

Meanwhile, the virus remains a threat beyond Réunion. De Oliveira said that at an emerging virus symposium in Geneva last month, a French scientist reported as many as 100 imported cases of chikungunya being detected in France weekly. The last Réunion outbreak also traveled to India , where it infected an estimated 1.4 million people. Hamer says his surveillance network is now picking up cases in travelers returning from Sri Lanka.

With the arrival of cooler weather in the Southern Hemisphere, the number of cases on Réunion may be on the decline, Vincent said during the Wednesday webinar. The average of 20,000 weekly cases reported by family medicine clinics (though not necessarily confirmed with genetic testing) in recent weeks fell to 14,000 in the week that ended on 4 May, she said. Since the epidemic was declared in January, there have been about 174,000 such cases.

Hamer says a tailing off wouldn’t be surprising. “The natural history of these outbreaks, especially on an island is they blast through in a very short period of time and fade away.”

Update (10 May, 11 am: This article has been updated with FDA's reccomendation to pause use of the Ixchiq vaccine.

When The Wall Street Journal reported on 1 May that President Donald Trump’s administration was shifting $500 million meant for improving COVID-19 vaccines to develop more ambitious “universal” vaccines for multiple strains of flu and coronaviruses, many infectious disease scientists and vaccine developers were puzzled. “This initiative represents a decisive shift toward transparency, effectiveness, and comprehensive preparedness,” said a statement issued later that day by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which dubbed the project Generation Gold Standard. But despite HHS’s promise of transparency, details of the initiative remain sparse, and some researchers are leveling sharp criticisms at the effort.

One detail triggering swift condemnation is the decision to give a still-unspecified portion of the $500 million to work led by two flu scientists who have recently become leaders at HHS’s National Institutes of Health (NIH): Deputy Director Matthew Memoli and the newly appointed acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Jeffery Taubenberger. The diverted money comes from a $5 billion pot to support Project NextGen, a COVID-19 vaccine effort started in April 2023 by HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and NIAID.

For large awards like this, both BARDA and NIH typically make a public announcement of an area of interest and invite applicants to compete with detailed proposals. But that didn’t happen in this case, dismaying some vaccine veterans. “I don’t think it should be impossible for an NIH intramural project to be funded, but it should be reviewed by the right experts, independently, and there should be a very high stringency to ensure there is no conflict or cronyism,” says Moncef Slaoui, a former GSK executive who ran Operation Warp Speed, which led the U.S. government crash program to develop COVID-19 vaccines. “That’s not what’s been done.”

Emily Erbelding, the physician-scientist who headed NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Disease until being put on leave in April as part of Trump administration cuts, says the substantial support announced for Taubenberger and Memoli’s universal vaccine work is highly unusual. “I’ve spent a lot of years talking to BARDA, and I’ve not seen them operate in this manner previously,” she says.

HHS did not answer specific questions from Science Insider about how the pair’s work was selected, but The Atlantic this week reported from anonymous former and current NIH sources that it came after Memoli directly pitched the idea to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Neither Memoli nor Taubenberger responded to Science ’s requests for comment, but The Atlantic reported that HHS said the $500 million would be split among an undefined number of projects.

Equally baffling to some vaccine researchers is the dearth of published evidence to support Taubenberger and Memoli’s project, which relies on inactivating viruses, a “platform” that first proved its worth in the 1940s with flu vaccines. “In some circumstances, the older technologies are safer and better,” says Stanley Plotkin, author of the seminal textbook Plotkin’s Vaccines and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. “What’s troubling is to have an announcement that this is a revolutionary technology that is going to change the world, and there’s nothing on which to base those statements.” When he saw the HHS announcement, “I thought, ‘Have I missed something in the literature?’” says Plotkin, who now consults for vaccine manufacturers. “Well, no, I haven’t.”

Plotkin adds that he finds HHS’s apparent special treatment of Taubenberger and Memoli’s universal vaccine work “appalling.”

Memoli and Taubenberger for several years have been developing potential universal vaccines for flu by mixing together multiple subtypes of the influenza virus, inactivated with the chemical beta propiolactone (BPL). Beyond flu and coronaviruses, the HHS release said the platform could also be used to make vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus, metapneumovirus, and parainfluenza.

There’s no doubt some find the work promising. In addition to the project having received intramural NIAID funding, it received a $2.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017.

In contrast with the COVID-19 and flu vaccines approved in the United States that rely solely on surface proteins from the pathogens to trigger protective immune responses, inactivated vaccines contain the entire viruses. Two Chinese vaccine manufacturers during the COVID-19 pandemic similarly created shots containing BPL-inactivated SARS-CoV-2. Those vaccines were used by much of the world, and although they did not perform as well as messenger RNA vaccines in clinical trials, they likely saved many lives. The whole, inactivated virus approach may also appeal to Kennedy, who recently claimed in an interview with CBS News that vaccines based on single molecules are ineffective against respiratory viruses, an assertion widely dismissed by scientists with experience in the field.

Taubenberger, Memoli, and co-workers last year published a study in which they injected mice and ferrets with vaccines made from four different BPL-inactivated influenza viruses.  They then “challenged” the animals by giving them highly lethal flu viruses, including one that caused the 1917–18 pandemic and two flu subtypes that are particularly deadly in birds. They reported that the immunized animals enjoyed “substantial protection” compared to unvaccinated control animals.

In October 2024, they reported at a meeting the first human results of this vaccine. The small clinical trial, designed primarily to assess safety, compared 30 people who received it with 15 who got a placebo shot. The vaccine was “safe and well tolerated,” according to an abstract from their presentation. More detailed immune responses for the vaccine and control groups appear on ClinicalTrials.gov but they don’t impress several scientists in the field. “They were fairly mediocre results,” says infectious disease physician Luciana Borio, former acting chief scientist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who now works with a venture capital company and at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Borio also has misgivings about Generation Gold Standard’s focus on the BPL platform. The project has “an enamorment” of the inactivated virus approach that isn’t well justified, particularly for influenza and coronaviruses, she says. “A whole virus vaccine mimics the natural infection, and I think that what people forget is that the natural infection does not induce lasting protective responses for many diseases,” she says.

“There is a lot of opportunity to have better flu vaccines, universal or seasonal,” Borio adds, “and I would like to see a portfolio approach in which we’re betting on cutting-edge science to develop those.”

Other vaccine developers agree. “There are real risks, both in safety and in efficacy, that the Taubenberger-Memoli approach may not work well,” says virologist Adolfo García-Sastre of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “The best way to get to a universal flu vaccine will be to move ahead some other approaches with good preclinical and/or clinical evidence,” says García-Sastre, whose team has been testing a candidate vaccine with an engineered version of flu’s hemagglutinin surface protein, regions of which share shapes with most influenza viruses. The hope is that commonality will stimulate broadly protective immune responses.

García-Sastre is also co-founder of a company, Castlevax, that competed for and won a Project NextGen award from BARDA worth up $338 million to develop and test an improved COVID-19 vaccine. It was terminated last month. “The official reason received was that the program was stopped because of uncertainties whether the trial can be conducted within the expected timelines,” García-Sastre says. He and company officials disagree with that assessment, and have tried to discuss the situation, he adds. “BARDA has stopped talking to us due to the termination.”

GeoVax Labs similarly had a next-generation COVID-19 vaccine award from Project NextGen terminated last month. CEO David Dodd says the termination “was a disappointment and surprise,” and notes that the funding mainly was meant to support a clinical trial, which would have involved 10,000 people.

Slaoui, former head of vaccines at GSK, says the sudden terminations are bad business. “If we made a commitment, we made a commitment,” he says. “Work with the company in a constructive way on how to allow them to continue their program.”

Generation Gold Standard is a “much better approach than Project NextGen,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote in an email to Science Insider. “It is no surprise that the Trump Administration will review the funding under Project NextGen, a [former President Joe] Biden-era initiative to address COVID-19 challenges, which most Americans agree is over.” Nixon noted that funding a BPL platform that NIH developed provides “freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.” (NIH has two patents for the BPL-inactivated, universal flu vaccine and Taubenberger is named as one of the inventors.)

That a leader at NIH stands to financially benefit from this project has raised some eyebrows, although U.S. government employees have a $150,000 annual cap on what they can earn in royalties from their inventions, and many other NIH scientists have earned money this way.

But of course any patent windfall mut be preceded by proof the universal BPL-inactivated virus vaccines work, which appears far off—HHS says it is targeting approval for one by 2029. Slaoui remains skeptical. Maybe, he says, NIH scientists have invented some modification to the BPL-inactivation process that leads to immune responses beyond what has been seen by other similar vaccines—but he’s doubtful. “If this vaccine was exciting to any investors,” Slaoui says, “they would have already invested in it.”

VIENNA— Thousands of years ago, a mariner abandoned their reed boat in one of the many canals that crisscross the plains outside Uruk, one of the world’s first large cities. The identity of this navigator was lost to time, but their vessel was not—in 2017, it was rediscovered in what is now Iraq. Although the boat was clearly thousands of years old, researchers struggled to date it at first. Now, with a little help from geoscience, they’re narrowing in on its true age.

Several factors conspired to obscure the age of the boat, which was excavated and 3D imaged (as seen above) in 2022 and is presently housed at the Iraq Museum. The craft’s reed construction ordinarily would have allowed researchers to radiocarbon date it—except that ancient, organic bitumen, a kind of natural asphalt, used to glue the reeds together threw off dates proposed by the method. Ceramics and bone fragments at the site were dated to between 2100 and 1800 B.C.E., but none were found inside the boat. So, scientists from the German Archaeological Institute switched to a different technique called optically stimulated luminescence, which estimates how long it has been since certain minerals last saw sunlight. Using the method on quartz in the sand grains that had settled inside the boat long ago, they determined it was constructed some 3600 years ago , the researchers announced last week at the European Geosciences Union conference here.

Next, researchers and historians hope to restore the boat to its former glory. But intact boats of such antiquity are incredibly rare in the archaeological record—so rare, in fact, that scholars are having a hard time finding a specialist to do the work.