HHS directed NIAID to terminate Consortia for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development funding, ending $258M federal HIV vaccine program

On May 30, 2025, program officers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases informed researchers at Scripps Research and Duke University's Human Vaccine Institute via video call that the Trump administration was terminating the Consortia for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD). The program, a $258 million seven-year grant, was the largest NIH-funded effort devoted to HIV vaccine research and had been running for nearly fifteen years. NIAID simultaneously ended funding for three separate research groups that tested experimental HIV vaccines in monkeys. A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told NPR that "complex and duplicative health programs have resulted in serious duplication of efforts that dilute taxpayer resources," but did not clarify whether the decision originated at HHS or within NIH.

The termination arrived at what scientists described as the worst possible moment. CHAVD researchers at Scripps and Duke had been pursuing a broadly neutralizing antibody strategy — designing vaccines capable of attacking many variants of the HIV virus simultaneously — and were preparing to launch clinical trials as soon as 2026. Dennis Burton, the Scripps immunologist who headed one of the two CHAVD programs, told NPR: "Just when it looked like we could beat this virus, we're going to give up." The annual CHAVD funding of approximately $67 million represented roughly 10% of all global HIV vaccine research investment; in 2022 the United States accounted for nearly 90% of the $731 million devoted to HIV vaccine research worldwide.

HIV vaccine development had long eluded researchers because of the virus's exceptional mutation rate, which allows it to evolve faster than antibodies can neutralize it even within a single infected person. The CHAVD approach of using broadly neutralizing antibodies had emerged as the leading scientific consensus for a path forward, a view reinforced by recent clinical trial results. The administration's termination of CHAVD was not the only such cut: earlier in the year, a $45 million USAID grant to the BRILLIANT HIV vaccine consortium — which had assembled an international team across eight African countries and was days from launching its first human clinical trial — had also been halted by a stop-work order. The loss of CHAVD, researchers told NPR, would leave the field without the organizational and technical infrastructure needed to develop and test HIV vaccines at scale, and no philanthropic or foreign funder was expected to step in at equivalent magnitude.