But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
Presumably the motivation is some combination of “slash funding so we can give tax cuts” and “kill the Universities as an independent center of smart people who oppose us” but the actual effect is someone you love will die when they could have lived. It’s fucked.
No. USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted [1].
[1] https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...
USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.
> Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted
Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other.
It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.
That’s not completely accurate.
https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/interviews/usaid-sponsor...
Established in 1961, USAID is used to fund various projects including clinical trials for vaccines and therapeutics in lower-middle-income countries, as well as elsewhere worldwide. The organisation has been used to find research into human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, among other diseases and research efforts. The sudden pull of funding has meant trials have been suspended until trial sponsors seek alternative methods of funding to restart studies.
If this is happening, what organization are they relocating funding to?