This editorial was originally published by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and was distributed by The Associated Press.Â
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America has been, for generations, the envy of the world in terms of its medical research breakthroughs. From the development of penicillin in the early 1940s, to Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in the 1950s, to the measles and mumps vaccines of the 1960s, to America’s leading role in the lightning-fast creation of the first COVID vaccines during the pandemic, no nation in history has been remotely as successful as the U.S. at curing what ails humanity.
All of which makes the Trump administration’s determined deconstruction of America’s medical research legacy all the more baffling and alarming (not to mention ironic, given the first Trump administration’s success at spurring the COVID vaccine’s development in 2020). In addition to appointing an anti-vaccination zealot as the nation’s top health official, President Donald Trump’s aggressive, unilateral defunding of medical research at universities and elsewhere will inevitably cost American lives — if it hasn’t already.
This deliberate devastation against the research sector has been so reckless, widespread and opaque that it’s difficult for people outside that sector to even get their heads around it. Which makes one small example of that devastation, happening in St. Louis a useful microcosm.
Fimbrion Therapeutics is a little biomedical research company with a big goal: to develop a key new drug in the continuing fight against tuberculosis. The deadly lung disease, once brought largely under control in the U.S., has seen an uptick in cases in the past few years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fimbrion, from its base in central St. Louis, has spent five years and almost $4 million in funding through the National Institutes of Health developing a new drug to combat tuberculosis. With the federal agency having already lauded the firm’s work, its final funding installment to allow completion of the drug appeared to be a foregone conclusion.
Until it wasn’t.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Michele Munz reported, the firm was informed in mid-May that further funding was being denied due to the outcome of what the NIH called a “foreign risk assessment.â€
It made no sense, Fimbrion CEO Thomas Hannan told Munz, because the firm has no foreign ties at all. When they tried to get an explanation from the NIH, the agency responded with a terse refusal to discuss it further.
The firm has since laid off two of its three chemists, put the rest of its small staff on part-time schedules and is banking on getting separate grant funding to finish its work. If not, the company — and its pending weapon in the fight against tuberculosis — will be shuttered.
The episode has all the hallmarks of this administration’s approach to cutting government in other areas: sudden, unilateral funding withdrawals made for unexplained reasons, often with questionable legality and no clear purpose other than to display an abiding contempt for the role of government in promoting lifesaving medical research.
The story of Fimbrion is a footnote in the much larger story of this president’s determination to withdraw the federal government from its crucial role in American health care. That’s largely what the administration’s defunding of university research around the country is all about.
Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pseudoscience-spouting Health and Human Services secretary, recently fired every member of the highly respected federal board that formulates vaccination policy recommendations. He is replacing them with a group that includes multiple anti-vaccination activists or skeptics.
The real-world impact of this president’s normalization of anti-science quackery can be seen in the resurgence of measles in the U.S. recently, a trend due entirely to the fact that rejecting vaccination today has become socially acceptable on the political right.
Top it all off with Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill of pending tax cuts for the rich — to be funded in part by deep cuts to Medicaid, the government medical insurance system for the poor — and it becomes clear that the biggest threat to America’s health today isn’t tuberculosis, measles or any other disease. It’s this White House. And as long as Americans and their congressional representatives sit idly by and watch this willful sabotage of the nation’s medical legacy, it will only get worse.
