NIH Halts Funding for COVID-19 Projects While Trump Admin Sets Stage for Next Pandemic

COVID spending is over, but the pandemic machine is quietly shifting gears to bird flu.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be cutting grants for COVID-19 research, according to a Wednesday report from Nature.

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Both the NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are “cancelling billions of dollars in funding on research related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” per the report.

Internal NIH documents reveal COVID research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic.”

“Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the documents read, though it’s unclear clear how many COVID grants will be closed.

The agency’s staff members have been given updated guidance on how to close the grants.

Nature noted that President Donald Trump’s NIH has already discontinued nearly 400 grants in the past month alone.

This, despite the fact that it was the Trump administration that launched Operation Warp Speed and spearheaded the most expensive pandemic response in American history—greenlighting unprecedented funding for COVID vaccines, therapeutics, and surveillance.

Making up nearly 2% of the NIH’s $47 billion budget, the agency has awarded grants to nearly 600 COVID projects, worth about $850 million.

For example, the NIH is terminating a $577 million program aimed at developing antiviral drugs against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “and six other types of viruses with pandemic potential.”

But the CDC plans to cancel $11.4 billion in funds for pandemic response.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent organization, told Nature that “the COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

Earlier documents had “directed staff to identify and potentially cancel projects on transgender populations; gender identity; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce; and environmental justice.”

NIH received updated guidance this week addressed to “staff members who oversee the business side of awarding research grants, called ‘grants-management specialists.’”

That document includes COVID on a list of “research activities that NIH no longer supports.”

Certain “grants-management specialists” will be tasked with the project terminations.

This is because the agency’s scientific staff members “are considered to be too biased by the NIH’s current leadership to make these determinations,” an NIH official told Nature.

Funding will also be scrapped for research on China, DEI, so-called “transgender issues,” “vaccine hesitancy,” as well as grants related to climate change and South Africa.

Emphasizing how the “large-scale grant terminations” are “unprecedented,” Nature points out that the agency “typically terminates only a few dozen projects each year in response to serious concerns about research misconduct or fraud—and does so only as a last resort, after taking other actions such as suspension.”

On Monday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) said the department had grown too much under the Biden administration while Americans’ health outcomes declined.

“Under the Biden administration, HHS’s budget grew by 38% and staffing increased by 17%, yet public health outcomes declined,” he said. “We’re committed to restoring our health agencies to their gold-standard tradition of evidence-based science — through greater efficiency and accountability.”

But while the government is publicly backing away from COVID-era spending, behind the scenes it’s quietly retooling the same infrastructure for the next crisis.

COVID ‘Over’—But Bird Flu Biosecurity Complex Ramps Up Under Trump

While the end of federal COVID-19 research is long overdue, the Trump administration’s simultaneous buildup of a bird flu pandemic response looks eerily familiar.

Despite declaring the COVID emergency “over,” Trump’s USDA just pledged $100 million to bird flu vaccine research, therapeutics, and biosecurity measures—an effort involving the same agencies that oversaw the disastrous COVID response: HHS, CDC, NIH, and FDA.

And just like with COVID, the federal government isn’t merely preparing for a threat—it’s actively engineering one.

The USDA has been conducting gain-of-function experiments on purported avian flu pathogens, making them more infectious and deadly.

These are the same types of experiments that preceded the COVID outbreak under Trump’s first term, as well as past biowarfare tests like Operation Big Buzz and Operation Sea-Spray, where U.S. agencies covertly released pathogens on the public.

While Trump’s team winds down pandemic-era grant spending, it appears to be replacing one manufactured crisis with another.

The administration even granted exemptions for the CDC and FDA to continue coordinating with the World Health Organization (WHO) on bird flu strategy—despite Trump’s own executive order to withdraw from the global body.

According to STAT News, both agencies “actively participated” in WHO meetings this year to select the strains for the next flu vaccine, working alongside the Crick Worldwide Influenza Center in London.

This isn’t a passive response to a potential outbreak.

It’s coordinated, it’s global, and it’s already happening.

In December, Trump backed a stopgap spending bill that included massive funding authority for biolabs, pandemic vaccines, and emergency health powers—another setup, critics say, for government overreach.

This month’s stopgap bill does the same thing.

Even more telling: although Trump’s team floated an executive order to pause deadly gain-of-function research, the order would reportedly exempt bird flu.

This follows Trump’s 2019 Executive Order 13887, which empowered the Pentagon and a dozen other federal agencies to create a sweeping National Influenza Vaccine Task Force—laying the foundation for today’s aggressive avian influenza (bird flu) posture.

If ending wasteful COVID-19 spending is a win, the quiet replacement of that machinery with an even more coordinated, military-involved influenza program should raise red flags.

Is Trump actually draining the swamp of pandemic overreach—or is he quietly building the next one?

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