Sick people are a bunch of losers

Bring out your dead

The 18 percent cut to the Department of Health and Human Services includes a $5.8 billion reduction for the National Institutes of Health, or about a fifth of its budget.

This will decimate the basic and clinical scientific infrastructure in the United States, said Joseph Ross, a professor of medicine at Yale University. Spending on health R&D in the US has already been flagging, and most of the NIH’s budget goes to an army of 300,000 outside researchers, so a very broad community of researchers would feel the effects of a budget reduction of this size.

According to Matt Hourihan, the director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when the NIH’s budget dropped 5 percent from sequestration cuts, they had to cut around 700 individual grants (out of about 9,000). With a 20 percent cut, “We’re likely talking about [grant] cuts in the hundreds, if not the thousands,” he told Vox’s Brian Resnick.

The cuts would mean less publicly funded science on things like how to treat pain, fight aging, or create vaccines for diseases like Ebola. “Our [research] showed that publicly funded science conducted at academic research institutions and government labs is the source of the most important innovations and products that become transformative therapeutics,” said Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Deep cuts like this will turn off the discovery of the important new therapies of tomorrow.”

The budget also calls for “a major reorganization of NIH’s institutes and centers to help focus resources on the highest priority research and training activities.” There’s not much detail on exactly what this reorganization would look like, except that the budget proposes eliminating the Fogarty International Center, a $69.1 million global health program at NIH that funds 400 research and training projects involving more than 100 US universities and other countries.