Credit: Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP
Activists push for long COVID research funding outside the White House in 2022.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) appears to be reversing course on its decision to abruptly cancel a spate of grants for long COVID research earlier this week.
On Friday, the NIH Office of Extramural Research notified an office at New York University (NYU) that funding awarded through the NIH’s long COVID research program—Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER—for pathobiology studies was restored, according to emails shared with C&EN. “Funds made available to you under this award are no longer restricted, and available for us in accordance with our research agreement and any of its valid amendments,” the NYU office tells university researchers in an email.
Other researchers at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Emory University have also had their RECOVER grants restored, says Megan Fitzgerald, a researcher and patient advocate who works closely with several RECOVER-funded scientists. One researcher tells her that some or all of the terminations “may have been rescinded.”
It’s not clear whether the NIH reinstated all the impacted RECOVER grants. The agency terminated up to 45 grants for pathobiology studies that RECOVER awarded in 2022 and 2023 earlier in the week. The cancellations immediately worried patient advocates, who emphasize that such studies, which are designed to uncover how the multisystemic postviral illness operates in the body, are the key to developing diagnostics and therapeutics. There are no treatments specific to long COVID approved in the US.
P. J. Utz, an immunologist and rheumatologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine who is running multiple RECOVER-funded studies, has not received official communications from the NIH or from his own university. But “usually, when you get something like this from NYU, they’re not going to send something out unless they’ve got something official from NIH,” he says.
Mitchell Miglis, a Stanford researcher and neurologist who’s running a RECOVER pathobiology study on autonomic nervous system complications in long COVID, says in an email that he “just got the notice today that the grant funding was restored.” That notice was the one mentioned above from NYU; long COVID researchers have shared it among themselves.
Spokespeople for the NIH and its parent agency, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), did not respond to requests for comment.
Meighan Stone, executive director of the advocacy group Long COVID Campaign, says in a statement emailed to C&EN Friday that several senators, particularly those on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), were instrumental in getting the grants reinstated.
“Long COVID patients are grateful to bipartisan leaders Senators Young and Kaine, HELP Chair Cassidy and Ranking Member Sanders for their partnership on preserving these critical NIH grants,” Stone says in the statement. “HHS Secretary Kennedy and NIH Director Bhattacharya’s action today on RECOVER research funding will make a powerful difference for the over 17 million Americans with Long COVID, especially pediatric patients.”
Researchers are still concerned about their future funding prospects. Amid sweeping changes to the HHS, NIH funding has been awarded more slowly than usual. The NIH is also slated to lose around 1,200 employees as part of a broader agency restructuring, which could affect the speed of reviews and grant awards.
Meanwhile, President Donald J. Trump’s administration has dealt other blows to long COVID–related projects. The HHS closed its Office of Long Covid Research and Practice, Politico reported on Monday. The NIH has also canceled funding for COVID-19-related projects more broadly, including a no-cost extension for antiviral research centers that would have allowed scientists to carry over unspent money into April 2026.
“Some of us are concerned that our entire labs are going to get wiped out at some point,” Utz says.
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
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