In Cape Town, South Africa, one of the world’s most important HIV researchers has lost money for long-time workers and young doctoral students, and has calmly said their work. Once the call is complete, she cries in the empty office.
In the heart of Johannesburg, the lobby of the building, which once housed hundreds of scientists, was choked with a pile of files rushed to collect from abandoned office furniture and closed research sites.
South Africa has been a medical research powerhouse for decades, but its height is largely unknown to people outside the field. Scientists in South Africa are responsible for key breakthroughs against major global killers, including respiratory viruses such as heart disease, HIV and Covid-19. They work closely with American researchers and are awarded more research funds from the US than any other country.
But a series of executive orders and budget cuts from the Trump administration have destroyed this research ecosystem in months.
There will also be severe impacts on pharmaceutical companies that include human health around the world, as well as American giants such as Pfizer, Merck, Abbott and Gilead Science, which rely heavily on South African research complexes to develop and test new drugs, vaccines and treatments.
“South Africa is a beacon,” said Dr. Harold Balmas, a professor of medicine at Cornell University, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his studies in cancer biology and was director of the National Institutes of Health.
“We’ve done a lot of important collaboration there,” he continues, “to cut them off, I don’t understand it. It’s self-destructive behaviour.”
Many important medical trials that have been guaranteed treatment and protection for go disease, diabetes, meningitis, cervical cancer and many other distress have been closed as a result of amputation. The sudden termination left the researchers scramble to find ways to provide continuous surveillance and care to people, including small children who have been given experimental vaccines or drugs.
“The meaning of this is huge,” says Dr. Nutbeko Nutusi, CEO of the South African Medical Research Council. “One of the biggest success stories that have emerged from South Africa over the past 30 years was the development of this large caliber executive of this scientist who has primarily supported the generosity of the American people, but who led scholarships not only for South Africa but for the whole world.”
