Introduction to the Issue
THE CITY partners with Open Campus on coverage of the City University of New York. Dr. Denis Nash was at an HIV conference in San Francisco last month when rumors began to swirl that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was canceling research grants awarded to universities across the country to study vaccines or vaccine hesitancy.
“We actually heard something along the lines of, ‘They were all canceled yesterday, and all of the investigators were informed,’” Nash, an epidemiology professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health, told THE CITY on Monday.
“We hadn’t heard anything so we kind of thought maybe we weren’t canceled,” he added.
CUNY epidemiology professor Dr. Denis Nash. Credit: CUNY School of Public Health
But a day later, on March 11, the NIH terminated a $3.3 million project led by Nash that studied whether or not brief digital messages could increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adults with mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
Background of the Research
Nash and his team of researchers focused on that group because prior studies suggested that people with mental health issues were more likely to cite reasons for not taking vaccines that contained misinformation and disinformation.
The NIH shut down the project two and a half years in with six months left to completion and an estimated $600,000 remaining in federal funding, which would have gone towards paying 13 faculty members, staffers and students to continue their work on the rest of the project.
Theirs is just one of 61 CUNY research projects that have received stop-work orders from the NIH, according to an email sent to staffers on Wednesday by Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez obtained by THE CITY.
The Broader Impact
The canceled CUNY grants are part of a wider effort by President Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, to cut a third of the federal health budget. Under Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” mandate, 40% of the NIH’s budget would be slashed.
Now Nash has been forced to consider layoffs and furloughs for the staffers, while also trying to figure out how to support four graduate students who had been on the project, he said.
The sheer breadth of Trump’s funding cuts makes that latter task more difficult, Nash explained, because graduate students often work on more than one research project. When only a few grants are lost, it’s possible to find other funded slots for graduate students. But losing 61 research grants in one swoop restricts what’s possible.
Effects on Researchers and Students
“We’re looking at letting people go, furloughing them, people losing their health insurance and people losing their opportunity to do the kind of work that they signed up to do,” Nash said.
“We’re doing our best to see them through, if they’re finishing their degree with us this year, getting them through to the end,” he added. “Our dean has also offered to try and help where he can. But CUNY is not a university with deep pockets. We don’t have an endowment that we can draw on for these kinds of things.”
“We are evaluating how changes to funding from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy and other federal agencies will impact our research and programming,” wrote Matos Rodriguez in his email to CUNY staff.
“Cuts in NIH reimbursements, for example, for operational costs of research and training are being challenged in court, but should they be carried out we estimate that CUNY would receive only about 35% of our expected $12.7 million payment on currently active grants.”
Other Impacts on CUNY
Other CUNY cuts include an $8.4 million grant awarded to Lehman College to train bilingual teachers, part of a total $600 million in funding for teacher training programs canceled by the U.S. Department of Education, according to the email.
“CUNY remains deeply concerned about the potential impact of federal cuts to research,” CUNY spokesperson Noah Gardy told THE CITY in a written statement. “CUNY and campus leadership are mobilized to support everyone in our community and will continue to support our tremendous growth as a preeminent research institution.”
NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Studying Vaccine Misinformation
The Research Project
Nash’s research involved a trial that tested three one-minute, video-based strategies.
One incorporated messaging appealing to participants’ emotions and values designed to strengthen resistance to vaccine misinformation. Another employed cognitive behavioral therapy to address common barriers like vaccine worry and lack of time, especially among those with anxiety or depression symptoms. And a third utilized standard public health messaging that informed people how vaccines prevent severe disease and death.
Nash and his team found that none of interventions materially improve short-term vaccine uptake, but Nash said the study provided useful insights nonetheless.
“It highlights how entrenched vaccine views have become, the limits of short-form messaging late in a pandemic and the need for better-tailored, more sustained engagement strategies — especially for those with mental health challenges who may face unique barriers,” he said.
Nash added that the decision to terminate the project undermines public health preparedness as “research that helps us understand what does and doesn’t work on improving suboptimal vaccine uptake is important to support the design of better strategies in the future.”
A Very Scary Feeling
CUNY is consulting with state and local officials to better understand the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts and is partnering with the American Council of Education and other universities to warn elected officials and the public about the consequences of funding cuts, wrote Matos Rodriguez in his email.
“We remain committed to a CUNY that has lifted generations of New Yorkers of all means and backgrounds and that is at the vanguard of the production and dissemination of knowledge, discovery and creativity for the public good,” said the chancellor.
The cuts have triggered multiple lawsuits from other institutions across the country challenging them, which CUNY says it’s monitoring.
Those include one major legal challenge representing about 120,000 higher education workers filed earlier this month in the Massachusetts District Court taking direct aim at the NIH grant cancellations, arguing that the agency did not have the authority to terminate projects with regulatory language that won’t go into effect until October.
“There’s a very scary feeling at universities all over and I’ll say at CUNY,” he told THE CITY, noting the rising anxiety around academic public health research. “People in public health are wondering about what their career choices mean at this point, and how their career choices are going to be viable in the future where the field of public health is being basically dismantled.”
But, Nash continued, “People who go into careers in public health are also among the most committed and driven people in government, non-profits, the private sector, and academia.”
“We will prevail because of that and because society always needs the improvements that public health can bring.”
Conclusion
The termination of CUNY’s research on vaccine misinformation by the Trump administration has significant implications for public health research and the academic community. The cuts not only affect the researchers and students involved in the project but also undermine the progress made in understanding and addressing vaccine hesitancy. As the country continues to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and other health crises, it is essential to prioritize research that supports the development of effective strategies to improve vaccine uptake and address misinformation.
FAQs
Q: What was the focus of Dr. Denis Nash’s research project?
A: The project studied whether brief digital messages could increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adults with mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
Q: Why was the project terminated by the NIH?
A: The NIH stated that the award "no longer effectuates agency priorities" and that it is not a priority to focus on research that aims to understand why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated.
Q: How many CUNY research projects were affected by the NIH’s stop-work orders?
A: 61 CUNY research projects received stop-work orders from the NIH.
Q: What is the potential impact of the funding cuts on CUNY and its researchers?
A: The cuts may lead to layoffs, furloughs, and loss of health insurance for researchers and staff, as well as restrictions on graduate students’ opportunities to complete their degrees.
