Where is the research money for coronavirus?
With President Trump’s signature on the enormous $2.2 trillion stimulus package to provide relief to about anyone who is losing business or income due to COVID-19, one thing is notably absent from the discussion: research funding.
Despite the strong groundswell of researchers and scientists coming together to innovate and provide lasting solutions to this crisis, I am not aware of a laboratory that has actually received federal funding for COVID-19 research. We are 11 weeks into this aggressive, rapidly spreading pandemic, but we have not received funds to study transmission dynamics or the biology of the virus to develop badly needed vaccines, therapeutics or rapid diagnostics.
Academic research is fueled by the grant system, a notoriously slow and bureaucratic way of paying for salaries, reagents and supplies, administered through the National Institutes of Health and other government institutions. While with a lot of fanfare, “rapid emergency funding for COVID-19” was announced and legislation has already passed allocating funding to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and others, we are left to discover somewhere in the fine print that we don’t qualify, or the amount funded is very small, or the “rapid turnaround” for review alone can take up to 60 days, or extensive preliminary data is needed on the project, data that no one could generate because this virus wasn’t known three months ago.
Webinars about funding opportunities crash because too many dial in. NIH program officers are inundated with requests and can’t respond. Funding for COVID-19 diagnostic testing is supposed to be provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet that money is nowhere to be seen, leaving us to order supplies for patient testing yet again with philanthropic donations and recruit volunteers to collect samples and run machines.
The National Science Foundation is proud to have so far released 10 small COVID-19 grants for the entire nation, $2 million worth in total. Let’s compare this to the $58 billion planned to be allocated to airlines alone in the current stimulus package. One can’t help but wonder, who will develop an effective drug or a working vaccine for a disease that is threatening the globe? Airlines? Hotels? Cruise ship companies?
At the University of California, we are working on setting up diagnostic testing, study outbreak dynamics, and are pursuing several novel therapeutic programs to combat COVID-19 infection. With the best and brightest from other fields coming into the fold, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to develop antivirals and vaccines that might end coronavirus pandemics once and for all. However, it won’t happen without funding and support.
We urgently need centralized, unbureaucratic seed funding distributed directly through universities that allow immediate action on COVID-19 projects so that no time is wasted writing proposals and waiting for funding agency decisions in this rapidly spreading outbreak. Several months later, we could assess which projects do well and which should be discontinued.
This model would allow us to become more innovative, enable us to start a full-blown attack on COVID-19 without delay, with a minimum amount of waste and the possibility of a large return on investment. All this could happen on pennies on the dollar relative to the stimulus proposed for airlines and hotels. Instead of just putting out fires everywhere, we need to fix the root cause of the problem and catch the arsonist.