Hundreds of Clinical Trials Have Been Cancelled as Project 2025 Guts Health Funding
DOGE is gone, but Project 2025 lives on, even though you might not
There are now some numbers behind the concerns many of us expressed when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced $1.8 billion in funding cuts as part of Project 2025’s more general shakedown of the American government in March 2025. The impact was felt immediately.
For background reference, see my August post on this:
The peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Internal Medicine publication has published real numbers on NIH grant terminations.
The Trump regime gives new meaning to the concept of cancel culture
During the first half of 2025, between March and August 15, 2025, 383 clinical trials were cancelled, cutting off 74,000 participants in the process.1
Researchers from Harvard Medical School studying the impact of the cuts reported in the JAMA article that 36% of these trials had completed their data collection phase, meaning the trials were almost complete.2 But they’re now ghost trials. Nobody is working on the results.
43 trials ended during the trial phase, meaning that participating patients may have lost access to a life-saving experimental medication.
The researchers learned infectious disease trials were the hardest hit, making up 14.4% of the total.
Scientists like Teva D. Brender, MD, of the University of California, and Cary P. Gross, MD, of Yale School of Medicine, call the cutbacks a serious ethical breach for what should be obvious reasons, including the painful fact that for some patients, such trials are last-ditch attempts to survive a terminal illness.
Reacting to the research, the two scientists wrote:
“Participants who have been exposed to an intervention in the context of a trial may be harmed by its premature withdrawal or inadequate follow-up and monitoring for adverse effects,”
Other patients, knowing death is imminent, nevertheless take satisfaction in knowing their efforts might help someone else live down the line. That is now denied to them by Piggy and his Project 2025 piglets.
CDC vaccine denier is named second in command
Today, we learned that JFK Jr. who has no medical background, appointed Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, Louisiana’s surgeon general, second in command at the C.D.C.3
This comes on the heels of the CDC’s recent dangerous website edit that states that, “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
Of course, everyone knows that there are no studies that rule out that vaccines cause random nose bleeds, sudden onset hypothermia (I made that up — I don’t think that’s a thing), or premature ejaculation. In other words, this is not how medical science works. This is also why you don’t put a sketchy lawyer (JFK Jr.) in charge of the nation’s health.
Abraham has called COVID vaccines dangerous and has urged against using Tylenol during pregnancy (toughen up, ladies!), because, you guessed it, autism. Abraham has worked against hepatitis B vaccines, too.4
The CDC’s acting director is Jim O’Neill, a former biotech bro with no medical or scientific training, which means that Abraham, a quack who ordered health officials in Louisiana, one of the unhealthiest states in the nation, to stop promoting vaccines, will be the CDC’s highest-ranking person with a P, H, and D attached to their name.
O’Neill is pals with JD Vance’s puppet master, Peter Thiel. Both Thiel and O’Neill strive to create solutions to make humans live forever, or at least a few hundred years longer than they currently do.
Note: I don’t think they want you to live a few hundred years. Just a few humans who deserve it (i.e., those humans who are incomprehensibly rich).
The cost of the government shutdown
Let’s move on quickly to the government shutdown, the cost of which is always high for medical researchers. One of the problems is that nobody much cares what happens to their research, because they toil for obscure agencies. But some of these obscure agencies keep us alive.
Libertarians will tell you we should cut down government to the bone, and/or privatize most of it. However, researchers only earn profits for companies when something truly remarkable occurs. Most research output is tossed into a big metal waste can as a necessary part of the process. It is, by nature, not something that is designed to be profitable.
When the government shut down, the Trump regime halted research into Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD).5 CWD is as nasty as it sounds, and is similar to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a disease thought to be caused by malformed prions, which are protein molecules most commonly associated with our nervous system through a gene called PRNP.
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is breathtakingly wicked in its assault on the human body. It renders the brain nearly inoperable shortly after infection.
Some of these diseases caused by malformed prions are neurological attacks on the brain, often ripping away our intelligence in a matter of weeks.
The problem is that mutated prions are transmissible from one animal to another. To put it (too) simply, you can get it from a deer if you eat its meat. You can get it from any similar category of animals, called cervids, such as elk, caribou, and moose.
“I don’t eat moose meat!” screams the non-hunter. Ah, this may be true, but many of you enjoy the occasional hamburger. Remember mad cow disease? When 230 people in the U.K. ate contaminated beef in the 1990s, they all died. Mad Cow Disease is a prion disorder.
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which can also result from eating infected beef, is transmissible from human to human. Prion-related diseases are among the scariest we know, partly because researchers have only recently begun to learn details about how they spread.6
This is why the U.S. government has obscure offices with names like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Prion and Public Health Office. Whew. I’m glad I didn’t have to write all that. Thank you, Control V.
The Prion Office (my shortcut) had only four staff members before the shutdown, but that’s typical for these sorts of government research outfits that work in the hustings, away from you and me, away from the general public, and away from the mainstream press (until the Zombie Apocalypse, when they become household names run by guys like Brad Pitt).
During the Project 2025-inspired government shutdown, those four staff members received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices. They’ve reportedly returned to work, but there’s now a gap in knowledge regarding a known outbreak of CWD that has hammered the North American deer population. Staffers had been monitoring animals, but, because wily deer like to run a lot, researchers have lost track of many of their existing targets.
There is, of course, also the threat of another government shutdown in January, and we can probably trust House Speaker Mike Johnson to see that through to fruition, since he doesn’t pass legislation unless someone has thrust his head into a toilet.
So if a deer walks up to your backdoor window and offers you a bowl of soup, don’t accept it.
These kinds of researchers are easy targets for the Trump regime. For now, our esteemed researchers are back in business. We’ll see how things hold up as the regime tries to continue enforcing Project 2025.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
Brender, Teva D, and Cary P Gross. 2025. “Consequences of Grant Termination in Clinical Trials.” JAMA Internal Medicine, November. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.6093.
“Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.” 2025. CIDRAP. November 21, 2025. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/public-health/nih-grant-terminations-disrupt-hundreds-clinical-trials-affecting-more-74000.
Apoorva Mandavilli. 2025. “C.D.C. Quietly Appoints Doctor Critical of Vaccines as Second in Command.” The New York Times, November 25, 2025.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/health/cdc-ralph-lee-abraham-vaccines.html?unlocked_article_code=1.308.kiPe.5Z3lM02Dkc8v&smid=url-share 🎁
Anthes, Emily. 2025. “What to Know about Jim O’Neill, the New Acting C.D.C. Director.” The New York Times, August 29, 2025.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/health/james-oneill-cdc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.308.j-_D.vY7w9QD9X3MD&smid=url-share 🎁
“Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.” 2025. CIDRAP. November 21, 2025. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chronic-wasting-disease/while-no-one-was-watching-tenuous-status-cdc-prion-unit-risk-cwd-people.
This is a good reason to eliminate beef from your diet, anyway.
What could go wrong?
I'd like to be first in line to thrust Mike Johnsons head into a toilet.
And now with the loosening of restrictions of chemicals in our food...we dont even have a chance. Good piece. Scary stuff.
I hate it here.