CNN's Kate Bolduan repeatedly expressed her astonishment at the breadth and depth of the cuts president Donald Trump made to medical research in his ongoing feud with Harvard University.
The Trump administration canceled hundreds of grants worth millions of dollars for the university's research, which a public health expert from the school told "CNN News Central" had been abruptly halted when that funding was cut off.
"The impact has been devastating," said Dr. Sarah Fortune, chair of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health. "The extent of the administration's actions against Harvard have become clear, and so not only have my funds been frozen and the funds that went to 14 different institutions out of my program, you know, funds all the way across the university have been frozen."
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The cuts ended a clinical trial that halfway through an effort to cure infants born with HIV, the physician said.
"We don't have a playbook for how you stop treatment halfway through," Fortune said. "This is totally unprecedented. You know, when you set up a trial like that, you spend years trying to set it up to do it ethically and then trying to stop on a dime is, we don't have a roadmap for that, and the honest truth is that because the federal government has been defaulting on its contractual payments to Harvard, Harvard itself is paying for the completion of those studies such that our ethical obligations to our human subjects are are maintained."
"That's astonishing," Bolduan said. "Even in unprecedented times, doctor, with all this funding lost, what are you doing right now?"
Fortune said the university's researchers were working in "disaster mode" and trying to determine which contractors they owed money after the federal government defaulted on its payments starting in April, and she said a decade of her work was "unraveling" so quickly that she hadn't even been able to grieve the loss.
"I can't imagine, a decade worth of work," Bolduan said. "I mean, this is called this was called a moonshot project, which was what you were working on. That is tough to swallow."
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