Information from the United States is causing growing concern within the international scientific and medical community. After the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), the freezing of the budgets of the major US public health and research institutions, the suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) development aid programs, and the restrictions imposed on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), created by George W. Bush in 2003, cooperation between researchers and scientific progress are under serious threat. Additionally, censorship is striking fundamental principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion, or crucial topics such as the climate crisis, now expunged from official US texts.
In this context, the scientific community of the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis and Emerging Infectious Diseases (ANRS MIE), an agency of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm), expresses its solidarity with its American counterparts and with all the researchers concerned. It also expresses its deep concern about the likely consequences of this unprecedented situation on global health.
International collaboration is, as Peter Agre (2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) emphasizes, "essential not only for scientific progress, but also for the future of humanity." No country, no matter how powerful, can meet today's global challenges alone. These collaborations have led to considerable results both in the acquisition of new knowledge and in the improvement of public health, in the richest countries as well as in those with low or intermediate resources, particularly in the field of HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases.
Pandemic risks
The United States is a major player in the funding of scientific research – the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a US government institution in charge of biomedical research, had $3.3 billion in 2023 for the sole topic of HIV/AIDS – and is one of France's privileged partners. By joining forces, American researchers and French teams from the ANRS MIE have made major advances, such as demonstrating the effectiveness of antiretroviral prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, anti-tuberculosis treatments, particularly for patients living with HIV, and, recently, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV infection.
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