Funding cuts hit CU researchers
Plus: Colorado is trying to Kennedy-proof vaccine rules
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Hooboy, Colorado, what a week it’s been. It’s only Wednesday you say? Impossible!, says I, a guy whose young kid is out of school for spring break.
Speaking of which, spring break means that a lot of college students will be traveling. But the University of Maryland’s Derik Queen took that far too literally over the weekend on the game-winning bucket to knock our very own Colorado State Rams out of the NCAA Tournament for men’s basketball. Look for yourself here.
THAT’S THREE STEPS! WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR CAM!
Alas, with no justice forthcoming, we in Colorado must now focus all of our rooting energy in cheering on Grandview grad Lauren Betts as she leads UCLA deeper into the women’s tournament.
But the Bruins don’t play again until Friday. So that means there’s just enough time to dive into the news first. Here we go!
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
RESEARCH FUNDING
The impact of one CU researcher’s canceled NIH grant: “It feels terrible”
For Annie Collier, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, this was going to be a big year.
Since 2022, she had been working with a foundation in Alaska studying vaccine hesitancy in Alaska Native communities and building an informational campaign that might be able to persuade more people to get vaccinated against diseases like flu, RSV and COVID. The campaign, which involved providing education to interested community members so they could serve as a kind of vaccine ambassador in their areas, was to finally launch this year.
The work fit with Collier’s two decades of experience in public health initiatives for Indigenous communities, mostly in the Pacific Rim. And, beginning soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work also had urgency: Studies showed American Indian and Alaska Native communities were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, in part because of overall lower vaccination rates.
But, earlier this month, an email arrived that brought everything to a halt. The federal National Institutes of Health, which had been funding the project with several hundred thousand dollars a year, was canceling the grant.
The study, according to the email, “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focus on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the email stated.
Identical emails have gone out to other researchers studying vaccine hesitancy across the country. They arrived as prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the nation’s top health job, and the administration of President Donald Trump also threatened research funding more broadly.
Collier was devastated.
“It feels terrible,” she said. “I think this is lifesaving work, and it’s very confusing to have a message that vaccination is no longer valued.”
“We’ve got a very strong, community-engaged project that would benefit people, and now it’s come to an end.”
Collier’s grant is one of two, so far, that have been canceled at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, where the School of Public Health is based.
The other, a project exploring the connection between diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, is tied to frozen funding for Columbia University — CU’s grant is a sub-award to Columbia’s. Don Elliman, the campus’s chancellor, said CU-Anschutz is paying out-of-pocket for the time being to maintain its research infrastructure for that project.
“It’s going to cost us $100,000 roughly a month to keep that infrastructure going in the hope that Columbia gets their funding back,” Elliman said last week while hosting U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper at the campus.
But, for Collier, funding to continue her work is not as readily available. Travis Leiker, the School of Public Health’s assistant dean of external relations, said the school is “pursuing all funding opportunities to backfill the important research we’ve been conducting.”
That leaves Collier waiting and hoping — but also worrying.
The language she has used for years to describe the importance of her work — words like “diversity” and “disproportionately impacted communities” — are now targets for cuts. She has one other health project in Indigenous communities that is supported by federal funding, and she wonders whether that project will soon be canceled, too.
“Everybody who works in areas of diversity is concerned,” she said, “including me.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
CONGRESS
Takeaways from Hick’s visit to CU-Anschutz
I tagged along last week as U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper visited the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and came away with a story about researchers and patients worried that years of scientific momentum is on the verge of being lost.
But the event was also notable for other reasons. Here are a couple more takeaways.
No one’s actually sure what all the impacts are.
During a brief media availability, I asked Hickenlooper if he felt he has a good handle on what funding cuts have already happened. He responded that the cuts are more of a future-tense concern than a present-tense one.
“We don’t know what those cuts are yet,” he said. “It’s not who’s been fired so far. It’s what they’re waiting to hear. … This is only a few weeks old. This whole kerfuffle is maybe a month old.”
As Collier’s experience above shows, it’s not entirely true that no cuts have happened yet. Also, as Hickenlooper acknowledged, some CU researchers have paused hiring graduate students and research assistants out of concern that the funding won’t be around to sustain them. That also has a present-tense impact on the work that can be accomplished.
At another point during the visit, CU-Anschutz Chancellor Don Elliman appeared to say there had been layoffs on campus related to funding cuts, but a campus spokesperson later said there had been no layoffs.
Insight into Hickenlooper’s approach to resistance.
It was striking that Hickenlooper didn’t use the event to call for an aggressive political strategy to fight back against the cuts, instead opting to talk more in terms of patient persuasion — “Telling someone why they’re wrong and why you think you’re right never works,” he said.
“Part of my job is to go out there and take some of the individual stories we’ve heard here, and hopefully collect more stories, because stories are what really matters,” he said. “… Nothing affects voters and nothing affects legislators more than stories that are compelling.”
Hickenlooper said he thinks there are 25 to 30 Republican senators who believe in the power of science and won’t go along with widespread funding cuts. He also said he agrees with efforts to find waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs and didn’t exactly come down hard on the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“They’re trying to go fast, and I respect that,” he said. “I understand the value of speed when you’re trying to change things.”
He later added, “DOGE is just going so fast that they’re making cuts so quickly that they’re affecting the morale of the different agencies.”
“Most Americans want government to be smaller, and I’m one of them,” Hickenlooper said. “But I think there’s a better way to do it.”
Hickenlooper said it may take time, though, for the pushback effort to manifest.
“Part of what’s happening is the administration is just putting in their management teams for a lot of these large agencies,” he said. “That’s where some of the responsibility lies. Now that we have that leadership and now as you get cabinet members in place — and you need to get the deputy secretaries and the assistant secretaries — as they all get approved, I think that’s where we’ll sit down.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
DISEASE
Why the state wants to axe a committee of disease experts
Colorado appears poised to kill a committee of health and emergency-response experts who are statutorily charged with advising the governor during outbreaks of infectious diseases.
This committee is known as the Governor’s Expert Emergency Epidemic Response Committee, or GEEERC. (The acronym’s pronunciation rhymes with “perk.”) During the early days of the COVID pandemic, it often advocated in favor of containment measures like mask orders or restaurant shutdowns.
But now, Democrats at the state legislature and officials at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are backing a bill that would repeal the committee and transfer its power to the state Board of Health. The bill has cleared both chambers and is awaiting Gov. Jared Polis’ signature. The only people who have spoken out against the idea are folks who adamantly oppose some of the things the committee recommended during the pandemic.
Confused? Welcome to the weirdest health debate of the legislative session.
House Bill 1027, which contains the provision axing the GEEERC, comes out of an after-action review CDPHE did for the COVID pandemic. In addition to the section on the GEEERC, the bill also extends the amount of time families have to come into compliance with school immunization requirements and it tweaks testing standards for hepatitis C. In other words, it’s a bit of a catchall, hence the broad bill title: Update Disease Control Statutes.
In testifying in support of the bill, Dr. Daniel Pastula, a neurologist and epidemiologist who served on the GEEERC and also serves on the Board of Health, said the GEEERC “in theory is a great idea.” But he said during COVID it didn’t work the way it was intended.
“The GEEERC unfortunately wasn’t nimble enough to respond to how quickly things were happening, especially during that first year,” Pastula said.
Indeed, the GEEERC often found itself sidelined by Polis’ rapid-fire and sometimes more libertarian-minded decision-making as the pandemic wore on, to the obvious frustration of some committee members. The committee now appears moribund — it hasn’t met in more than a year.
CDPHE officials say moving some of the GEEERC’s responsibilities to the Board of Health will improve transparency because the board is better able to receive public comment. But the GEEERC’s membership is far more diverse than the board’s, intending to bring together a broader array of perspectives. In addition to doctors and health care leaders, the GEEERC also includes experts in emergency response, public safety, local government, veterinary medicine and pharmacy science.
To account for that gap, the bill envisions ad-hoc convenings of “subject-matter experts” as needed to address things like crisis standards of care — rules for who a hospital treats when it can’t treat everybody.
“Since the nature of emergencies vary, the governor benefits from having the flexibility to appoint advisors based on the situation,” a CDPHE spokesperson wrote in an email to The Sun.
This is where opponents of the bill aimed their criticism.
During the bill’s committee hearings, as well as during floor debates, opponents said eliminating the GEEERC amounts to a power grab by the CDPHE and the governor’s office.
“Who are the subject-matter experts and why are we not defining it?” Rep. Brandi Bradley, R-Littleton, asked during the floor debate in the House on Feb. 6. “Why are we not bringing diverse viewpoints into this to help the decision-making that is affecting all citizens in Colorado? I believe that the executive branch needs checks and balances.”
The GEEERC draws its membership from either people serving in specific roles — CDPHE’s chief medical officer, for instance, or the president of the Colorado Hospital Association — or from people appointed by the governor based on their expertise — a specialist in post-traumatic stress management, for instance, or a midwife with experience in out-of-hospital births. The Board of Health’s members are all appointed by the governor, with a requirement to draw at least one member from each of Colorado’s eight Congressional districts.
Bradley said she would like to see guaranteed representation for business owners and rural Colorado communities on any epidemic advisory committees. She also suggested including naturopathic practitioners who could suggest alternative disease treatments.
The bill cleared the legislature on a party-line basis except for the vote of Sen. Larry Liston, a Republican from Colorado Springs, who voted yes, according to legislative records.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
VACCINATION
The Colorado legislature is trying to Kennedy-proof vaccine rules
One more thing on House Bill 1027: An amendment added to it seeks to steer Colorado’s school immunization requirements away from a prominent federal committee, in response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Colorado’s Board of Health sets the rules for which vaccines schoolkids need to receive or have a valid exemption for. The current law says the board should do that “based on recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the federal Department of Health and Human Services.”
The committee, known as ACIP, plays a major role in reviewing vaccine safety and efficacy data and recommending their use. Historically, the committee has been staffed by prominent pro-vaccine doctors, including a few from Colorado.
But the committee’s future is less certain with Kennedy at the helm of HHS, and the committee’s most recently scheduled meeting was postponed for two months. This has led to concerns that Kennedy may seek to tilt the committee in an anti-vaccine direction and may revoke prior ACIP recommendations.
Against that backdrop — though he didn’t mention Kennedy specifically — state Sen. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, proposed an amendment to House Bill 1027 that would lessen the state Board of Health’s reliance on ACIP for vaccine rules. (In his day job, Mullica works as an emergency room nurse.)
If Polis signs the amended bill, the law would now state that the Board of Health should adopt immunization rules “taking into consideration” ACIP recommendations, as well as recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Physicians.
Mullica, in introducing the amendment during a Senate committee hearing earlier this month, said the goal is to “stabilize” the vaccine recommendations and “make sure that we’re trying to take the politics out of what those recommendations are for the immunization schedule.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues to grow and ripple outward. Texas is now reporting 309 confirmed infections tied to the outbreak, while neighboring New Mexico is up to 42 infections, and Kansas and Oklahoma have also recently reported new cases. (Still no cases have been reported in Colorado.)
The numbers in Texas have grown large enough for the state to provide a breakdown of its infections. Most infections — 232 out of those 309, or 75% — are in kids ages 17 and younger. And, as the chart above shows, the vast, vast majority are in people who are unvaccinated against the disease.
Out of those 309 infections in Texas, only two were in people who had been vaccinated. Both of those people had received two shots of measles vaccine, according to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The state has reported no infections so far in people who received only one dose of vaccine.
These numbers update every Friday, so we’ll be watching this week to see what changes.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
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We’ll see you back here next week.
— John & Parker
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