“It feels terrible”: How one CU researcher lost her NIH grant and the impacts that will have

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 life-saving 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.”

“A misunderstanding”

Jennifer Reich, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studies vaccine hesitancy, said the opposition to the field of study is based on a misconception.

“I think the Trump administration has assumed that research on hesitancy is meant to persuade people, and I think that’s a misunderstanding,” Reich said.

Instead, research into vaccine hesitancy is meant to better understand what information people want to know about vaccines and how they want to receive that information. Reich said only a small percentage of people reject all vaccines as a matter of principle. So the goal of studying vaccine hesitancy is to help people make informed decisions that are right for them.

Community-centered approaches, like what Collier was working on, are critical because people in different communities may have different concerns. For instance, Collier said a sizable number of Alaska Natives who responded to a survey that she helped conduct said they were skeptical of government vaccination efforts because of the ugly history of medical experimentation on Indigenous people.

The information gained by research into vaccine hesitancy can also be useful to people regardless of their vaccination decisions. Reich wrote a book based on interviews with parents about why they rejected vaccines for their kids. That book has been used by medical professionals to better understand how to talk to parents about the benefits and risks of vaccines, but Reich said she also recently heard that it is for sale on the website of an anti-vaccine organization in Australia.

“What the body of vaccine hesitancy research has been effective at showing is how complex people’s thinking can be,” Reich said.

She said canceling research grants broadly “is taking away our ability to identify how people can be better served to get the kinds of health outcomes that they themselves want.”

Two grants cancelled

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 subaward to Columbia’s. Don Elliman, the campus’s chancellor, said the campus 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.”