‘Fund research not Tesla trucks’: The HIV casualties of Trump’s war on science

• This year there were empty seats at the prestigious Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, CROI, in San Francisco, where groundbreaking HIV research gets presented.

• Missing from the conference: people working for US government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Agency for International Development, that funded much of the research presented.

• Over the past seven weeks, the Trump administration cut travel budgets and laid off hundreds of staff — including the heads of all of the agencies.

• Although some attended online, and the conference organisers imposed no restrictions on what researchers could and couldn’t say, some US government-funded presentations were retracted; others were redacted, had their titles changed, or the names of government authors removed.

• Most of this centered around groups of people President Trump doesn’t like — or acknowledge — like transgender people.

• And, Science magazine reports health researchers who work in South Africa are on red alert after hearing last week the NIH could terminate all grants that fund work in the country.

Mia Malan, the founder and editor-in-chief of Bhekisisa, explains why there were empty seats at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) and much more.