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Juana Summers (3:25)

It's Consider this from npr. Scientists say research into a vaccine for HIV is further along than it's ever been. But Trump administration cuts to scientific research have set that effort back, including a promising trial for an HIV vaccine in Africa, which was shut down altogether. NPR's Ari Daniel has the story of how researchers there refuse to give up.

Ari Daniel (3:51)

Penny Moore leads me into a room at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg. It's a raid with half a dozen large green and white freezers.

Penny Moore (4:04)

These are the freezers that contain samples that are the basis of everything we do in the lab.

Ari Daniel (4:09)

Moore is a virologist at the University of Witwatersrand. She cracks open the lid of one of the freezers and pulls out a tower of frosty tubes.

Penny Moore (4:19)

It's heavy and hard for me to lift. So this is blood and cells.

Ari Daniel (4:25)

All samples that have been donated over and over again for two decades by the same group of 117 South African women.

Penny Moore (4:33)

They live in the communities that are most ravaged by hiv, and they donate their samples because they hope to see an end to an epidemic that is really, really real for them.

Ari Daniel (4:44)

These samples have helped Moore and her team piece together a detailed portrait of the virus over the years and how it infects, how it hides and how much it changes across different parts of the world and even within a single individual.

Penny Moore (4:59)

The amount we have learned from these freezes, it's just astonishing.

Ari Daniel (5:02)

And yet Moore spent much of last year worrying that it might all amount to nothing. Because just when she and her colleagues were on the brink of something audacious, an innovative HIV vaccine trial across Africa, the bottom dropped out. To explain, let me rewind to early last year to a meeting in Zanzibar.

Penny Moore (5:23)

The famous Zanzibar trip.

Ari Daniel (5:25)

Zanzibar is a tropical archipelago off the east coast of Africa. Penny Moore says it was crazy hot.

Penny Moore (5:32)

One of those places where you just consider standing up and you break out in a sweat.

Ari Daniel (5:36)

The gathering took place in a hotel perched on the edge of a brilliant blue ocean. There were researchers and clinicians from across Africa, and then there were the international scientific advisors.

Penny Moore (5:48)

They grilled us to within an inch of our lives to make sure that we were doing the very best cutting edge science we could do with the amount of money we had.

Ari Daniel (5:56)

That amount was $45 million awarded by the United States Agency for International Development to create a state of the art vaccine to prevent hiv. The grant was intended to get teams across the continent to collaborate on developing a vaccine that would work in different African communities.

Penny Moore (6:15)

The virus that they have in Kenya is not the same as the virus that we have in Botswana. It's not the same as the virus that they have in Senegal. And so understanding how these vaccines will work for the local virus is what makes it relevant.

Ari Daniel (6:29)

At the meeting in Zanzibar, there was a real feeling of momentum.

Penny Moore (6:33)

The excitement was through the roof.

Ari Daniel (6:34)

This is Penny Moore's colleague, Nono Mkize.

Penny Moore (6:37)

We're at the beginning of something big.

Ari Daniel (6:39)

But just as the meeting was about to wrap up, Penny Moore says the.

Penny Moore (6:43)

Mood darkened from the number of Americans, particularly checking their phones all of a sudden and talking to one another in little huddles.

Ari Daniel (6:52)

Something was wrong. Newly inaugurated President Trump had just signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid. Suddenly, it seemed everything was up in the air.

Penny Moore (7:03)

I remember at the end of the meeting, USAID colleagues saying to me, I'm not sure if I'll see you again. I completely underestimated how much it would gut the program.

Ari Daniel (7:13)

But Moore and her colleagues would soon find out. After returning to Johannesburg, she says the official stop work orders arrived from Washington just weeks before the trials were to begin. Everything came to a sudden halt. All the money was gone.

Linda Gale Becker (7:29)

In many ways, we've kind of had our legs cut off even as we're beginning to run the sprint.

Ari Daniel (7:34)

Infectious disease specialist Linda Gale Becker is based at the University of Cape Town. When the funding collapsed, she says she cycled through the stages of grief.

Linda Gale Becker (7:44)

There's disbelief in the first instance. Then there is emotion that basically is angry because we'd worked damn hard, we'd won this grant, and we were doing what we had said we would do.

Ari Daniel (7:56)

But gradually, Becker and her colleagues started.

Linda Gale Becker (7:59)

Saying this matters too much to not finish the work.

Ari Daniel (8:03)

A period of frantic grant writing began.

Linda Gale Becker (8:06)

We brought out the begging bowl to say, this is important. Can you help us in some way?

Ari Daniel (8:12)

Finally, they got funding from the South African Medical Research Council and the Gates Foundation. But it was a fraction of the original USAID grant and only focused inside South Africa, meaning they had to sacrifice studying how the vaccine might work against different versions of the virus within different African populations.

Penny Moore (8:33)

Penny More It's a bare bones version. We will still get the answer, but it's going to cost us time, years, which is not trivial because people are getting infected with this virus constantly.

Ari Daniel (8:45)

Despite having to scale back, Moore says HIV vaccine research is farther along than it's ever been. She takes me back into that freezer room in her lab, which contains an embarrassment of scientific riches, thanks in no small part to those 117 women and the samples they've donated over the years.

Penny Moore (9:07)

These samples have taught us everything we know about HIV.

Ari Daniel (9:12)

And have revealed a veritable pot of scientific gold. A unique kind of antibody that showed up in the blood of a few of these women, something called a broadly neutralizing antibody.

Penny Moore (9:24)

A broadly neutralizing antibody could stop my virus and could stop your virus and could stop an HIV virus from any other person.

Ari Daniel (9:31)

But it's difficult to coax the human immune system to produce these antibodies. This vaccine trial is trying to figure out how to do that more easily. At last, after nearly a year of delays, the pared down trial is getting underway. On the outskirts of Cape Town, a large brick building rises above Felipe Village, an impoverished township where HIV is rampant. A few levels up, I spot Amelia Mfiki, the community liaison officer for the vaccine trials.

Penny Moore (10:03)

This is a great opportunity for South Africa to prove that we can do things in South Africa, for South Africa with South African financing.

Ari Daniel (10:12)

Mfiki makes her way to a room where 20 or so young women from the community are gathered to hear about participating in the trial HIV vaccine. 25 year old Nandeepa Mongo listens attentively. She says her community struggles with rape, sex, traded for favors, unplanned pregnancies.

Penny Moore (10:35)

Most of us are scared of getting.

Ari Daniel (10:36)

Hiv, which is why she'd happily be involved in the research.

Penny Moore (10:42)

I'm over the moon, man. I'm over the moon.

Ari Daniel (10:44)

Yes, because she's proud to be making a difference.

Penny Moore (10:48)

Yes, a big one. A big difference.

Ari Daniel (10:51)

So I ask her, if this team of researchers are able to find a vaccine, what would a world without HIV be like?

Penny Moore (10:58)

Living free.

Linda Gale Becker (11:00)

Yeah.

Ari Daniel (11:01)

The first shots of the new vaccine trial started going into participants arms this week. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel. Cape Town, South Africa.

Juana Summers (11:11)

Ari's reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. The Gates foundation is a financial supporter of npr. This episode was produced by Mallory Yu and Kyra Wakim. It was edited by Rebecca Davis and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Annigan. It's consider this from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

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