The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has stopped funding for a next-generation COVID-19 vaccine that received an award during the Biden administration, the company making the vaccine said on April 16.
Georgia-based Geovax said that the stop-work order from HHS went into effect on April 11 and affected an award of some $24.3 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), an HHS component that was placed in charge of the Biden administration’s Project NextGen.
“We had no prior indication that the notice was forthcoming. We were surprised by the notice as both ourselves and our external contractors and consultants were making good progress and had a seemingly productive working relationship with the technical team at BARDA,” David Dodd, Geovax’s president and CEO, said at a conference on Wednesday.
The stop work order came about five months before the phase 2b portion of the clinical trial was scheduled to start enrolling participants, he said.
An official with HHS told The Epoch Times in an email, “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago when there are other emerging public health threats that we can better prioritize resources for.”
