STAT+: With Trump review, a Harvard infectious disease researcher stands to lose it all
"This looks bad"’ A Harvard infectious disease researcher is targeted in President Trump’s review
Tuberculosis infects more than a quarter of the world’s population, kills more than 1 million people per year, and is still a scourge at home. It has never disappeared from the United States, and there was even a recent cluster of cases in Boston, according to Sarah Fortune, a Harvard scientist leading one of the world’s preeminent tuberculosis research programs.
Her lab, along with its collaborators at 11 other sites across the country and in Africa, has solved some of the crucial mysteries of this disease, and continues making discoveries that could prove life-saving for generations to come.
That enterprise is now at risk, caught up in the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigation at Harvard. Fortune’s $60 million contract with the National Institutes of Health was the number one project threatened in a memo the Trump administration sent to Harvard last week, apparently because it was the largest.
