Trump Savagely Cut Funding That Could Save Babies Lives

We're seeing more fallout from the cuts in NIH funding, specifically a heart pump for babies. The scientists and the researchers have been working on this pump for decades, called PediaFlow, and it is so close to going to clinical trials. But this administration, through all their funding cuts just announced, we're pulling the funding at the finish line from this infant heart pump.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So we're seeing more fallout from the cuts in NIH funding, specifically a heart pump for babies.

Yeah. This is a truly disturbing, everything from this administration is disturbing, this is one that is going to kill babies. 40,000 infants a year in the United States, roughly born with some kind of heart defect, a hole in the heart, a missing valve, something that doesn't work right. And that's actually a relatively low number. So the pharmaceutical companies, the device makers say, we're not gonna invest in building a heart pump for babies. There's no money in that. So the federal government for almost 20 to 30 years has said, we will fund it. So the scientists and the researchers for decades have been working on this pump that is so close to going to clinical trials right now. It's called PediaFlow. And basically it's about the size of a AA battery and you implant it into the infant and it essentially works almost as a heart. It keeps the blood flowing. It's a pump. So we could save the lives of 40,000 infants a year. But this administration, through all their funding cuts just announced, by the way, we're pulling the funding at the finish line from this infant heart pump, again, almost done, almost ready to start implementing it and the project's dead. It's crazy that they're even thinking about doing this, let alone they've done it.

When we look more broadly at the NIH, 354 out of 356 of the most recently approved therapies have all had some sort of NIH funding. Across all devices and treatments NIH is all over the country and they've laid off more than a thousand scientists and workers so far. And importantly, between 1991 and 2022, we've seen the cancer survivability go up 34% in this country and that's largely in part because of things that have been funded by NIH. We also see that for every dollar that is spent on an NIH project a local community receives more than $2 in return. So this is bad business. This is bad politics. This is bad for the rest of us. This funding is vital to our survival, to our innovation, and to medical progress because when you leave this space, we know what pharmacy companies will do. We've seen plenty of lawsuits about what they will do, charging what they charge for a medication hasn't changed in a hundred years, in insulin, for instance. We cannot evacuate this space and cutting $1.8 billion is not the right move at this time.

Right. And Donald Trump came out with his executive order this week saying, I'm lowering prescription drug prices, which would be great if you could, you can't do it via executive order. But if you really wanted to do it, what you would say is, listen, we're not cutting any funding for the National Institutes of Health. But if you are using a drug, selling a drug, selling a device that was made with taxpayer dollars, you can't charge us 10% above cost, something like that. You control the federal funding of things. You don't control what the pharmaceutical companies set unless you use that federal funding as a tool and a weapon. That is how he could have done this. Instead, he wrote it in a way that's gonna immediately be overturned by the courts probably within the next two weeks, I imagine, it's gonna be fast.

But instead we are cutting the funding for all of these life saving projects, not just this pump. We have seen them cut back on infectious disease research. We were one of the only areas that was funding research on Ebola, that's gone. As you mentioned, all these scientists and researchers laid off to the point where France is now trying to become the new brain epicenter of the world.