Elizabeth Cooney, who’s a cardiovascular disease reporter at STAT, is covering heart, stroke, and metabolic conditions. On Monday, the Women’s Health Initiative said the federal contracts funding the study’s 40 regional centers would end with the fiscal year. But then on Thursday, a federal official was like, “Hold up, we’re changing our minds,” based on new NIH budget numbers.
“Honestly, these studies are pretty important for understanding women’s health,” said HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon to Politico, who broke the news. “At first, NIH was trying to cut back on contracts, but now they’re trying to give more money to these research projects.”
Word spread earlier this week that the regional centers were losing funding after the WHI Clinical Coordinating Center at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center spilled the beans to JoAnn Manson at STAT. She’s one of the main investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and she was like, “I’m kind of worried, but also kind of hopeful, I guess,” until NIH confirmed the budget change on Thursday.
