Days after the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), one of the largest and longest-running women’s health studies in the world, announced that the Department of Health and Human Services was terminating some of the initiative’s funding, the agency has reversed course.
“These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health. While NIH initially exceeded its internal targets for contract reductions, we are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts,” an HHS spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in an email. “NIH remains deeply committed to advancing public health through rigorous gold standard research and we are taking immediate steps to ensure the continuity of these studies.”
On the social media platform X, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that reports of cuts to the WHI were “fake news.”
“We are not terminating this study,” Kennedy wrote. “We all recognize that this project is mission-critical for women’s health.”
However, the WHI has not yet received official confirmation that the funding will be restored, Garnet Anderson, Ph.D., a biostatistician and the principal investigator of the WHI’s Clinical Coordinating Center at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, told Fierce Biotech in an email.
“We certainly hope this is true,” Anderson said. “These cohorts provide incredible opportunities to learn how a wide range of factors affect our health. And the participants in these studies deserve to have their contributions acknowledged and valued.”
The WHI announced on April 21 that HHS had told them the agency was ending contracts to the WHI’s regional centers by the end of September. WHI regional centers are spread across the country, with the initiative’s coordinating center located at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
The original WHI study began in 1991 with funding from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The study enrolled 161,808 women between the ages of 50 and 79, researching strategies to prevent osteoporosis, heart disease and various cancers.
After the initial study concluded in 2005, the project has continued through multiple extension studies that follow original study participants and additional volunteers. WHI scientists have broadened their focus to many other age-related health issues that affect women, including frailty, vision loss, dementia, mental health and social isolation, according to the April 21 announcement.
Anderson said she hopes that the WHI’s continued funding doesn’t “come at the expense of other, equally deserving studies.”
“To get the best return on our investment, we need to prioritize and support research on the most important issues in public health and the most promising scientific opportunities,” Anderson said. “It isn't clear how this can happen when decisions are made outside of a transparent vetting process.”