Ari Daniel

Penny and her colleagues had gotten a $45 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to create a state-of-the-art vaccine to prevent HIV.

The goal was to get teams across the continent to collaborate on developing something that would work in different African communities.

Exactly.

And within a country and even between individuals.

So at this meeting in Zanzibar, there was a real feeling of momentum.

Nonu Mkize is a colleague of Penny's and a senior medical scientist.

But just as that meeting was about to wrap up, Penny says the mood darkened.

Yep.

As you may recall, Nate, President Trump, who'd just been inaugurated at that point, had signed an executive order freezing most foreign aid.

Yeah.

But Penny and her colleagues soon found out.

After returning to Johannesburg, she says the official stop work orders arrived from Washington just weeks before the trial was to begin.

Everything came to a sudden halt.

All the money was gone.

And remember Linda Gale Becker from the top of the episode?

That's the one.

She says when the funding collapsed, she cycled through the stages of grief.

But soon, this team of researchers decided that they needed to find a different way forward.

A period of frantic grant writing began, and finally they got funding from the South African Medical Research Council and the Gates Foundation.

No, they couldn't raise that much, but they did get about $2.2 million.