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The National Institutes of Health has terminated research grants worth more than $110 million to Harvard University and its affiliated hospitals since late February, according to public Department of Health and Human Services filings reviewed by The Crimson.

At least 23 grants affiliated with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the School of Public Health were canceled over a month-long span between February 28 and April 1.

All of the grants were terminated before the Trump administration announced a $9 billion review of funding to Harvard and affiliated health care centers. At least four grants to Harvard-affiliated scholars — specifically those related to research on Covid-19 — have since been temporarily reinstated as the White House battles court challenges.

The affected projects had more than $43 million in undisbursed funds at the time of cancellation. These grants are only those publicly disclosed on an HHS spreadsheet, which has not been updated since April 4. The total number of terminations may be higher.

An analysis by The Crimson revealed that all of the canceled projects prominently featured themes of gender and sexual identity, Covid-19 and its vaccine, or health disparities. Keywords appearing in the projects’ abstracts include “transgender,” “vaccine,” “race,” “barrier,” “inequity,” “mental health,” “underserved,” and “minority” — all of which have been targeted in the Trump administration’s sweeping erasure of language that conflicts with its agenda.

School of Public Health spokesperson Stephanie Simon wrote that 15 federally funded research grants affiliated with the school — primarily from the NIH, but also from the Department of Homeland Security and USAID — had been terminated since March, although only four were primary holders of the cancelled grants. The other 11, Simon wrote, were “subcontractors.”

No other Harvard-affiliated research institutions whose grants were terminated responded to a request for comment.

“The rationale for nearly all the funding terminations was that the research no longer aligned with agency priorities,” Simon wrote.

NIH officials told gender identity-focused researchers, including at Harvard, via email that they had a grant canceled because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities,” the email read.

At least two Covid-19 researchers at Harvard received a similar email from the NIH reading that the grant funding would end as “the pandemic is over.”

“The end of the pandemic provides cause to terminate Covid-19 related funded grants. These grant funds were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic,” the email read.

University spokesperson Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly declined to comment.

Some of the grants related to the Covid-19 pandemic were reinstated following a federal court’s 10-day temporary restraining order on the HHS’s termination of $11 billion in public health grants across the country on April 3.

One of those reversals affected a grant on immunological signatures of the Covid-19 virus and vaccine held by Dan H. Barouch ’93, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Still, the reinstatement left Barouch with little confidence.

“At this moment, the grant has been reinstated, and by next week, it is not clear what will happen,” Barouch said. “It’s not like a water spout. You can’t just turn them on and off and on and off at will.”

Ariel L. Beccia, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Public Health said the terminated grant entirely funded both her research and her salary and she was turning to private sources for future funding.

“The project is pretty much halted, because I now need to shift my attention to grant writing in order to be able to fund my work,” Beccia said. “I am now experiencing — as are so many of my peers whose grants were also terminated — job and income insecurity.”

Brittany M. Charlton, the director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at HSPH, wrote that halted funds had already led to “really tough decisions, like terminating staff.”

Charlton is among six plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts challenging the NIH cuts last week, seeking to have their grants restored and the terminations declared unconstitutional.

Simon wrote that some faculty at the School of Public Health were also appealing the terminations of the grants. Under NIH policy, researchers have 30 days to appeal grant terminations.

“In other cases,” she added, “the school has asked the funding agency to release enough funds to facilitate an orderly and safe shutdown of the research project.”

All researchers interviewed by The Crimson described the terminations as abrupt, unexpected, and disruptive to their work.

HSPH professor of social epidemiology Nancy Krieger ’80 called the cuts “unprecedented.”

“It was shocking to get a termination out of the blue with no advance notice of any form whatsoever,” Krieger said. “It showed up at 5:45, on a Friday.”

“It is extraordinarily horrible and disrespectful to say that the data of the people that are served by the community health centers don’t matter, that their lives don’t matter,” Krieger, whose research involves methods to measure and analyze discrimination for population health added. “They’re trying to wipe out an entire raft of health equity research.”

Elizabeth F.M. Janiak ’03, an assistant professor at HSPH whose research focuses on reproductive healthcare insurance coverage, also criticized the NIH’s decision-making process.

“What I can say as a scientist is that this is an egregious affront to peer review,” Janiak wrote in a statement. “My project was awarded funding by qualified experts, and interference in these decisions is a threat to rigorous, transparent science.”

Spokespeople for the NIH and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.

Duane R. Wesemann, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher whose Covid-19 research grant was terminated and temporarily reinstated after a court order, said he hoped the cancellation was just a “misunderstanding.”

“The information that we’re learning from this grant is valuable for the future,” Wesemann said. “Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding, and they’ll consider our appeal.”

—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.