It transformed the treatment of Covid-19 patients around the world, saving thousands of lives by finding cheap, effective drugs during the pandemic and winning the UK widespread praise from the international community of scientists.

But now government support for the UK recovery plan is coming to an end. In a few weeks, central financing of the scheme will cease. The plan can only continue with funding from a group of American philanthropists.

The move has frustrated senior scientists, who say it is yet another worrying example of the UK life sciences industry being cheated by the government. “We knew that recovery had huge potential, and we realized it in a very short time during the COVID-19 pandemic. But now that dream is coming true,” said Professor Peter Horby, one of Recovery’s co-founders.

Horby added that it’s not just the value of recovery that’s being overlooked as the pandemic ends. “The UK produces some of the best clinical trials, vaccine development and genomics work in the world, but much of it has been abandoned or lacks investment. However, we urgently need to remain vigilant about the dangers of future epidemics.”

Recovery – the Randomized Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapies – is a drug testing program that involved thousands of doctors and nurses in hospitals across the UK on tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients at the height of the pandemic. The trials were conducted in intensive care units and wards packed with seriously ill patients.

Professor Martin Landray, another co-founder of Recovery, said: “In day-to-day routine clinical medicine, it’s absolutely crucial to be clear about the difference between what you think might work, what actually works and what doesn’t. “Recovery really does that. “

The program succeeded in finding four effective drugs while ultimately showing eight over-hyped drugs to be ineffective. For example, the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine — widely touted by Donald Trump as a treatment for Covid-19 — has proven to be of no help to patients. By comparison, dexamethasone, a cheap drug that treats inflammation and arthritis, was found to reduce deaths by one-third in ICU patients on ventilators. No other country can match these achievements.

“Other countries, including Canada and the United States, have made it clear that they are very envious of what the UK has done in terms of recovery and are prepared to spend significant sums setting up similar schemes – at a time when we appear to have collectively lost interest in the UK’s recovery . program. I think it’s a disgrace,” Landry added.

The UK’s recovery will continue thanks to the US charity Flu Lab, which works to combat future flu epidemics, and under the new deal the program will be expanded to research new treatments for influenza and coronavirus.

The UK government’s decision not to continue supporting the recovery comes against a worrying backdrop, with the UK lagging badly behind other countries in clinical research, in which new medicines are tested on volunteers to ensure they are safe and effective and any side effects are monitored. For example, Swiss company Novartis recently canceled a large trial of a cholesterol drug in the UK.

“We have been falling down the rankings in terms of trials and now we are behind Italy, Poland, France and many other countries. The state of the NHS is part of the problem but remains a concern,” Horby said.

“I welcome the government’s ambition to make the UK a scientific superpower, but if you look at what’s happening today we appear to be heading in the wrong direction.”

This view was supported by Landry, who warned that it was vital that the UK was prepared for the arrival of future epidemics. “You don’t disband the military to prepare for the next war just because it’s peacetime,” he told reporters observer.