The fallout from Trump’s attack on Harvard is rippling through clinics, labs, and research centers across the country

Despite being nearly 2,000 miles apart, the scientists made a series of breakthrough discoveries, ultimately identifying the receptors on the surface of cells that allow the mosquito-borne virus to infect its host. Their discoveries, published in elite scientific journals, marked a turning point in efforts to develop a vaccine for a virus that kills nearly a third of its victims and leaves others with lasting neurological damage.

Now, those years of potentially life-saving progress are in peril. Since April, the Trump administration has slashed billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard University, including a federal grant that funded this partnership.

“It was a fantastic collaboration, but now our momentum has been halted in its tracks,” said Jonathan Abraham, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School who helped spearhead the partnership.

The abrupt turnabout underscores the enormous ripple effects of the Trump administration’s decision to freeze virtually all federal funding to Harvard. The White House claims its actions are aimed at rooting out what it says is a longstanding culture of antisemitism, racial discrimination, and left-wing political bias. Yet researchers and institutions far beyond Harvard’s gates are also being punished, simply for collaborating with the school.

Those swept up in the mass purge of federal grants to Harvard include young dentists serving poor and underserved communities in rural New Hampshire, scientists in Michigan studying the quality of care for newborns with heart defects, and community clinics in Western Massachusetts that are using new digital tools to improve cancer screenings.

The far-reaching impact stems from the way federally funded research studies are structured. Scientists at Harvard and other universities often partner with up to a dozen outside institutions — including other universities, hospitals, clinics, and laboratories — when they embark on large, multiyear research projects. Harvard then channels the federal grant money it receives to these outside entities through so-called “subawards.”

Institutions that partner with Harvard have been bracing for cuts since mid-April when the Trump administration abruptly froze $2.2 billion in research grants. The harsh reality finally hit on May 15, when the National Institutes of Health and multiple other federal agencies sent hundreds of termination notices to Harvard researchers — a day that many at the elite university have now dubbed “bloody Thursday.”

The fallout has been staggering. Since early June, Harvard has notified institutions that money would no longer be available for some 570 subawards spread across 32 states, including some for projects that provided life-saving medical interventions and research into vaccines. All told, institutions that have partnered with Harvard and its medical school have lost $225 million in federal grant funding, according to the university’s estimates.

At the same time, reports of a possible deal with the Trump administration potentially ending the monthslong feud has given Harvard’s research partners a glimmer of hope. Some scientists say they are trying to keep projects afloat with money stitched together from their own institutions and private donors, in the hopes that a deal will ultimately restore their funding.

“As a country, do we really want to impede progress into some of the most devastating viral diseases we know?” asked Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity and a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “What is this accomplishing except putting people’s lives at risk?”

At Harvard, scientists have faced the unenviable task of personally communicating the grim news of canceled grants to their far-flung partners.

For Marc Weisskopf, professor of environmental epidemiology and physiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, that has meant messaging some 5,000 people across the country.

They were participants in a landmark, federally-funded study exploring how early exposure to lead and other toxic metals affected people as they age and put them at risk of cognitive decline. To accomplish this, they relied on a vast, Cold War-era depository of baby teeth collected during a 1960s study of childhood exposure to radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests.

Weisskopf and his team sorted through 100,000 small envelopes of baby teeth, each with little index cards with the child’s name and date of birth, kept at a depository in New Jersey. Then, they had to track down their whereabouts and send out thousands of questionnaires about their health.

The project, known as the St. Louis Baby Tooth - Later Life Health Study, had begun to explore ways that people preserve their cognitive health later in life. Yet, even a temporary interruption in the survey puts the entire project at risk, Weisskopf said. Many of the participants will lose interest or move on, and finding them again would be a logistical nightmare, he said. “You can’t go totally silent on a project of this scope for very long,” Weisskopf said.

Desperate to keep the project afloat, Weisskopf said he may take the unusual step of dipping into his own savings to send out the next survey. But that would only be a stopgap measure: Weisskopf doesn’t have the money to personally pay a team of researchers to collect and analyze the data.

“It would be an incredible waste of time and effort if this study goes dark,” he said.

Many of those affected by the Trump administration’s campaign against Harvard are far removed from the halls of academia.

In New Hampshire, clinics in remote towns have partnered with the Harvard School of Dental Medicine to fund a rural dental residency program in a state that lacked a dental school and a pipeline of young dentists; and where people living in rural areas often have to travel an hour or more for dental care.

Young graduates from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine rotated through clinics in towns such as Bristol, Lebanon, and Somersworth and made regular trips to nursing homes, homeless shelters, and addiction recovery centers where people often have severe orthodontic problems. In the past two years, the rural residency program served nearly 2,500 patients across the state who might otherwise have gone untreated, according to officials involved with the program.

“It’s been a beautiful partnership that benefited the whole state,” said Stephanie Pagliuca, senior director of workforce development and recruitment for Bi-State Primary Care Association in Bow, N.H., which represents community health centers in New Hampshire and Vermont and received a subcontract from Harvard to manage the clinical sites.

Dr. Sara Alibakhshi was among the residency program’s early recruits.

Since she was a toddler, Alibakhshi dreamed of working alongside her father, also a dentist, at his clinic in suburban Montgomery County, Md. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, she postponed that dream to work at a community clinic in Bristol, a lakeside town of 3,300, where many of the patients were uninsured and had not seen a dentist in years.

“People are coming in with abscesses on their faces ... and infections that are compromising their brains or their hearts,” she said. “The need is breathtaking.”

In April, a unit within the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly stopped reimbursing Harvard for the costs of the program, including pay for the residents. Since then, funding has not been restored, threatening the program’s ability to recruit and train new residents.

Bewildered and angry, Alibakhshi said she fired off more than three dozen emails to elected officials, including to the White House and Elon Musk, former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, to urge them to restore the funding.

So far, she has only received automated replies from the White House.

Mike Damiano of the Globe staff contributed reporting.

Chris Serres can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @ChrisSerres.