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Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.I.V. infection.
The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.
When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money.
Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.
The State Department, which now oversees U.S.A.I.D., replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.go, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda that is counter to President Trump’s foreign policy.
The United States is signatory to the Declaration of Helsinki that lays out ethical principles under which medical research must be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.
Ms. Zondi said she was baffled and frightened. She talked with other women who had volunteered for the study. “Some people are afraid because we don’t know exactly what was the reason,” she said. “We don’t really know the real reason of pausing the study.”
In interviews, scientists who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm.
It is difficult to know the total number of trials shut down, or how many people are affected, because the swift demolition of U.S.A.I.D. in recent days has erased the public record.
The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.
“In the communities where her organization works, people have volunteered for more than 25 years to test H.I.V. treatments, prevention products and vaccines, contributing to many of the key breakthroughs in the field and benefiting people worldwide.
“That work relied on a carefully constructed web of trust that has now been destroyed, Dr. Mansoor said. Building that trust took years in South Africa where the apartheid regime conducted medical experiments on Black people during the years of white rule.
“It’s unethical to test anything in humans without taking it to the full completion of studies,” said a scientist who worked on another trial.
“Inoculated people, left unattended, run a greater risk of complications.”
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