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As the world Struggling to contain Rapidly growing Ebola outbreak In Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, a vital network of research centers has been unable to provide assistance on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration reduced its funding last year, in part due to conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus.
Founded in 2020 by National Institutes of Healththe Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network has been conducting research on viruses that emerge from wildlife and are transmitted to humans, including the family of viruses to which Ebola belongs. The network ran 10 sites around the world where these types of disease outbreaks are likely to occur, including in Central and East Africa. (The network was also searching com. hantavirusa disease that saw a rare outbreak recently on a cruise ship.)
The National Institutes of Health provided the CREID Center with approximately $82 million in funding over five years, and its funding was up for renewal in 2025. But last June, the centers decided Received a stop work order stating that their research was deemed “unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding,” and that the agency’s priorities no longer supported the network.
“That’s a very rich reason, right? Because this was really the kind of pandemic preparedness research we needed to do,” says Christian Andersen, an evolutionary virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who led one of CREID’s two centers in West Africa. Andersen has been involved in developing diagnostics and sequencing Ebola virus genomes during past outbreaks to learn how the virus evolves and spreads. He doesn’t have funding from the National Institutes of Health to do this kind of work right now.
He says he is speaking with colleagues in the Democratic Republic of Congo and reviewing data on the outbreak, but is unable to provide support with testing or sequencing. “We’re sitting here in San Diego and watching this unfold,” he says.
“The entire network could have been mobilized,” says Robert Jarry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School, who led the center with Andersen.
CREID centers were involved in the development of diagnostic reagents and tests, which were lacking on the ground in the DRC. Public health agencies failed to detect early infections because the tests used were designed to detect the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, which was responsible for a previous outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus.
CREID was likely a target because of its loose connections to the COVID-19 lab leak theory embraced by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. One of its origins centers It was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a former US non-profit organization that became a flashpoint in conspiracy theories about… The origins of COVID-19 Because of its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services Permanently banned EcoHealth Coalition will stop receiving taxpayer money in January 2025. The White House as well quote EcoHealth’s connections to Wuhan lab as reason for disbanding USAID.
Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
The Andersen Center in West Africa was focusing on Ebola virus and Lassa virus. Another CREID site in Nairobi, Kenya, focuses on other infectious diseases, but has played a major role in responding to a serious problem. September 2022 Ebola outbreak In Uganda. Its former commander says this would have been part of the response this time, and would have relied on research from other centers in the network.
