President Donald Trump’s administration is shuttering a network of centres funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that aims to prevent future pandemics. The research is “unsafe,” NIH has concluded.
The 10 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) were launched 5 years ago with a projected $82 million in funding to collect and characterize mosquito-borne viruses and other pathogens that could jump from animals to people. NIH had planned to renew the network this year.
But a 5 June stop-work order for one centre states that the network’s research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding. Current agency priorities do not support this work.” The message did not elaborate on the risks posed by the research, and a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, did not respond to questions.
“I’m disappointed that this and other research aimed at identifying and preventing future pandemics has been deemed unsafe and useless,” Kris Smith, a CREID postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University works in Kenya, wrote on Bluesky.
The network’s research, conducted in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the United States, involved collecting viruses from the wild, killing them, then studying their genomes, according to University of Saskatchewan virologist Angela Rasmussen, who protested the network’s closure on her blog yesterday. The centres also took blood samples from people who come into contact with animals to see whether they’ve developed antibodies to wild viruses.
A few studies worked with live viruses in high-containment labs, mainly to develop drugs and vaccines. But network scientists did not modify viruses in ways that make them more risky to people, Rasmussen writes. Trump and NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya are planning to crack down on such “gain-of-function” studies.
Virologist David Wang of Washington University in St. Louis, who led one center, calls the claim that CREID work was not safe “totally unsubstantiated.” In fact, “If we can detect and stop a virus where it starts, that directly makes America and American citizens safer,” says Wang, who calls the cancellation “incredibly short sighted.”
Trump has previously ended pathogen surveillance projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and CREID investigators knew they could be next. The network was also likely to face disruptions because of a new NIH policy revamping how it funds foreign collaborations.
CREID may also have been vulnerable because one center was run by the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that collaborated with researchers in Wuhan, China, on virus studies that some scientists and conservative politicians allege could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. And a second CREID center funded in 2020 also got ensnared by the origins debate with one of its heads, Kristian Andersen, being accused of downplaying the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab in order to get the $9 million grant.
By canceling the network, NIH is “pandering to the lab-leak conspiracy theorists,” Wang says.
Jocelyn KaiserJocelyn Kaiser writes about biomedical research news and edits Science’s online policy news. She can be found on Signal at jocelynkaiser.51.