NIH Shutters Network Aiming To Stop Pandemics Before They Start

President Donald Trump’s administration is shutting down a network of centers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that aimed to prevent pandemics. The research is “unsafe,” the NIH stated.

The network’s research, conducted in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the U.S., involved collecting viruses from the wild, deactivating them, and studying their genome. I Photo: National Institutes of Health Image Gallery Flickr

The 10 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) were launched five years ago with a projected $82 million in funding to study mosquito-borne viruses and other pathogens capable of jumping from animals to humans, Jocelyn Kaiser reported for Science.

NIH had originally planned to renew the network this year.

However, a stop-work order dated June 6 for one of the centers stated 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 agency did not elaborate on the specific risks posed by the research.

“I’m disappointed that this and other research aimed at identifying and preventing future pandemics has been deemed unsafe and useless,” wrote Kris Smith, a CREID postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University working in Kenya, on Bluesky.

The network’s research, conducted in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the U.S., involved collecting viruses from the wild, deactivating them, and studying their genomes, according to University of Saskatchewan virologist Angela Rasmussen, who criticized the closure on her blog.

The centers also took blood samples from people in close contact with animals to determine whether they had developed antibodies to wild viruses.

Some studies involved working with live viruses in high-containment laboratories, primarily for the development of drugs and vaccines. However, Rasmussen wrote that CREID scientists did not modify viruses in ways that would increase their risk to humans.

Virologist David Wang of Washington University in St. Louis, who led one of the centers, called the claim that CREID’s work was unsafe “totally unsubstantiated.” He added, “If we can detect and stop a virus where it starts, that directly makes America and American citizens safer.”

Wang described the cancellation as “incredibly short-sighted.”

Trump has previously ended other pathogen surveillance initiatives funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and CREID researchers had long suspected they might be next.