As the world As the country struggles to contain a rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a vital network of research centers is unable to support on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration cut funding last year, in part because of conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19.
Founded in 2020 by the company National Institutes of HealthThe Centers for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network has been researching viruses that escape from wild animals and spread to humans, including the family of viruses that includes Ebola. The network included 10 centers around the world where these types of disease outbreaks are likely to occur, including in Central and Eastern Africa. (The network also investigated hantavirus, a disease that recently emerged on a cruise ship.)
NIH has provided approximately $82 million in funding to CREID over five years, which was scheduled to renew in 2025. However, last June, the centers received a stop-work order stating that their research was deemed “dangerous to Americans and a misuse of taxpayer funds” and that the agency’s priorities no longer support the network.
“The reason is quite rich, isn’t it? Because we really needed to do this kind of pandemic preparedness research,” says Kristian 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 the development of diagnostics and has performed genome sequencing of the Ebola virus genome during previous epidemics to learn how the virus evolves and spreads. There is currently no NIH funding for such work.
He says he is talking to colleagues in the DRC and reviewing data on the outbreak, but is unable to offer testing or sequencing support. “We’re sitting here in San Diego and watching this unfold,” he says.
“The entire network would mobilize,” says Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School who co-directed the center with Andersen.
CREID centers were involved in the development of reagents and diagnostic tests that were in low supply on the ground in the DRC. Public health agencies failed to detect early infections because the tests used were aimed at detecting the more common strain of Ebola in Zaire, which was responsible for previous outbreaks in the DRC. The current epidemic is caused by the Bundibugyo virus.
CREID was likely targeted because of its loose ties to the Covid-19 lab leak theory put forth by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. One of his originals centers was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a former US nonprofit that has become a flashpoint for conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19 due to its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services permanently blocked EcoHealth Alliance from receiving taxpayer dollars in January 2025. So does the White House quoted EcoHealth’s links with the Wuhan laboratory as a reason for disbanding the US Agency for International Development.
Neither HHS nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
The Andersen Center in West Africa focused on Ebola and Lassa viruses. Another CREID center in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on other infectious diseases, but played a key role in responding to the Ebola outbreak in Uganda in September 2022. Its former leader says it would be part of the response this time and would build on research conducted at other centers in the network.