As the world struggles to contain the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province, a vital network of research centers has been unable to help on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration slashed its funding last year, in part due to conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19.
Established in 2020 by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) Network was conducting research into viruses that emerge from wildlife and spill over to people, including the family of viruses that Ebola belongs to. The network operated 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 researching hantavirus, a disease that saw a recent rare outbreak on a cruise ship.)
NIH provided CREID with approximately $82 million in funding over five years, and its funding was up for renewal in 2025. But last June, the centers received a stop-work order stating that their research had been deemed “unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding,” and that the agency’s priorities no longer supported the network.
“That reason is pretty rich, right? Because that was really the kind of pandemic preparedness research that we need to do,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who led one of the two CREID centers in West Africa. Andersen was involved in developing diagnostics and conducted genomic sequencing of Ebola virus genomes during past outbreaks to learn how the virus was evolving and spreading. He doesn’t have NIH funding to do that kind of work now.
He says he is talking to colleagues in the DRC and reviewing data about the outbreak, but isn’t able to offer support with testing or sequencing. “We sit here in San Diego and see this unfold,” he says.
"The whole network would have mobilized," says Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School, who led the center with Andersen.
The CREID centers were involved in developing reagents and diagnostic tests, which have been lacking on the ground in the DRC. Public health agencies failed to spot early infections because the tests used were designed to detect the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, which was responsible for previous outbreaks in the DRC. 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 espoused by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. One of its original centers was run by the EcoHealth Alliance, a former US nonprofit that became a flashpoint in conspiracy theories over 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 barred EcoHealth Alliance from receiving taxpayer dollars in January 2025. The White House also cited EcoHealth’s connections to the Wuhan lab as a reason for dissolving the US Agency for International Development.
Neither the HHS nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
Andersen’s center in West Africa was focused on Ebola virus and Lassa virus. Another CREID site in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on other infectious diseases, but it played a key role in responding to a September 2022 Ebola outbreak in Uganda. And its former leader says it would have been part of the response this time around, and would have drawn on research from other centers in the network.
“We had active studies there. We were covering Eastern and Central Africa. We would have been there,” says M. Kariuki Njenga, a virologist at Washington State University who led the CREID center in Eastern and Central Africa.
CREID centers worked with local collaborators to boost disease surveillance and provide support for outbreak investigations. During the 2022 outbreak, rapid detection of cases and effective contact tracing led to Uganda declaring the outbreak over just four months after it began.
In total, 164 people were infected and 55 died as a result of that outbreak. The current outbreak is already responsible for at least 1,000 suspected cases and 238 suspected deaths in the DRC, with seven confirmed cases, including one death, in neighboring Uganda.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has expressed concern over the speed at which the outbreak is growing. “We are urgently scaling up operations,” he said this week during an online meeting of the African Union, “but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us.”
