The Ebola outbreak is growing fast in the Ituri province. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Right now. And a specific network of scientists who could help on the ground are sitting on their hands.
They can’t do anything.
Not because they want to stay home. But because the Trump administration cut their funding. Last year. Driven in part by the same conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that kept so many people talking about bat caves instead of actual science.
A Network Cut Loose
In 2020 the National Institutes of Health created something useful. The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious diseases (CREID) network. It sounds dry. It wasn’t.
This group tracked viruses spilling over from wildlife. Into people. Including the filovirus family. That’s where Ebola lives.
They had ten sites worldwide. Places where outbreaks happen. Central and East Africa included.
The whole network would have mobilized.
Robert Garry said it. A microbiologist at Tulane. He co-led a center with Kristian Andersen. They weren’t just theorists. They had boots on the ground infrastructure. Or they did until last June.
NIH had given them roughly $82 million for five years. Then the renewal window opened in 2025.
It closed instead.
A stop-work order dropped on them. The language was brutal. Their research was deemed unsafe for Americans. And not a good use of taxpayers’ money. Agency priorities shifted away from it.
“ That reason is pretty rich” says Andersen.
He’s an evolutionary virologist. Works out of Scripps Research. Leads one of two centers in West Africa.
He says we need this pandemic prep research. Period.
Watching from Afar
During past outbreaks Andersen developed diagnostics. Sequenced genomes. Traced how the virus evolved. How it spread.
He does none of that now. No NIH funding means no field work.
He talks to colleagues in the Congo. Reads data. Watches screens.
“We sit here in San Diego,” he says, “and see this unfold.”
No testing. No sequencing support. Just observation.
The lack of help hurts. Hard.
The tests used by public health agencies in the Congo right now are looking for the Zaire strain. That’s the one that killed so many in previous years. But the current outbreak?
That’s Bundibugyo. A different virus entirely.
Standard tests miss it.
CREID was working on reagents. Diagnostic kits. Things the ground teams actually needed.
Why pull the plug?
Because CREID touched a nerve. A political one.
The Conspiracy Connection
The network had loose ties to the lab-leak theory. The kind of theory President Donald Trump liked. Republican lawmakers pushed.
One original center in CREID was run by EcoHealth Alliance.
If you have been online for the last three years you know that name. EcoHealth became the villain of choice for conspiracy theorists blaming a Chinese lab for Covid-19. Their work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology made them radioactive.
Trump didn’t forget.
In January 2025 the Department of Health and Human Service barred EcoHealth from getting taxpayer money. Forever.
The White House even cited EcoHealth’s Wuhan ties when it dissolved the US Agency for International Dev.
It feels like punishment by association.
HHS didn’t comment. The White House stayed quiet.
But the impact is real.
Andersen’s West Africa center studied Ebola and Lassa fever. Another site in Nairobi focused on other bugs but helped when Uganda had an Ebola spike in September 2022. The former leader of that Kenya site says they would have joined this fight too. Drawing on research across the whole CREID network.
They won’t.
One provider on the ground reports shortages. Masks. Hand sanitizer. Basic stuff. Funding cuts leave holes everywhere.
Was it smart policy to strip away pandemic readiness because of old conspiracy drama?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But the virus doesn’t care about politics. And it is still spreading.
And researchers are still watching.
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