In what many see as fallout from the concern that researchers studying bat viruses may have triggered the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has prematurely ended a $125 million program aimed at identifying viruses in animals that might harm humans.
USAID launched the program, known as the Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens – Viral Zoonoses (DEEP VZN), in October 2021. It tapped the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health at Washington State University (WSU) to lead a consortium that planned to work in up to 12 foreign countries over 5 years. Goals included training people in those countries to safely collect and characterize viruses found in animals, and to identify and develop strategies to thwart pathogens that might gain the capacity to jump to humans and spark a global pandemic.
In late July, however, USAID officials notified WSU investigators that they had canceled DEEP VZN (pronounced “deep vision”), as first reported yesterday by The BMJ. “This decision is in no way a reflection on the performance or capability of the prime partner, Washington State University, or its consortium of partners,” a spokesperson for USAID told ScienceInsider.
USAID did not reply to questions about whether the early death of DEEP VZN was linked to intense concerns voiced by lawmakers in Congress—mostly Republicans—and some scientists that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that studied bat coronaviruses. No compelling evidence supports this theory, but it has gained some traction with the public, too. USAID’s spokesperson said the decision flowed from an effort “to assess priorities and approach to pandemic preparedness. This includes aligning resources to achieve the commitments within the National Biodefense Strategy, the relative risks and impact of our programming (including biosafety and biosecurity capacity), as well as how to optimally allocate USAID’s global health security resources.”
WSU’s Guy Palmer, a veterinarian who founded the global health school there in 2007, says he’s disappointed by the decision. “Stepping away from global surveillance is not wise,” Palmer says. “It creates a vacuum, and there are certainly other nations that are less committed to data transparency that are more than happy to fill that gap.”
He is convinced political pressure ultimately killed the program. “It’s hard to think of a way to sugarcoat that. There’s a lot of concern about lab leaks and creating a human-animal interface that wouldn’t naturally exist,” he says.
Researchers who have been critical of what they see as risky virus research applauded the decision. “Wow! USAID has terminated DEEP VZN! This is a major win in the global fight against lab-generated pandemics,” quantitative biologist Justin Kinney of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory posted on X (formerly Twitter). Kinney is a co-founder of Biosafety Now, a nonprofit that advocates for improved laboratory safety and prohibiting research that modifies pathogens in ways that potentially make them more dangerous to humans.
Epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, who heads the Brown University Pandemic Center, saw value in DEEP VZN but said it likely was going to trigger a “land mine of hearings” in Congress. She also questioned why it was housed at USAID in the first place. “It seems like the wrong vehicle for this kind of work,” Nuzzo says. “If anything, you’d want to do it through a science agency that goes through an external peer-review process to make sure that the projects being proposed are the most rigorous and most likely to net scientific benefit. And that just seems like a weird line of work for a development agency.”
DEEP VZN was a follow-on to a USAID global surveillance program called PREDICT that ran from 2009 to 2020 and received more than $200 million. PREDICT itself grew out of USAID’s interest in helping countries combat avian influenza, which devastated poultry industries and threatened to spark pandemics. PREDICT funds were used to strengthen labs in more than 60 countries, train more than 6000 people, and detect more than 1100 unique viruses.
Critics, however, assailed PREDICT. Some said that rather than focusing on hunting viruses in animals, PREDICT should have emphasized improving surveillance for unusual infectious diseases in humans. Researchers have little chance of predicting which viruses detected by animal surveillance might cause great harm to humans, argued evolutionary biologists Edward Holmes, Kristian Andersen, and Andrew Rambaut in a comment published in June 2018 in Nature. “[G]iven the rarity of outbreaks and the complexity of host–pathogen interactions, it is arrogant to imagine that we could use such surveys to predict and mitigate the emergence of disease,” they wrote.
Palmer notes that “PREDICT had a lot of baggage,” and he believes that DEEP VZN “got caught up in that.” In addition, in the wake of COVID-19, concerns rose about the dangers of handling wild animals to discover and study viruses that have pandemic potential. DEEP VZN drew especially sharp scrutiny because the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that specializes in sampling animals in attempts to prevent emerging diseases, played a central role in the PREDICT consortium. (EcoHealth also had a long-standing collaboration with the Wuhan lab at the center of the lab-leak theory.)
Although USAID billed DEEP VZN as a virus hunting program, Palmer says his group’s main aim was to train scientists in foreign countries on how to safely surveil animal pathogens and to lower risks. They planned to inactivate samples as close as possible to the time of collection, which would reduce risks but still allow scientists to extract any viral sequences. If an interesting virus surfaced and they wanted intact samples to study, the researchers would return to the site with higher level protective gear. Once samples arrived at the labs, they hoped to teach their collaborators how to improve biosecurity and best manage data.
Prior to its cancellation, DEEP VZN had received about 10% of the promised funding, and Palmer said it had yet to conduct any sampling because USAID would not give them a green light to do the fieldwork. “We never got permission to work in any of the five initial countries selected,” he says. “There was a prohibition on doing the work, and therefore the money didn’t flow.”
Palmer says the DEEP VZN researchers knew USAID had developed cold feet about the program, and they met with members of both the House of Representatives and Senate to discuss their concerns. “They had legitimate questions that we thought we could address,” Palmer says.
Dennis Carroll, who started PREDICT and retired from USAID shortly before it ended, fears that scuttling DEEP VZN will cost lives. “Eliminating USAID’s investment in viral discovery is a recipe for disaster,” Carroll says. “For nearly 20 years USAID has been at the forefront of building the systems and capacities that are essential to making the world safe from future viral threats.”
