The Trump administration decided to end a $200m early warning program designed to alert it to potential pandemics just three months before it is believed Covid-19 began infecting people in China.
The project, called Predict, had been run by the US Agency for International Development since 2009. It had identified more than 160 different coronaviruses that had the potential to develop into pandemics, including a virus that is considered the closest known relative to Covid-19.
A decision to wind down the program was made, however, in September, just three months before the first reports of people becoming infected with Covid-19 in Wuhan, China. The end of the program saw the departure of dozens of scientists and analysts working to identify potential pandemics in countries around the world, including China.
“It was a genius, visionary program that USAid took a big risk to fund and it’s a crying shame it was canceled,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit specialist in tackling wildlife-borne disease that was one of the major partners in the program.
Daszak said he did not know why the initiative was scrapped or if the White House played any direct role in its ending. EcoHealth Alliance has been given a temporary extension to work on the program but the role will finally come to a close in September.
The news about Predict’s demise was first reported in the Los Angeles Times.
Predict’s work focused on the dangers of viruses spreading from wildlife to humans and causing possible pandemics like the Covid-19 outbreak that has resulted in much of the world grinding to a halt. It is suspected that Covid-19 made the leap to humans from a bat sold at a Wuhan market.
Daszak said there are an estimated 1.7m mystery viruses in wildlife that may have the potential to transfer to humans and cause another pandemic, making the early detection of these diseases imperative for public health and economic reasons.
“We should’ve been more unsettled about this before all this happened,” he said. “We got a lot of flak for spending money in other countries but just think how much even a few billion would be worth to stop this sort of pandemic. It’s sad to see the project finish because it’s the way of the future, in 50 years they will be bog-standard.
“I’m not confident we will learn the lessons from this, though. We saw the same thing happen after Ebola and then Zika. We are always behind with pandemics, we are flying blind. We have hit the snooze button several times and now here’s the big one.”
It’s not clear whether a continuation of the project would have dampened the current pandemic, although the Trump administration has faced criticism for its preparation before the outbreak. The administration reduced a team working in China on pandemics and has repeatedly attempted to cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A spokesman for USAid told the Los Angeles Times that the Predict program was “just one component of USAid’s global health security efforts and accounted for less than 20% of our global health security funding”. A new initiative to help prevent the spread of diseases from animals to humans is due to start later this year.