US Virus-Hunting Project Back On Track After Untimely Expiration In 2019

Even as President Donald Trump faced renewed criticism from his Democratic challengers over the lack of support to scientific efforts to check the spread of epidemics, the U.S. Agency For International Development (USAID) has put on track a global virus-hunting program to replace the one which was left to die last October.

The $100 million program, named Stop Spillover, is designed to watch out for dangerous pathogens that could jump from animals to humans from the wet markets of China to the camel pens of West Asia.

The program aims to follow up on the work done by Predict, which began in 2009 as a response to the 2005 bird flu epidemic. Former officials and grantees of Predict have suggested that the White House did not give the program much attention and the specter of budget cuts and the current administration's hostility toward foreign aid led to the untimely demise of the program. This happened before the deadly coronavirus arrived on U.S. soil.

The decision to pull the plug on Predict was pointed out by Trump critics as an example of the fragmented approch to the COVID-19 pandemic. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he will restore many of the programs that were canceled in the Trump years.

The former Vice President said Predict may have provided the country ample time and warning about the impending pandemic. “As president, I will prioritize sustained long-term investments that ensure America is strong, resilient, and ready in the face of new pandemic threats,” Biden said in a statement to the New York Times.

Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, evoked Predict in a speech on Thursday. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a program, called Predict, that tracked emerging diseases in places like China. Trump cut it,” Harris said.

USAID spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala, however, said the project was not cancelled. She said its 10-year “life cycle” has come to an end, the New York Times reported. Jhunjhunwala also said that USAID extended Predict twice for six months, the first extension was to allow its officials to finish some analyses and the second to allow the program to extend help to other countries in fighting the new coronavirus outbreak.

Ironically, some administration officials sought to put the blame on the Predict program when COVID-19 struck the country. They pointed out that the grant received by New York-based consultancy EcoHealth Alliance was used to provide training for Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to catch bats and take their blood and fecal samples to check for viruses.

That was the time when some of the officials were relaying the unsubstantiated claim that the Wuhan institute inadvertently released the lethal coronavirus into the world.

Reports indicate around $207 million was spent by the Predict program to train approximately 5,000 scientists in 30 Asian and African countries during its 10-year existence. The program also helped build or fortify 60 laboratories that study animal viruses that are harmful to humans. Scientists under the program also collected more than 140,000 biological samples and discovered 1,000-plus new viruses, which include a new Ebola strain.

According to Dr. Jonna Mazet, a veterinarian based at the University of California and the global director of Predict, gene-sequencing scientists in Nepal and Thailand who trained under the program were among the first to spot COVID-19 in their respective countries, even before receiving test kits provided by the World Health Organization. Both of these countries swiftly contained the spread of coronavirus and kept their death rates at low levels.

At present, the five major grantees of Predict formed a new group that applied for USAID’s Stop Spillover grant. The group comprised Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, EcoHealth Alliance, One Health Institute at U.C. Davis, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Dr. Dennis Carroll, the creator and director of the Predict program, said USAID is trying to make Stop Spillover appear like Predict’s revival in an attempt to “create an optic that gets them out of the blowback for ending Predict.”

Jhunjhunwala explained that the new program is not Predict’s revival and it is also not a follow-on project, adding that Stop Spillover is designed to “implement the scientific gains of Predict to reduce the risk of viral spillover.”

In a USAID fact sheet, the agency said Stop Spillover, the Predict program's successor, is scheduled to start in October with a $100 million budget. The new program's purpose will be similar to that of its predecessor and will complement other USAID programs dealing with zoonotic diseases. These include training of health workers, funding laboratories, establishing partnerships with other governments, and the private sector to minimize the occurrence of zoonotic diseases in livestock.