Biden team ends WSU virus study program

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Biden administration has ended a program led by Washington State University intended to track down viruses that could pose a threat to humans, after an influential Idaho senator and other critics raised concerns the work could increase the risk of an accidental disease outbreak.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, quietly began working with WSU researchers in July to wind down the program, according to the researchers and a statement from the agency. The decision was first reported by The BMJ, a publication of the British Medical Association.

“USAID appreciates Washington State University’s partnership and looks forward to ways we can work together in the future,” the agency said. “The decision is in no way a reflection on the performance or capability of the prime partner, WSU, or its consortium of partners.”

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had questioned the wisdom of the international development agency funding virus-hunting efforts since the program was announced in October 2021. In a statement Sept. 8, he said the risks of such research “far outweigh the benefits” and he was glad the Biden administration had heeded his concerns.

“USAID should not be engaged in virus hunting overseas,” Risch said. “Not only is this outside the agency’s purview, but USAID does not have the adequate oversight and control mechanisms in place to ensure any viruses that are found are protected and won’t cause catastrophic outbreaks.”

In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, USAID said in a statement that the COVID-19 pandemic has led the agency and the whole U.S. government “to assess priorities and approach to pandemic preparedness,” including “the relative risks and impact of our programming.”

In interviews with The Spokesman-Review, two of the lead researchers at WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine acknowledged the risks associated with their work but said the project was intended to help researchers in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia do important disease surveillance work as safely as possible.

“I’m disappointed that we’re not moving forward, because we could have done a lot of good with this, but it just got tangled up in some politics we couldn’t control,” said Tom Kawula, director of WSU’s Paul G. Allen School for Global Health.

In October 2021, USAID announced that WSU would lead a five-year, $125 million project called DEEP VZN — short for “Discovery and Exploration of Emerging Pathogens — Viral Zoonoses” — to collect more than 800,000 samples, mostly from wildlife, and identify and catalogue viruses that could someday spread to humans. But critics say that work could make it more likely, not less, that a virus could jump from animals to humans.

The project was intended to focus on building the capacity of local partners in five countries: Kenya, Senegal, Peru, Vietnam and Thailand. A consotrium led by WSU also included the University of Washington; Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; PATH, a Seattle-based global health nonprofit; and FHI 360, a global development nonprofit based in North Carolina.

Kawula said most of the project’s budget would have been spent by the subcontractors, not directly by WSU. The consortium spent about $7.6 million on the initial phase of the project, he said, with $3.2 million for WSU.

The U.S. government had funded similar programs for more than a decade, including an earlier project called PREDICT, which had identified about 1,200 novel viruses and supported research at laboratories around the world. One of those labs was the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded is at least a plausible source of the initial outbreak, although the pandemic’s origin may never be clear because of a lack of transparency from the Chinese government.