Trump Administration Cut Program That Could Have Warned Of Pandemic: Report

The Trump administration ended a $200-million early warning program that could have predicted the present coronavirus pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. 

Participant Says Program's End 'Shortsighted'

A project of the U.S. Agency for International Development named PREDICT, which involved staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including one in Wuhan, China — was axed by the Trump administration. The lab in Wuhan identified the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Launched in 2009, the  $200-million early-warning initiative had identified 1,200 viruses with the potential to turn into pandemics, the Times said. Dozens of scientists and analysts were laid off when fieldwork stopped due to a lack of funding in September 2019. 

“Look at the name: Our efforts were to predict this before it happens," EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak told the Times. 

"That’s the part of the program that was exciting — and that’s the part I’m worried about." 

Daszak said that it was “absolutely critical” that a large-scale, proactive and predictive program with the goal of stopping pandemics before they happen be maintained.

“Cutting a program that could in any way reduce the risk of things like COVID-19 happening again is, by any measure, shortsighted.”

A spokesperson for USAID said PREDICT was “just one component” of the agency’s global health efforts and accounted for less than 20% of their global health security funding.

Program Studied Coronaviruses 

The PREDICT project operated on two five-year funding cycles and had onboard epidemiologists and wildlife veterinarians to study interactions between animals and humans, the Times said. 

The initiative was launched in response to the 2005 H5N1 bird flu and gathered samples from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in its study of viruses. 160 of these were novel coronaviruses, which are from the same family that causes COVID-19.

As of Friday, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, the COVID-19 pandemic, which first emerged in Wuhan, had claimed the lives of 53,160 people worldwide. Globally, 1.01 million cases are confirmed. The U.S. now has the most cases at 245,449 and so far has reported 6,057 fatalities.