The CREID centers were involved in developing reagents and diagnostic tests, which have been lacking on the ground in the DRC. Public health agencies failed to spot early infections because the tests used were designed to detect the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, which was responsible for previous outbreaks in the DRC. The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus.
CREID was likely a target because of its loose connections to the COVID-19 lab-leak theory espoused by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. One of its original centers was run by the EcoHealth Alliance, a former US nonprofit that became a flashpoint in conspiracy theories over the origins of COVID-19 because of its ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services permanently barred EcoHealth Alliance from receiving taxpayer dollars in January 2025. The White House also cited EcoHealth’s connections to the Wuhan lab as a reason for dissolving the US Agency for International Development.
Neither the HHS nor the White House responded to a request for comment.
Andersen’s center in West Africa was focused on Ebola virus and Lassa virus. Another CREID site in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on other infectious diseases, but it played a key role in responding to a September 2022 Ebola outbreak in Uganda. And its former leader says it would have been part of the response this time around, and would have drawn on research from other centers in the network.
“We had active studies there. We were covering Eastern and Central Africa. We would have been there,” says M. Kariuki Njenga, a virologist at Washington State University who led the CREID center in Eastern and Central Africa.
CREID centers worked with local collaborators to boost disease surveillance and provide support for outbreak investigations. During the 2022 outbreak, rapid detection of cases and effective contact tracing led to Uganda declaring the outbreak over just four months after it began.
In total, 164 people were infected and 55 died as a result of that outbreak. The current outbreak is already responsible for at least 1,000 suspected cases and 238 suspected deaths in the DRC, with seven confirmed cases, including one death, in neighboring Uganda.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has expressed concern over the speed at which the outbreak is growing. “We are urgently scaling up operations,” he said this week during an online meeting of the African Union, “but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us.”
This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.
