The Great Irony: US Shuttered Pandemic Monitoring Program, then Scrambled to Extend it

By Staff, CNN

As early indications of China's coronavirus outbreak emerged in late December, the US administration notified Congress it would still follow through with its plan to shutter a US Agency for International Development surveillance program tasked with detecting new, potentially dangerous infectious diseases and helping foreign labs stop emerging pandemic threats around the world.

US President Donald Trump’s administration ultimately backtracked nearly three months later, granting an emergency six-month extension for the program known as PREDICT on April 1. The extension allowed the US to provide "emergency support to other countries for outbreak response including technical support for early detection" of the virus that causes the disease Covid-19, according to a notice posted by University of California-Davis, one of the project's implementing partners.
But by that time, the coronavirus outbreak had already been declared as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization and had claimed the lives of more than 4,300 people in the US.

The administration planned to launch a successor project for PREDICT sometime in 2020 but did not appear to have an interim plan until that happened.

The PREDICT program's cancellation and the subsequent scramble to secure an emergency extension reflects the Trump administration's broader pattern of dismantling or downsizing key offices and programs focused on protecting the US from a pandemic, despite multiple warnings in recent years about the need to prepare for such an event.

It is also indicative of the Trump administration's seeming lack of urgency in the months leading up to the coronavirus outbreak in the US, even as the disease was beginning to ravage countries overseas.

The PREDICT program was launched in 2009 and is tasked with monitoring zoonotic infectious diseases -- those that normally exist in animals but can jump to humans -- in an effort to help stop pandemics before they emerge. Nearly 75% of all new, emerging or re-emerging diseases affecting humans at the beginning of the 21st Century are zoonotic, according to USAID.

While there is still some disagreement among scientists regarding the exact origins of coronavirus, researchers agree that it was the result of "zoonotic spillover," exactly the type of virus the PREDICT program was tasked with monitoring.

Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, wrote to USAID in late November to express concerns over the plan to end the PREDICT surveillance program, which was written before the US had clear information related to the emerging coronavirus outbreak in China.

In an interview on Tuesday, King called the administration's December response "one of the great ironies," given how rapidly the outbreak has spread in the months since and President Donald Trump's initial comments downplaying the situation in China earlier this year.

CNN previously reported that two top administration officials last year listed the threat of a pandemic as an issue that greatly worried them, undercutting Trump's repeated claims that the pandemic was an unforeseen problem.