Trump: "We don't need no stinkin' Pandemic Monitoring Program"!
As early indications of China's coronavirus outbreak emerged in late December, the Trump 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.
The 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.
Spillover
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.
"The work that these projects do may help our country and our world to avoid future catastrophic epidemic and pandemic events akin to Ebola and HIV," King said in the letter.
USAID officials responded on December 31 to inform King that PREDICT would not be renewed after it expired in March 2020, despite concerns raised by the Maine Independent that canceling it before a replacement program was up and running could hinder the US ability to track possible pandemics.
"As planned, PREDICT is scheduled to end in March 2020 following the expiration of its second, five-year period of performance. While PREDICT is closing, the Bureau for Global Health at USAID is planning a successor project, which we intend to award through a competitive procurement process in 2020," wrote Richard Parker, assistant administrator for the Bureau of Legislative and Public Affairs, according to a copy of the letter obtained by CNN.
"The new program will seek to continue our investments in this critical area, by focusing on mitigating risks associated with the spillover of emerging viruses from animals, based on a more-informed understanding of what is needed at the country level to address these risks," he added.
The letter is dated on the same day that China reported its first cases of an unknown virus to the World Health Organization, marking the first public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak in the Wuhan region.
'Great ironies'
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.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Tim Morrison, then a special assistant to the President and senior director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense on the National Security Council, made the comments at the BioDefense Summit in April 2019.
"Of course, the thing that people ask: 'What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?' Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern," Azar said, before listing efforts to mitigate the impact of flu outbreaks.
Technically, PREDICT ended in September, two months prior to King's letter to USAID after its second, five-year contract expired, but was given a "no cost extension" so implementing partners could allow some core staff to finish work that was still in progress, according to Christine Kreuder Johnson of UC Davis One Health Institute.
"We just had a few things that were remaining to do both on the in country side as well as on the global side. That's what carried us through this whole year," she said, referring to the initial no-cost extension.
But the situation changed in January once the scale of the outbreak became clearer.
PREDICT staff were deployed to several countries almost immediately to provide technical assistance with testing and additional supplies as needed.
For months, those efforts were funded by a limited pool of funds the program had left over from the previous year, as USAID worked to secure an emergency extension, Johnson told CNN.
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