Two years after launching what officials hailed as a five year flagship project for hunting viruses among wildlife to prevent human pandemics, the US Agency for International Development is shuttering the enterprise. David Willman reports
A flagship project for the controversial practice of hunting viruses among wildlife in South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America to prevent human outbreaks and pandemics is being quietly dropped by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after private and bipartisan criticism over the safety of such research, The BMJ has found.
For more than a decade the US government has been funding international projects engaged in identifying exotic wildlife viruses that might someday infect humans. Although critics have raised concerns over the potentially catastrophic risks of such virus hunting activities,1 hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated funding have symbolised a commitment to the effort.
The shuttering of the project, as described in a new congressional budget document and during interviews with scientists and federal policy makers, marks an abrupt retreat by the US government from wildlife virus hunting, an activity that has also been funded by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The turnabout follows early warnings raised by sceptics—including officials in the Biden White House—that the $125m (£99m; €115m) “DEEP VZN” programme could inadvertently ignite a pandemic. The misgivings continue to resonate, as the cause of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the world’s deadliest such event in a century, remains unproved.
When USAID, an arm of the US State Department, launched DEEP VZN (pronounced “deep vision”) in October 2021, the agency promoted it as “a critical next step . . . to understand and address the risks posed by zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans.”2 Short for “Discovery & Exploration of Emerging …