A termination notice from the federal government has Scripps Research virologist and immunologist Kristian Andersen considering a big move.
Already facing significant cuts to grant funding overseen by the National Institutes of health, Andersen said that the latest notification involved the cancellation of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, often called CREID. The program, which was allocated $82 million over the past five years, brought together Andersen and 11 other labs worldwide to study “how and where viruses and other pathogens emerge from wildlife and spillover to cause disease in people.”
Andersen said late last week on the social network Bluesky that he received a notice from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) that CREID’s research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding.”
This work had already become more difficult with an announcement on May 1 from the National Institutes of Health notifying grant holders that they can no longer issue subawards — essentially breaking off pieces of their larger awards — “to a foreign entity.”
Taken together, Andersen said that the termination of CREID and the clamp down on subawards to researchers outside the United States makes it difficult to do the kind of global collaborations that are necessary to better understand emerging threats such as H5N1 bird flu or more-virulent strains of MPOX now causing a severe outbreak in Sierra Leone.
“I want to continue working with my colleagues in much of the world,” Andersen said. “West Africa, for example, has been a large focus, and the CREID center ed Sierra Leone and Nigeria and Liberia and Senegal.
“We have really deep connections in South Africa these days, too, but also across the world in places like Jordan, Kurdistan, India and collaborators in Europe and the United Kingdom.”
These changes, taken together with ongoing proposals to significantly cut grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, have caused him to consider whether it might be time to look for a research position in another company, perhaps in Europe.
“We’re trying to understand how viruses emerge and spread and evolve, and we’re trying to understand the diseases that they cause,” Andersen said. “In the United States right now, our ability to do that work is being dismantled and so, of course, we need to look for alternatives …
“For myself, yes, I have, as a result, considered leaving the United States.”
It is not uncommon for researchers to maintain relationships with multiple organizations, even if they are in different countries, and Andersen said that he hopes to remain engaged at Scripps even if he is based somewhere else. Recent blog posts that say he has already committed to a new post at Oslo University, he said, are untrue.
“The whole thing about Oslo is greatly exaggerated,” Andersen said. “I have multiple different countries and multiple different institutions that I have been in with and have corresponded with.”
But studying outbreaks in other places has also led Andersen and a handful of research partners into a buzzsaw of very public criticism. A March 17, 2020, letter to the editor of the scientific journal Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” concluded that the origin of the pandemic-causing virus crossed over from an animal, perhaps a bat, making a leak from a coronavirus research lab in Wuhan, China, unlikely.
Andersen and his colleagues faced backlash when internal communications surfaced that appeared to document pressure from Dr. Anthony Fauci, then NIAD’s director, to minimize the possibility of a lab leak which, at first, appeared to be the researcher’s first hypothesis of COVID’s cause.
Though Andersen testified before Congress in 2023 that he simply changed his mind in the course of further research after discovering that genetic markers he thought might be man-made in fact appeared in other coronaviruses, many have not been satisfied with that explanation.
One online publication calling itself the “Disinformation Chronicle” has hounded Andersen relentlessly, posting a piece last week that said he was about to “flee the US for Norway” and suggesting that Andersen faced a Justice Department inquiry regarding previous grants.
But Andersen, 47, who said he holds dual Danish and U.S. citizenship, said that the overall science climate, not the lab leak kerfuffle, is driving his desire to see if moving research to a different country might be necessary.
“None of this has anything to do with (coronavirus) origin,” Andersen said.
While COVID’s origins continue to get attention from some sectors of the media, Andersen has moved on. He worked during the pandemic with researchers at UC San Diego to create a wastewater analysis program that has helped the region determine which viruses are circulating in the community, allowing epidemiologists to spot a new outbreak before it begins producing a rash of fresh symptoms in patients.
Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley, an infectious disease expert at UCSD, said in an email Monday afternoon that Andersen’s departure would be seen as a major blow to the San Diego biomedical science community.
Robert F. Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and fellow CREID researcher, agreed. Garry, who first worked with Andersen to analyze the genetic characteristics of Ebola virus in Africa, said the researcher continues to enjoy a strong reputation among his peers, COVID origin coverage notwithstanding.
“He is, I would say, a leader in the field of biogenomics, which he and a handful of other people really started, using (genetic) sequencing to define evolutionary relationships of viruses and basically doing that in near real time in outbreak situations like we had with Ebola,” Garry said.
Andersen, he said, is a real-world example of what’s at risk with the federal government’s current plans to cut research spending. Other countries, especially China, he noted, are more than very interested in becoming the new home of researchers who end up leaving the U.S. But there is also risk in not being home to the latest virology research.
“The viruses aren’t going to stop because we’ve decided to deprioritize research,” Garry said.
