US will revive global virus hunting effort ended last year

NEW YORK - A worldwide virus-hunting programme allowed to expire last year by the Trump administration, just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, will have a second life - whatever the outcome of the presidential election.

"Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a programme, called Predict, that tracked emerging diseases in places like China," she said late in her 20-minute speech."Trump cut it." The US response to pandemics is strangely fragmented. The CDC investigates outbreaks, while the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pursues vaccines. Much research into tropical diseases and bioweapons is done by the military, legacies of the Spanish-American War and the Cold War, while the State Department coordinates global campaigns against AIDS.

On Friday, a USAID spokeswoman, Ms Pooja Jhunjhunwala, denied that Predict was cancelled and said it simply came to the end of its 10-year"life cycle." The programme was then extended twice for six months, she said - first to finish some analyses, then to help other countries fight Covid-19. During its 10-year existence, Predict spent US$207 million to train about 5,000 scientists in 30 African and Asian countries, and to build or strengthen 60 laboratories to seek out animal viruses that could endanger humans. Scientists working for Predict collected more than 140,000 biological samples and found more than 1,000 new viruses, including a new strain of Ebola.

"I don't know who our competitors are, but I'm sure we have some," said Dr Christine Johnson, associate director of the One Health Institute.

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