A week after the inauguration, US senator Rand Paul of Kentucky issued a flurry of congressional subpoenas to 14 agencies, including the NIH and HHS. The senator said the continuing investigation was being conducted in order to “critique the process that allowed this dangerous research, that may have led to the pandemic.”
In one subpoena sent to a Pentagon agency, Paul is seeking “all records related to whistleblower disclosures or complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse involving the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, dual use research of concern, or life sciences research,” according to a copy of the subpoena provided to WIRED. He is further seeking any funding provided to EcoHealth Alliance by USAID and other departments.
A staffer at one of the agencies targeted by the subpoena says they have already furnished the senator with tens of thousands of records under previous subpoenas—all of them proving that their agency does critical work in tracking and containing infectious disease outbreaks around the world. And yet, they say, they feel they are still being targeted by Paul and other Republicans with the allegation that they are building bioweapons. “It won’t die.”
Many of the sources who spoke to WIRED said they fear this witch hunt could accelerate in the months to come. More acutely, they worry that America may be destroying its ability to anticipate, surveil, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.
“They have an assumption that virology research is inherently dangerous and there really aren’t many benefits to it,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.
“They’re just going to completely decimate science and our understanding of the world, and our ability to fight pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and all the rest of it,” one researcher predicts, “which is dumb as a rock.”
This doesn’t seem to bother Kennedy. In at least two of his books, he characterizes virtually all virological work as bioweapons research. In a November 2023 speech to the virulently anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which he served as chairman of prior to his aborted presidential campaign, Kennedy vowed “to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
The Consequences
That potential pivot away from infectious disease research and toward chronic diseases comes as the US faces an outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu. “Our epidemiologists are [looking for] the very first case of human-to-human transmission, is not even a needle in a haystack—it’s a needle in a stack of needles,” says the former CDC official.
Last Wednesday evening, a senior adviser at the CDC responsible for the H5N1 policy response, Erin Abramsohn, announced her resignation. In a LinkedIn post, Abramsohn cited working with her team through “chaos and uncertainty, transition, reorganization, preparation, and response,” and mentioned her efforts to back up her files before resigning.
Rasmussen and some colleagues have also been racing to archive the massive volumes of government research, fearing that it could be taken offline completely—as has been done at USAID and elsewhere.
The former CDC official adds that the new administration seems set on changing how vaccines will be recommended to the public, and how the CDC can communicate vaccine effectiveness—particularly to vulnerable populations. Like most US government agencies, CDC and NIH have also been given edicts to delete references to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across their websites.
“We had to go through and scrub language from survey questions and documents, and internal and external websites,” the ex-CDC official says. “If you can’t get it, you pull the whole webpage down.”
Sources tell WIRED that this language edict extends to ongoing research. Scientists have been forced to scour their questionnaires and edit their yet-to-be-published papers to remove reverences to gender or transgender people.
“I think we’re really worried,” the former CDC official says, “about how much damage that’s going to be done that we can’t undo.”
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