Despite a formal determination by the National Institutes of Health that the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) posed safety risks to the American public and represented a poor use of taxpayer funds, university lobbyists have successfully engineered a reversal — quietly inserting language into a Congressional appropriations bill that compels NIH to fund the program once again to the tune of $18.2 million. The maneuver raises pointed questions about who ultimately controls federal science funding decisions: public health agencies or the well-resourced lobbying apparatus of America’s research universities.

What Is CREID — and Why Did NIH Shut It Down?

CREID — the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases — was established in 2020 as an initiative under then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci. The program was designed to fund research into emerging infectious disease threats, awarding grants to researchers at universities and nonprofit institutions across the country. Among the notable recipients of CREID grants were virologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Peter Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

Last summer, NIH issued notices to shut down the CREID centers, citing concerns about safety and the program’s value to American taxpayers. The decision aligned with the broader effort under the current administration to reassess federal science funding and rein in research activities deemed to carry biosafety risks — particularly those involving the collection and study of dangerous pathogens.

A senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed frustration over the reversal: “The NIH is committed to never again funding dangerous pandemic activities,” the official said. “The New CREID program will not fund the collection of dangerous pathogens from places like bat caves in China.” The official also indicated uncertainty about precisely how university lobbyists managed to insert the funding mandate into the appropriations legislation.

How Lobbyists Rewrote Federal Science Policy

The mechanism through which the CREID funding was restored is itself revealing. Rather than going through a transparent legislative debate or a formal reversal of the NIH’s safety determination, language mandating $18.2 million in CREID funding was slipped into a broader Congressional appropriations bill. This approach — embedding specific programmatic directives into must-pass spending legislation — is a well-worn strategy in Washington, allowing narrow interests to achieve outcomes that might not survive open scrutiny.

The HHS official’s admission that they are “unsure how university lobbyists managed to insert this demand into the funding bill” underscores a broader dynamic in federal science governance: the agencies nominally responsible for public health decisions may find themselves overridden by Congressional riders that reflect the priorities of institutional grant recipients rather than the findings of safety reviewers.

NIH has historically been the largest single federal funder of research at U.S. institutions of higher education, accounting for approximately 56% of all federal research funding to universities in FY2023, according to National Science Foundation data. With that level of financial dependency, it is perhaps unsurprising that universities maintain significant lobbying operations aimed at protecting and expanding their access to NIH grants.

The Andersen and Daszak Connections

The two researchers most prominently associated with CREID grants — Kristian Andersen and Peter Daszak — have each become central figures in ongoing debates over COVID-19 origins and the conduct of pandemic-era science.

Andersen co-authored the influential February 2020 paper in Nature Medicine titled “Proximal Origin,” which argued against a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2. House Republicans subsequently charged that Fauci helped orchestrate the paper’s publication. House Democrats, in their own investigation, concluded that Jeremy Farrar — now chief scientist with the World Health Organization — “led the drafting process” of the paper and helped organize it. Notably, Fauci signed off on Andersen’s CREID grant award in the months following the paper’s publication.

In a recent interview with The DisInformation Chronicle, virologist and former CDC Director Robert Redfield stated that Andersen’s “Proximal Origin” paper constitutes scientific fraud and should be retracted. The biosafety advocacy group BioSafety Now has separately written an open letter to Nature Medicine demanding retraction of the paper, characterizing it as “a product of scientific misconduct.”

As recently as ten days before this reporting, Andersen was publicly lamenting the loss of his CREID grant on the social media platform Bluesky — a grant the NIH had deemed “unsafe for Americans.”

Peter Daszak’s situation is more legally definitive. In the final days of the Biden Administration, HHS formally debarred both Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance from receiving federal funds, following revelations of pandemic-era wrongdoing surfaced by the House COVID Select Subcommittee.

Gain-of-Function Research and Executive Action

The restoration of CREID funding arrives against the backdrop of ongoing executive efforts to address gain-of-function research — the class of experiments that enhance pathogen transmissibility or lethality and that critics argue contributed to conditions that made a potential lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 plausible.

The HHS official quoted in reporting by The DisInformation Chronicle was unequivocal on one point: “We will absolutely abide by the President’s executive order to not fund dangerous gain-of-function research.” The White House has been finalizing a comprehensive plan to govern such research, stemming from a May 2025 executive order on the subject.

The tension between that executive commitment and the Congressional mandate to restore CREID funding illustrates a recurring fault line in federal policy: executive agencies seeking to implement presidential directives can find their actions undone by Congressional appropriators responding to institutional lobbying. The result is a policy environment where safety determinations made by health officials can be effectively nullified through the appropriations process.

Institutional Power and the Science Funding Pipeline

The CREID episode offers a window into the structural relationship between federal science funding and the university sector. NIH awarded over 64,000 extramural research and training grants annually in FY2023 and FY2024, making American research universities deeply reliant on the continued flow of federal dollars. That reliance creates a powerful incentive for institutions to deploy lobbying resources when funding streams are threatened.

What makes the current situation distinctive is that the program in question was not cut due to budget constraints or shifting scientific priorities in the conventional sense — it was shut down by NIH on safety grounds. The successful effort to reverse that determination through Congressional action, without any public rebuttal of the safety concerns that prompted the shutdown, raises questions that go beyond the usual debates over science funding levels.

Whether the reconstituted CREID program will operate under materially different parameters than its predecessor — particularly regarding pathogen collection activities — remains to be seen. The HHS official’s statement that the new program “will not fund the collection of dangerous pathogens from places like bat caves in China” suggests the administration intends to impose conditions on the congressionally mandated funding, setting up a potential conflict over how the $18.2 million is ultimately deployed.

Conclusion

The reversal of NIH’s CREID shutdown — achieved not through a scientific reassessment but through a lobbying-driven Congressional appropriations rider — reveals the durability of institutional interests in shaping federal research policy. An agency’s formal safety determination, made by officials accountable for public health, was effectively overridden by legislative language whose origins even senior HHS officials cannot fully account for. As debates over biosafety, gain-of-function research, and COVID-19 origins continue to animate both scientific and political discourse, the question of who controls the direction of America’s pandemic research infrastructure remains very much open.

This article draws on reporting from Activist Post and the DisInformation Chronicle, with supplementary context from Congressional Research Service (IF13131) and NIH.gov.