CREID Pro Quo: A Lie That Will Kill People

A conspiracy theory that Tony Fauci paid off scientists to cover up a "lab leak" is paying dividends for the conspiracy theorists. Not so much the rest of humanity.

This week, a lab leak conspiracy blogger gleefully anticipated the demise of a NIH grant program focused on studying the risk of emerging infectious diseases. This program, called the Centers for Research on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID), planned to award $82 million to 11 research centers around the US over 5 years to study the potential for dangerous pathogens to “spill over” into the human population from an animal reservoir. This is how the vast majority of epidemics and pandemics begin. The evidence to date suggests this how SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans to cause the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Friday, June 6th, CREID Principal Investigators received termination letters on the grounds that “the research supported by the CREID Network has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding.”

Keeping Americans safe from emerging viruses is no longer a NIH agency priority

Although NIH should never fund research that is unsafe for Americans, it’s notable that no evidence was cited to explain what exactly is so unsafe about the research being conducted by the CREID network. There is a good reason for that: CREID—and all the NIH research on the emerging pathogens that can cause pandemics and kill millions of people—is not unsafe for Americans. This is yet another example of the current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya distorting reality to justify their vicious attacks on our national scientific and public health capacity. When it comes to trying to convince the public they have legitimate reasons for devastating thousands of careers, shutting down lifesaving research, replacing evidence-based scientific inquiry with anti-vax political ideology, and illegally impounding funds appropriated by Congress, every day is Opposite Day.

CREID was making the world a safer place

You wouldn’t know it from Kennedy and Bhattacharya’s unsupported claims that lab leaks perpetrated by reckless, biosafety-hating virologists are to blame for most of humanity’s infectious disease woes, but this is untrue. The vast majority of pandemics begin through zoonotic spillover, or a pathogen being transmitted from an animal to a human.

Zoonotic spillover is a growing risk because of the way humans live and interact with the environment. Humans develop land, engineer the environment, hunt animals, and move around a lot. Deforestation, resource extraction, and climate change all disrupt ecosystems, changing habitats and driving animals into new regions, creating new opportunities for them to interact with humans or other animals.

This creates new opportunities for viruses—especially ones we’ve never seen before—to infect humans or animals that we depend upon for food and agricultural production. And there are a lot of viruses out there, including those we’ve never seen before and don’t know anything about. Some of those viruses can infect humans, so increasing the potential for human exposure to their animal hosts increases the potential for humans to be infected with them. Spillover is incredibly common, with one study estimating hundreds of thousands of SARS-related coronavirus spillover events per year in southeast Asia. Most of the time, it is rare for spillover to result in a pandemic, but the currently known evidence suggests it happened sometime in late November or December 2019 at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. With enough chances, even rare events can become more frequent.

Different variables and circumstances lead to zoonotic spillover (from Plowright et al, Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2017)

H5N1 influenza is a good example of this. My colleagues and I analyzed H5N1 genomes associated with the original spillover from wild birds to dairy cattle and found that this happened once in late 2023. Every single case of moo flu detected in 2024 was a derivative of this first spillover from birds to cows, so we surmised that this was probably very rare. Well, at least we thought that until February 2025, when two more independent spillovers occurred in Nevada and Arizona. More opportunity in the form of uncontrolled spread in infected wild birds getting access to dairy operations resulted in more virus spreading to cows. The uncontained dairy cattle outbreak in the US, in turn, creates more opportunity for spillover from cows to humans.

The purpose of the CREID network was to better understand these viruses to reduce spillover risk by a variety of approaches. We can’t stop viruses we don’t know about until we know about them, and we can’t do anything about them until we understand which ones present the biggest risk to people. Can they infect humans or other animals? Can they cause disease? Can they be transmitted between people?

This doesn’t sound like a diabolical plan to start pandemics to me, but then again, this is exactly what one of Tony Fauci’s minions WOULD say to keep the reckless virology gravy train rolling along at full speed

Pandemic preparedness depends on detecting spillover and outbreaks as soon as possible after they occur, which means knowing which viruses we should even be looking for. We also need to have diagnostic tests that can detect them. Having a stockpile of vaccines or antiviral drugs depends on knowing which viruses we need to protect ourselves against, and knowing enough about them to actually make countermeasures that will work. Making an effective plan for how to respond to different pathogens depends on ensuring that partners around the world can carry out rapid responses in a coordinated way, and implementation requires building and sustaining infrastructure tailored to scientific needs. The only way to obtain this critical information is to study the viruses most likely to cause these outbreaks so that we understand how they work. The CREID network was developed to tackle these problems.

Is the work I just described “unsafe for Americans”? Opponents of the CREID program have suggested that it’s wildly risky to carry out many activities inherent to studying emerging viruses. If someone is accidentally infected in the field while conducting surveillance, or is careless or irresponsible in the lab while characterizing the virus, they could start a pandemic. Conveniently, I both have done virology field work and currently conduct experimental virology research in a high containment lab, so I can provide some insight here. Let’s take a quick look at what the CREID centers were actually doing.

Most of them were conducting surveillance for known emerging viruses—either molecular (PCR and genome sequencing, indicating active infection) or serological (testing for antibodies, indicating prior exposure)—as well as capacity building and response coordination in collaboration with local public health authorities. Some centers were doing surveillance for emerging arboviruses (viruses transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, lice, biting flies, etc). Some centers were developing new methods and technologies for testing and detection for outbreaks of many different emerging viruses. Some centers were identifying novel threats before they emerge, in animal as well as human populations. All the centers were doing epidemiological studies to detect, track, and forecast outbreaks in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa. The entire CREID network worked closely with their international partners to implement the research for response and preparedness at the places where outbreaks are likely to occur. This research has reduced virus infections in humans, which reduces outbreak risk and has a meaningful positive impact on health, globally and in the US.

CREID centers primarily used molecular approaches to testing and the work itself was largely surveillance and epidemiology occurring in other countries, in locations where these threats were most likely to emerge. You don’t need infectious virus for this and usually samples are collected in buffer that inactivates viruses on contact. For projects that do involve virus culture, the experimental work proposed is primarily in the context of vaccine or antiviral development and all would take place in a properly equipped containment laboratory with both federal and institutional oversight. None of the CREID centers proposed experimental virology work that would have triggered additional review under the regulatory framework governing “gain of function” research of concern. For the type of work described by the CREID centers, exposure risks are highest in the field or clinic (getting infected while taking samples) and in the lab (getting infected when culturing and handling live virus). The field and clinic risks can be mitigated through training, infection control practices and personal protective equipment. The lab risks can be mitigated through training, use of well-established biosafety and biosecurity practices, appropriate biocontainment, and personal protective equipment. There are also approved vaccines for many of the focus pathogens, including chikungunya, dengue, Ebola, and yellow fever virus, which dramatically reduces risk to workers in the field, clinic, and lab. The research performed by CREID investigators does not increase safety risks if effective mitigation measures are in place. This research is not unsafe for Americans or anyone else.

On the other hand, Americans are far more unsafe now that the CREID network has been dismantled. If there is an outbreak of another novel coronavirus, I’d like it to be contained before it becomes a pandemic this time. The CREID network was building capacity around the world to do exactly that, and now that investment will not be sustained. We will lose the ability to detect outbreaks quickly and we may not be able to respond. As a result, more people will get sick and more people will die. Ending the CREID network makes Americans and everyone else far more vulnerable to these emerging pathogens than we were before.

The CREID conspiracy

So if the CREID network’s research wasn’t actually unsafe, then how can this be justified? Well, this is where this story turns into a chilling cautionary tale about the power of propaganda to undermine scientific inquiry, as well as a record of yet another lab leak conspiracy theory that is both profoundly stupid and completely divorced from reality. The CREID network has become central to a popular lab leak tale about how evil virologists covered up the true origin of the pandemic at Tony Fauci’s command. Full disclosure: I am an author of some of the key papers presenting evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic likely began at the Huanan Seafood Market, so I am part of this supposed cover-up. Collectively the lab leakers refer to us as the “Zoonati”—like the Illuminati, except for zoonotic pandemic origin hypotheses. Our Zoonati network of co-conspirators have been allegedly complicit in fraud.

In January 2020, founding Zoonatus Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research was perusing the newly sequenced SARS-CoV-2 genome and thought it looked weird. Like maybe-it-came-from-a-lab weird. So he talked to a couple of other evolutionary virologists and they all agreed that there were features that, as Andersen later wrote to Fauci, “were inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” On February 1, 2020, they convened a teleconference of experts, including Tony Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins, who all had different opinions on the likelihood that the virus was engineered or created in a lab. After the teleconference, everybody emailed each other. They didn’t agree on whether the virus from a lab or not, so Andersen and the Proximal Zoonati continued their analysis. As they studied the genome more, they realized that the virus actually wasn’t that weird. It was new, but the previously suspicious features didn’t actually seem all that suspicious after further scrutiny. They reported their results in a paper called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, noting their conclusion that, based on the evidence, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” This paper went on to be one of the most cited papers of the pandemic. It has largely held up scientifically in the five years since it was published, but that’s a topic for another time.

Before all of this happened, in 2019, Andersen had submitted a proposal for a CREID center that was given a fundable score at the study section in November 2019, which is where NIH grant proposals undergo peer review. This proposal was reviewed and scored prior to the pandemic, which means that this grant was almost certain to be funded based on its scientific merit long before Andersen ever knew the SARS-CoV-2 genome existed, much less thought it looked weird. Andersen testified under oath and provided evidence about this timeline to the US Congressional Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2023.

If this all seems very boring, that’s because it is. Scientific discussions and teleconferences, even about topics that result in highly influential scientific papers, and the process by which NIH reviews grant applications do not make for thrilling narratives with broad appeal. The truth is often quite unremarkable.

Not ones to let truth get in the way of a good story, the lab leak brain trust cooked up a very different explanation for these events. They think SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. Specifically, they think it was made by gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was funded by Tony Fauci via a subaward on a NIAID grant. They think the Proximal Origin authors lied, citing emails and Slack messages in which they discussed their evolving views of the hypotheses they were testing and also joked around, swore, and expressed political opinions. They think Andersen perjured himself when he explained this to Congress, because Fauci paid him off with a $9M CREID award in exchange for covering up the lab leak by publishing the Proximal Origin paper. They think the Zoonati conspired to cover it all up.

The lab leak lobby proclaims this lie as a validated fact. Rutgers University Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry, antibiotic startup entrepreneur, Rand Paul advisor, and unhinged biosafety zealot Richard Ebright developed a catchphrase to describe it: CREID pro quo.

Ebright thinks that forced expatriation to a foreign gulag is a fitting punishment for a US citizen who wrote a Nature Medicine paper he didn’t agree with or like

Since coining the term in 2021, Ebright has copy-pasted it into Twitter/X replies hundreds of times to make false accusations of criminal fraud without ever offering a shred of proof. And others have taken notice, repeating the CREID pro quo lie in official venues like the US House of Representatives. Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup and the Majority Staff of the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 Pandemic put out a report in July 2023 immediately prior to Andersen’s testimony, asking “Did the ‘Bethesda Boys’ Downplay a Lab Leak?” and alleging that the Proximal Origin authors went to extreme lengths to placate and protect Fauci and Collins. Ryan Grim accused Andersen of lying in The Intercept and quoted Ebright alleging that Andersen’s already-scored CREID award “would not need to be mentioned to be motivational.” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio accused Andersen explicitly of CREID pro quo: “Three days after they say it came from a lab, they change their position and the only intervening event is a conference call with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins…And then three months later, shazam, they get 9 million bucks from Dr. Fauci. Well, isn’t that something.”

Yes, isn’t that something. Something that doesn’t make any sense unless you have no idea how NIH grants work. Something that can only make sense if you believe that the lab leak must be true, no matter what the evidence shows. Something that is an evidence-free accusation of felony fraud that is predicated on a lie. The lab leak true believers don’t accept that Proximal Origin or any of the papers published by Zoonati authors could be scientifically valid, so there have been extensive efforts to discredit our work. The CREID pro quo conspiracy theory, like so many other speculative lab leak stories, has been repeated ad nauseum by malicious windbags like Ebright for four years, which is long enough for many people to absorb it and believe that it might be true. And if it might be true, that means the entire CREID program is corrupt. And if the program is corrupt, then it must also be dangerous and should be ended. Which brings me back to the CREID network’s tragic fate.

The lab leak hypothesis is being used to justify much of the damage being wrought on the federal government, particularly at CDC and NIH. The claim that the greatest threat comes from virology research compared to zoonotic spillover is easily and obviously disproven by the thousands of naturally occurring outbreaks compared to the handful of lab-derived ones. This inverted risk assessment is a lie meant to justify shuttering programs that address the real risk in favor of an imagined one. The great sins of the CREID network were not scientific ones. They were not corruption or fraud. The CREID network was terminated for being politically inconvenient; because it was conceived by Fauci, became the unwilling subject of implausible conspiracy theories, and focused on naturally emerging zoonotic viruses, it was anathema to the current administration.

During its brief existence, CREID built up capacity and critical infrastructure to conduct evidence-based research and build preparedness in places where outbreaks are most likely to emerge. Kennedy and Bhattacharya can continue to say that research is unsafe and scientists are untrustworthy, but it doesn’t change the fact that more people will be infected with more emerging viruses and more people will die now that the CREID program has been terminated. This is what happens when politically motivated conspiracy theories are given equal weight as scientific truth. The consequences are measured in people’s lives.