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RFK Jr.’s HHS Orders Lab Studying Deadly Infectious Diseases to Stop Research
NIAID's Integrated Research Facility is one of the few federal facilities charged with studying Ebola. Tuesday afternoon, all of its work was put on indefinite pause by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s department.
The email, sent by Michael Holbrook, associate director for high containment at the Integrated Research Facility, says the lab is terminating studies on Lassa fever, SARS-Cov-2, and Eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE, a rare but lethal mosquito-borne disease that has been reported in several Northern US states. The email says representatives from the Department of Homeland Security were padlocking freezers in BSL-4 labs, those with the highest level of biosafety containment used for studying highly dangerous microbes. This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause.
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