By Ed Cara Published May 1, 2025 | Comments (0) | HHS Chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously promised to shut down infectious disease research. © New Africa via Shutterstock The Trump administration looks to be surrendering in the war against germs. A new report from Wired reveals the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has shuttered a federal lab dedicated to studying some of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world. According to Wired’s report, published Wednesday, the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland was ordered to completely cease its experimental research by April 29. The facility has long researched the treatment and prevention of “high consequence” infectious diseases, including Ebola and Lassa fever. The facility’s ultimate fate is uncertain at this time. The Integrated Research Facility operates under the umbrella of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It hosts one of the dozen research laboratories in North America allowed to handle germs that meet the criteria for Biosafety Level 4, the highest level of containment; it’s also one of the few places in the entire world where scientists can perform medical imaging on BSL-4 infected animals. BSL-4 pathogens typically cause severe or fatal illness, may be able to spread easily in a lab setting, and have few or no available treatments or vaccines. These pathogens include the viruses that cause Ebola and Lassa, as well as the reconstructed flu virus that caused the 1918 pandemic. Wired viewed an email sent by Michael Holbrook, associate director for high containment at the Integrated Research Facility, that detailed the facility’s shuttering. Holbrook reportedly told employees that the facility will be explicitly ending its studies on Lassa fever, SARS-Cov-2, and Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), a rare but often deadly mosquitoborne virus found in the U.S. Northeast. The animals used for these studies, however, will not be euthanized. He added that officials from the Department of Homeland Security would padlock the freezers used for BSL-4 research. “The sacrifice to research is immense,” Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Wired. “If things are unused for a period of time, it will cost more money to get them ready to be used again.” The HHS’s closing of the Integrated Research Facility shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. After President Donald Trump’s election win last November, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has since become HHS chief—promised that he would try to shut down infectious disease research at the National Institutes of Health as soon as Trump took office. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also (wrongly) claimed that federal funding on infectious diseases far outweighed the money spent studying chronic diseases. When contacted by Wired, a NIH spokesperson characterized the facility’s closing as a “research pause” and appeared to blame staff members for the shutdown, though without any further details. Notably, the facility’s director, Connie Schmaljohn, was also put on administrative leave. “This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause,” Bradley Moss, communication director for the office of research services at NIH, told Wired. The government’s stated rationale for pausing work at the Integrated Research Facility might merit some skepticism, however, given how unorganized and destructive the supposed “restructuring” of HHS being carried out by RFK Jr. has gone to date. And seeing as we’re still fresh off the worst pandemic seen in over a century, any sustained pause in infectious disease research is likely to be bad news. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Ed Cara Published April 30, 2025 By Ed Cara Published April 23, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published April 22, 2025 By Ed Cara Published April 21, 2025 By Ed Cara Published April 15, 2025 By Ed Cara Published April 11, 2025