Joint response to GISAID regarding termination of SARS-CoV-2 data feeds

Since our Nov 6 update, we haven't had further correspondence with GISAID Secretariat and the GISAID data feed for SARS-CoV-2 hasn't been updated. We believe it's likely safe to assume that the feed won't be returning and so our GISAID-based analyses at nextstrain.org.ncov/gisaid will remain on hold indefinitely with a last update on Oct 1, 2025. Meanwhile, we continue to update the open analyses based on GenBank / INSDC data weekly to produce phylogenetic analyses at nextstrain.org.ncov/open as well as variant fitness analyses at nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/forecasts.

Meanwhile, on Jan 20, GISAID posted a statement that obliquely refers to Trevor Bedford as "individual four" and states that "GISAID terminated the data feed provided to a developer of software for visualizing phylogenomic data, after a review revealed that 'regional data packages' generated by the developer and offered through GISAID, were for the most part no longer being downloaded." As we described in detail in our Nov 6 blog post, we contend that making metadata and sequences available through the "nextregion" interface was a secondary byproduct enacted in May 2020 to allow reproducible research given strictures of GISAID's data resharing policy. We had previously documented emails from Jan 2020 and May 2020 that show this to be the case. This re-writing of history matches previous behavior by GISAID regarding their contentions surrounding the first publicly shared SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence.

COG-UK, outbreak.info and Cov-Spectrum were also referenced in GISAID's Jan 20 statement. Consequently, we, along with members of COG-UK, outbreak.info and Cov-Spectrum, have issued a joint response to GISAID that can be found at github.com/andersen-lab/2026_gisaid_response.