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trvrb merged 3 commits into from
Feb 24, 2026
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Include initial draft of blog post #1319

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Include initial draft of blog post
trvrb Feb 23, 2026
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trvrb Feb 23, 2026
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Update 2026-02-24-gisaid-joint-response.md
trvrb Feb 24, 2026
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---
author: "Trevor Bedford, Richard Neher and the Nextstrain team"
date: "2026-02-24"
title: "Joint response to GISAID regarding termination of SARS-CoV-2 data feeds"
sidebarTitle: "Joint response to GISAID regarding termination of SARS-CoV-2 data feeds"
---

Since our [Nov 6 update](/blog/2025-11-06-gisaid-based-ncov-analyses), 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](/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](/ncov/open) as well as variant fitness analyses at [nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/forecasts](/sars-cov-2/forecasts).

Meanwhile, on Jan 20, [GISAID posted a statement](https://gisaid.org/statements/20260120/) 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](/blog/2025-11-06-gisaid-based-ncov-analyses), 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](https://data.nextstrain.org/files/blog/2025-11-06_gisaid_fact_check.pdf) 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](https://www.science.org/content/article/dispute-simmers-over-who-first-shared-sars-cov-2-s-genome).

[COG-UK](https://www.sanger.ac.uk/collaboration/covid-19-genomics-uk-cog-uk-consortium/), [outbreak.info](https://outbreak.info/) and [Cov-Spectrum](https://cov-spectrum.org/) 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](https://github.com/andersen-lab/2026_gisaid_response).