The Consortium

What Andersen et al don’t mention in the Nature article is that Tulane University (Robert Garry) and Scripps (Andersen), which formed the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium had: established research programs in three West African countries, namely Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Nigeria, which provide clinical and laboratory resources for the studies on viral hemorrhagic fever. (Constantine Nana, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Why? p27) This included a research lab in the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.

The Consortium was funded by NIH to the tune of $15 mil from 2010-2014. Andersen calls it a founding five-year contract - although in a 2014 interview Garry says he had been working with Kenema hospital for 10 years. 

Garry:  In fact, there's been a research program on the Lassa fever since the 1970s set up by the CDC and other groups. So, after the war was over in 2003 or so, we went back there and started to rebuild the program.

So The Consortium circa 2010 was simply the formalization of a group led by Garry that had been operating in Sierra Leone for 40 years.

Although the initial focus was Lassa, Garry states that prior to the Ebola outbreak, they had also been working on Ebola in Kenema:  

We had started some projects on Ebola just to extend what we'd learned about Lassa to this other very serious disease.

Garry supplies no further details of these projects on Ebola - no research was published. It does indicate that the Consortium had samples of the Ebola virus - in order to work on it.  Was this work carried out in Kenema? That would be very dangerous if it was.

As always, the point of these studies, according to the Consortium’s website (administered by Andersen), was to develop countermeasures against bioterrorism.