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Coronavirus


IN MAJOR SHIFT, NIH ADMITS FUNDING RISKY VIRUS RESEARCH IN WUHAN

A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter
belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for
virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab
leak could have sparked the pandemic.

By Katherine Eban

October 22, 2021
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases on April 13, 2021. U.S. Photograph by Leigh Vogel / UPI / Bloomberg /
Getty Images.

Save this storySave
Save this storySave

“I totally resent the lie you are now propagating.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of
Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter
Senate hearing on July 20. You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with
all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly
from the right, up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon
cooked up in a lab.

The immediate target of Dr. Fauci’s wrath was Senator Rand Paul, who was
pressing the nation’s top doctor to say whether the National Institutes of
Health had ever funded risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology. Based on new information disclosed by the National Institutes of
Health, however, Paul might have been onto something.



On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy
and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New
York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research
and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat
coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH
letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was
carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was
that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating
that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen
by tenfold.



The NIH based these disclosures on a research progress report that EcoHealth
Alliance sent to the agency in August, roughly two years after it was supposed
to. An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful
in his statements to Congress,” and that he did not have the progress report
that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But
EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement:
“These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report
in April 2018.”

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The letter from the NIH, and an accompanying analysis, stipulated that the virus
EcoHealth Alliance was researching could not have sparked the SARS-CoV-2
pandemic, given the sizable genetic differences between the two. In a statement
issued Wednesday, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said that his agency “wants
to set the record straight” on EcoHealth Alliance’s research, but added that any
claims that it could have caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are “demonstrably
false.”



EcoHealth Alliance said in a statement that the science clearly proved that its
research could not have led to the pandemic, and that it was “working with the
NIH to promptly address what we believe to be a misconception about the grant’s
reporting requirements and what the data from our research showed.”

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s OriginsArrow

But the NIH letter—coming after months of congressional demands for more
information—seemed to underscore that America’s premier science institute has
been less than forthcoming about risky research it has funded and failed to
properly monitor. Instead of helping to lead a search for COVID-19’s origins,
with the pandemic now firmly in its 19th month, the NIH has circled the wagons,
defending its grant system and scientific judgment against a rising tide of
questions. “It’s just another chapter in a sad tale of inadequate oversight,
disregard for risk, and insensitivity to the importance of transparency,” said
Stanford microbiologist Dr. David Relman. “Given all of the sensitivity about
this work, it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not
explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

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The disclosures of the last four months—since Vanity Fair was first to detail
how conflicts of interest resulting from U.S. government funding of
controversial virology research hampered America’s investigation into COVID-19’s
origins—present an increasingly disturbing picture.

Early last month, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents it
obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating
to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a
fifth and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to
submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.

In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report, which was
dated August 2021. That report described a “limited experiment,” as the NIH
letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice infected with an altered virus
became “sicker than those infected with” a naturally occurring one.

The letter did not mention the phrase “gain-of-function research” that has
become so central to the bitter clashes over COVID-19’s origins. That type of
controversial research—the manipulation of pathogens with the aim of making them
more infectious in order to gauge their risk to humans—has divided the virology
community. A review system established in 2017 requires federal agencies to
particularly scrutinize any research proposals that involve enhancing a
pathogen’s infectiousness to humans.

Dr. Fauci’s spokesperson told Vanity Fair that EcoHealth Alliance’s research did
not fall under that framework, since the experiments being funded “were not
reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.”

However, Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and coauthor of the book Viral:
The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, said the NIH was in a “very challenging
position. They funded research internationally to help study novel pathogens and
prevent against them. But they had no way to know what viruses had been
collected, what experiments had been conducted, and what accidents might have
occurred.”



As scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another
disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with
the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that
could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September 20, a group of
internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical
Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million
grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing
SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific
cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens.
Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed
to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research.

The leaked grant proposal struck a number of scientists and researchers as
significant for one reason. One distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code
is a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to
efficiently enter human cells. That is just the feature that EcoHealth Alliance
and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had proposed to engineer in the 2018 grant
proposal. “If I applied for funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied,
but then a year later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a
prime suspect,” said Jamie Metzl, a former executive vice president of the Asia
Society, who sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human
genome editing and has been calling for a transparent investigation into
COVID-19’s origins.

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The claims of a lab origin, made without evidence in April 2020 by President
Donald Trump, have turned into a legitimate, long-haul hunt for the truth that
even U.S. intelligence agencies cannot seem to determine. This summer an
intelligence review ordered by President Joe Biden drew no definitive
conclusions but left open the possibility that the virus leaked from a
laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The NIH’s letter to Congress stated that the agency is giving EcoHealth five
days to submit any unpublished data from the experiments it funded. Republican
leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, who in June asked the NIH
to demand such data, said in a statement Wednesday that “it’s unacceptable that
the NIH delayed asking EcoHealth Alliance to submit unpublished data about risky
research that they were required to under the terms of their grant.”

Meanwhile, members of the DRASTIC coalition have continued their research. As
one member, Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist in New Zealand, told Vanity Fair,
“I cannot be sure that [COVID-19 originated from] a research-related accident or
infection from a sampling trip. But I am 100% sure there was a massive
cover-up.”

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complete online archive now.






KATHERINE EBAN


CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Katherine Eban is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, covering medical and
scientific mayhem. An award-winning investigative journalist, she is the
best-selling author of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug
Boom. You can follow her on Twitter.
See More By Katherine Eban »





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Read More
Coronavirus
Biden’s COVID-19 Origins Report Leaves the Lab Leak on the Table
The U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment, while inconclusive, vindicates
those who insisted on asking if the virus could have escaped from a Wuhan
laboratory.

By Katherine Eban

VIRAL INFLECTION
The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was
off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and
hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

By Katherine Eban

Politics
COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan
Lab
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the cutting-edge biotech facility at the center
of swirling suspicions about the pandemic’s onset, was far more troubled than
previously known, explosive documents unearthed by a Senate research team
reveal. Following the trail of evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica provide the
clearest picture yet of a laboratory institute in crisis.

By Katherine Eban


Politics
A Comprehensive Guide to Why a Ron DeSantis Presidency Would Be as Terrifying as
a Trump One
His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for
the top job in Washington.

By Bess Levin





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