National Review
Online
Friday, October
22, 2021
We still don’t know if a lab accident
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology caused the COVID-19 global pandemic. But now
we do know for certain that there was a cover-up — and that private
organizations and the U.S. government either hid information or misled the
public regarding several key details about the kinds of research that the U.S.
taxpayers were indirectly funding at the Wuhan labs.
Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy
director of the National Institutes of Health and the deputy ethics counselor
of the agency, wrote to
Congress this week informing it that NIH had indeed
funded “gain of function” research on coronaviruses found in bats, through
grants to the private research group EcoHealth Alliance. Gain-of-function
research takes existing viruses and makes them either more virulent or dangerous,
more contagious, or both, toward the end of learning how to fight them. Quite a
few virologists question whether the reward is worth the risk of deliberately
engineering viruses that are more hazardous to human beings and could
accidentally escape the laboratory and set off a pandemic.
Tabak’s letter makes it sound as if
EcoHealth misled the federal agency about what its research was doing, and that
the organization broke its promises to keep NIH informed of developments as it
was ongoing.
Back in May, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator
Rand Paul had a heated exchange over whether NIH had ever funded this kind of
research. “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely
incorrect — that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function
research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci averred.
Now NIH admits Fauci’s statement is not
quite accurate, pointing to research that was conducted “during the 2018-2019
grant period.”
“The limited experiment described in the
final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike
proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were
capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor on a mouse model,” Tabak wrote. (Before the
pandemic, Chinese research scientists had engineered a supply of mice with “humanized” lungs, to give a better sense of how these
viruses would affect human beings.) “All other aspects of the mice, including
the immune system, were unchanged,” the letter continues. “In this limited
experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus
became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.”
In other words, EcoHealth Alliance had
taken grant money from NIH and worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s
top scientist, Shi Zhengli — the researcher nicknamed “Bat Woman” — who then
took existing bat coronaviruses, figured out if they could be made more
infectious on “humanized” mice lungs, and found that, indeed, the virus made
the mice sicker than the previous iteration. NIH emphasized that “as sometimes occurs
in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to
something that the researchers set out to do.”
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding
right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” Tabak writes.
“EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to
NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under
this award.”
It’s a little late now.
Tabak’s letter emphasized that there was
no way that the viruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could
possibly have become the one that set off the COVID-19 pandemic: “Even these
viruses are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” But
now that we know EcoHealth Alliance was not telling NIH the whole story about
what they were doing with their grant money . . . how certain can NIH be about
anything else involving EcoHealth? What else were researchers at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology doing with the assistance provided by it? Even if the
viruses that EcoHealth Alliance chose to disclose are too genetically different
to have ever become SARS-CoV-2 . . . how do we know EcoHealth Alliance is
telling the whole story?
And is it really a coincidence that a
pandemic involving a novel coronavirus most like those found in bats began on
the metaphorical doorstep of one of three
institutions in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel
coronaviruses in bats, or is it
a sign of something more sinister?
EcoHealth Alliance is run by Peter Daszak.
In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance applied for a grant from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposing an effort to “introduce appropriate
human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses; in other words, to take
existing bat viruses and make them more likely to infect human beings. The
proposal declared that “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral
testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse
work.”
And yet, Daszak spent the first few months
of the pandemic insisting that only unhinged conspiracy theorists believed that
a virus could be bioengineered to become more contagious by focusing on
cleavage sites. “The presence of a Furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2
glycoprotein is widely touted by conspiracy theorists as evidence of lab
culture or bioengineering,” he sneered on
Twitter in May 2020 — even though not that long ago,
Daszak had proposed a project to do that!
Clearly, Daszak has been misleading about
what he knew this whole time and worked overtime to try to keep people off the
scent. One has to wonder, as well, if the rest of the U.S. government’s
public-health leaders, including Fauci, wanted to avoid intense public scrutiny
of their grants to EcoHealth.
We could expect the Chinese government to
do everything possible to hide evidence and keep investigators from getting to
the bottom of the origins of the virus. We should, on the other hand, expect
much more from the U.S. government and its grantees. We need complete
transparency, which we should have gotten from the beginning, and a full
congressional investigation of the role U.S. research dollars played at a lab
that may have been at the epicenter of a global catastrophe.
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