NIH admits funding 'limited experiment' in Wuhan, accuses US NGO of funneling its money

In a letter dated Wednesday, October 20, a top National Institutes of Health (NIH) official confessed that US taxpayers financed gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, and stated that EcoHealth Alliance, the US non-profit that directed NIH money to Wuhan Institute of Virology, was not transparent about its activities. According to National Review, Lawrence A. Tabak of the National Institutes of Health cites a "limited experiment" that was conducted to see if "spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model," in a letter to Representative James Comer (R., Ky.). The laboratory mice infected with the modified bat virus "grew sicker" than the unmodified bat virus-infected animals.

The news backs up Republican senator Rand Paul, who got into heated debates with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease head Dr Anthony Fauci on the gain-of-function issue during his congressional testimony in May and July. Paul accused Fauci of misleading Congress by denying that the US had financed gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the second session. Virus gain-of-function research is collecting viruses from animals and artificially altering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or lethal to humans. Tabak avoids the word "gain-of-function" in keeping with Fauci's refusal to use it, despite the fact that the task he describes exactly fulfils its usual description, National Review reported.

Intercept discovered, total grant of $599,000 was for research meant to make viruses more hazardous

The Intercept had already discovered that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research meant to make viruses more hazardous and/or contagious, according to a previously unreported EcoHealth grant proposal filed with NIAID, according to National Review. Dr. Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and Rutgers University professor of chemistry and chemical biology, previously called Dr Anthony Fauci's allegation that the NIH 'has never and does not now sponsor gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV],' "demonstrably incorrect."

The WIV's NIH-funded work "epitomizes" the notion of gain-of-function research, according to Ebright, which deals with "increased potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)" or diseases coming from the augmentation of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a virus, National Review reported.

Tabak also showed that EcoHealth failed to meet its reporting obligations under the award, in addition to admitting that gain-of-function research was being undertaken with NIH funds. In the event of certain events that would enhance the risk connected with the research, EcoHealth was required to submit to a "secondary review." The NIH was supposed to be notified when Wuhan researchers successfully attached a natural bat coronavirus to a human AC2 receptor in mice, but they didn't. Eco Health now has five days to report "any and all unpublished data" relevant to this award's research to the NIH for compliance purposes, according to National Review. The rest of the material tries to show that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses employed in the NIH grant tests are decades removed from SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 evolutionarily, with only 96-97% of the genome in common.

(With input from agencies)

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