NIH Renews Funds for ‘Bat Coronavirus’ Research despite Energy Department, FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion
The National Institutes of Health renewed a grant to EcoHealth Alliance for research on the “risk of bat coronavirus spillover emergence” despite multiple agencies of the U.S. government embracing the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin.
“Zoonotic coronaviruses (CoVs) represent a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated by the emergence of SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2,” a press release read. “Bats were identified as the wildlife reservoirs of SARS-CoV by EcoHealth Alliance, and since then, we have published hundreds of novel SARS-related CoV (SARSr-CoV) sequences from wildlife in China and across Southeast Asia.”
Eco Health Alliance is a U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the NIH in 2019 gave a grant to the organization but paused it in April 2020 after the outbreak of Covid over concerns about ongoing collaborative lab research with the WIV. The WIV subaward through EcoHealth Alliance was then permanently suspended in August 2022 for compliance failures regarding reporting requirements.
To address some objections, on-the-ground work under the auspices of this new grant will not be conducted in China, the press release said. While the study pertains to southern China, the “renewed work will involve collaboration only between EcoHealth Alliance and the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School.”
All “recombinant virus culture or infection experiments” will also be removed from the research process. The press release assured that the research would not be “gain of function,” which involves extracting viruses from animals and engineering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or dangerous to humans.
In February, national-security council communications coordinator John Kirby said the Biden administration supports gain-of-function research despite the potential risks as long as that it is pursued in a safe and transparent manner.
“[The president] believes that [the research is] important to help prevent future pandemics, which means he understands that there has to be legitimate scientific research into . . . the potential sources of pandemics so that we understand [them] and so we can prevent them from happening,” Kirby said.
In an updated assessment released in February, the Energy Department concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory accident, although it made that judgment with “low confidence,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Also in February, FBI director Christopher Wray told Fox News that Covid likely escaped from a laboratory in China, issuing the first public opinion of the sort from the agency on the origins of the virus.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
