EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. nonprofit that used National Institute of Health funds to conduct dangerous coronavirus research in partnership with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the global Covid-19 pandemic, has been approved for yet another five-year federal grant, despite a history of violating the terms of its contracts.
On September 21, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by the soon-to-be-stepping down Anthony Fauci, approved a new five-year grant for EcoHealth. The nonprofit will receive $653,392 this year, and is in line to receive more than $3.25 million over the next five years. The grant is to analyze "the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam," according to a description on the NIH RePORTER website.
This newest grant is one of four concurrent NIH grants that EcoHealth has. Three of the four grants were awarded after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"This is high-risk research that involves going into remote, often inaccessible areas, and sampling bats and bat excreta, and then returning those samples to laboratories in population centers where they attempt to isolate the virus … and then seek to characterize the threat level posed by the virus," said Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University. "This is one of the kinds of research that may have been directly responsible for the current pandemic."
NIAID did not respond to an email from National Review on Monday asking why the grant was awarded and if the agency will be providing extra oversight to EcoHealth's work.
The description of this newest EcoHealth project wouldn't' qualify as gain-of-function research, Ebright said. Gain-of-function research involves extracting viruses from animals and engineering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or dangerous to humans. But Ebright said two of EcoHealth's grants do involve gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic research on coronaviruses. And even if the current description of the new project doesn't involve gain-of-function research, that doesn't mean it couldn't later.
From securing funding to completing the research, it is a six-year process, Ebright said, and the project is bound to change over those six years. "If researchers robotically followed what they proposed six years ago, they would not be taking into account developments in their own labs and in the field at any point along the way," he said. "You have to have this flexibility. That also means you need oversight to make sure the flexibility isn't going into forbidden areas."
Going into forbidden areas is exactly how EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak, previously got into trouble. Starting in 2014, the U.S. government temporarily paused funding for gain-of-function research due to concerns over biosafety and biosecurity. When some of EcoHealth's research – involving infecting genetically-engineered mice with hybrid viruses – seemed to cross that line, NIAID staff and EcoHealth leaders crafted work-around guidelines to allow the nonprofit to continue its work.
According to the new guidelines, EcoHealth would only stop its work if the viruses it was working on grew ten times faster than the viruses they were based on. But EcoHealth didn't stop work or immediately report back when one of the viruses the nonprofit's scientists were working on grew at a rate 10,000 times greater than its parent virus. Daszak denied that EcoHealth violated the guidelines or that it was conducting gain-of-function research.
Ebright said he has concerns generally about the safety and practical benefits of conducting high-risk virus research and gain-of-function research. And he has specific concerns about EcoHealth, "which the NIH has determined to have repeatedly and seriously violated contractual terms and conditions of its grants," he said.
"That should be the basis for termination of eligibility for further funding," he added. "Indeed, that should be the basis for government-wide debarment from receiving federal grants and contracts. So, seeing another award going to an entity that the NIH has determined to have systematically violated terms and conditions of grants makes no sense."
While the bulk of EcoHealth Alliance's federal funding comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of Defense, the NIH and NIAID funding allows the nonprofit to do some of its most controversial work, Ebright said, adding that it doesn't take a lot of time or money to develop a new coronavirus sequence.
"All of the U.S. AID and all of the Department of Defense funding that has been disclosed to date has been for virus discovery, whereas the NIH funding has been for both virus discovery and virus gain-of-function," he said. "All high risk, but the NIH funds have supported the highest-risk component of that high-risk research."
In addition to concerns about EcoHealth's work, Daszak has been accused of being a China apologist, and echoing seemingly far-fetched claims by the Chinese government about the possible origins of the Covid-19 virus. EcoHealth Alliance in China is dependent on the approval of the Chinese government to continue operating in the country.
When the Chinese officials conducted a supposed "internal investigation" into the possible origins of the pandemic in conjunction with the World Health Organization, Daszak was the only American that Beijing allowed to join the WHO team. The WHO gave Beijing veto power over the American scientists who would be appointed.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, though numerous experts, including Ebright, have accused Fauci of playing semantic games with the definition of "gain-of-function" to avoid taking responsibility for his role in orchestrating dangerous overseas research. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky,) who has emerged as Fauci's chief antagonist since the start of the pandemic, has vowed to investigate the possibility that U.S.-funded research may have unleashed Covid, should Republicans retake the majority in November.
No comments: