4. The US role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[2] From June 2014 to May 2019, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Whether or not SARS2 is the product of that research, it seems a questionable policy to farm out high-risk research to foreign labs using minimal safety precautions. And if the SARS2 virus did indeed escape from the Wuhan institute, then the NIH will find itself in the terrible position of having funded a disastrous experiment that led to the death of more than 3 million worldwide, including more than half a million of its own citizens.
The responsibility of the NIAID and NIH is even more acute because for the first three years of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance there was a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research. When the moratorium expired in 2017, it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.
The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “[a]n exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the federal reporting system of her research.
“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’—thereby nullifying the Pause,” Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.
But it’s not so clear that the NIH thought it necessary to invoke any loopholes. Fauci told a Senate hearing on May 11 that “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
This was a surprising statement in view of all the evidence about Shi’s experiments with enhancing coronaviruses and the language of the moratorium statute defining gain-of-function as “any research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”
The explanation may be one of definition. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, for one, believes that the term gain-of-function applies only to enhancements of viruses that infect humans, not to animal viruses. “So gain-of-function research refers specifically to the manipulation of human viruses so as to be either more easily transmissible or to cause worse infection or be easier to spread,” an Alliance official told The Dispatch Fact Check.
If the NIH shares the EcoHealth Alliance view that “gain of function” applies only to human viruses, that would explain why Fauci could assure the Senate it had never funded such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the legal basis of such a definition is unclear, and it differs from that of the moratorium language which was presumably applicable.
Definitions aside, the bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting research of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions.
