A month after a top microbiologist called him “untruthful” for claiming his agency did not subsidize dangerous genetic research on viruses in China, Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, has resigned.
Collins said he will step down before the end of the year.
The question is when Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, will follow.
Fauci, too, has denied funding the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which used it to enhance bat coronaviruses so they can infect human beings. Experts believe a genetically enhanced SARS-CoV-2 escaped a lab at the institute and spread around the world.
Decided in May
NIH and the leftist media put the best face they could on Collins’ announcement.
“Few people could come anywhere close to achieving in a lifetime what Dr. Collins has at the helm of NIH,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said:
It takes an extraordinary person to tackle the biggest scientific challenges facing our nation — and under three presidents, amidst three distinctly different chapters of American history. Dr. Collins, master of scientific breakthroughs and scientific reason — from mapping the human genome to fighting the most devastating pandemic of a century — has routinely broken ground to save countless lives, while unleashing innovation to benefit humanity for generations to come.
Collins told the Washington Post that he decided to step down in May. “He said he did not want to get too far into the Biden administration before making the move and was confident that NIH’s role in developing therapeutics, tests and vaccines for the coronavirus had reached ‘a pretty stable place,’” the Post explained.
But the Post somehow omitted last month’s stunner from Richard Ebright, head of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University.
Responding to a long piece at The Intercept, Ebright concluded NIH and NIAID did indeed fund the perilous research in Wuhan.
Fauci angrily denied the truth when Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) asked him about it during testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Collins denied it in a statement from NIH. “Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans,” he said.
Intercept Story
The Intercept uncovered two grants in a 900-page tome of government documents.
“The materials confirm the grants supported the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells,” Ebright wrote:
The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses — one not been previously disclosed publicly — was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed…
… and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
The Intercept’s document release, Ebright wrote, “make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
With Collins soon gone, the question is if and when Fauci will be held accountable for his false testimony before the Senate’s HELP committee.
When Paul questioned Fauci about NIAID’s gain-of-function subsidies to WIV, Fauci denied that his agency paid for such research and said Paul didn’t know what he was talking about.
If true, maybe Fauci would say Ebright is clueless, too.
