Anthony Fauci’s infectious-disease agency knew in 2016 about a grantee’s violating federal restrictions on dangerous virus research. And that agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), permitted the grantee to police its work.
The latest on NIAID appeared in reports from the Daily Caller and The Intercept.
A NIAID e-mail to the grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, said experiments described in a grant trespassed the ban on funding gain-of-function research, the Caller revealed. That research enhances viruses to make them more virulent. Experts believe the SARS-CoV-2 that infected the world and killed millions sprung from Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s where scientists conducted the experiments.
The Intercept revealed that NIAID permitted EcoHealth to monitor its own work. And that, virologist Richard Ebright said, was akin to permitting students to grade themselves.
Last month, Ebright called Fauci and outgoing NIH chief Francis Collins “untruthful” in saying the agencies did not fund the dangerous experiments. NIH confirmed two weeks ago that EcoHealth did indeed pass money to WIV, which used it to created a souped-up virus that could infect human beings.
The E-mail
“NIAID has determined that the above reference grant may include Gain of Function (GoF) research that is subject to the U.S. Government funding pause,” said the NIAID e-mail to EcoHealth on May 28, 2016.
Bad as that sounds for Fauci, who has falsely denied sending U.S. taxpayer money to China for the research, this is worse:
The letter requested EcoHealth provide its own “determination” as to whether its proposed experiments in Wuhan included gain of function research.
EcoHealth President Peter Daszak submitted his “determination” to the NIAID in a June 8, 2016 letter that downplayed potential risks associated with his group’s proposed research in Wuhan, which involved the creation of lab-made chimeric coronavirus, and denied it involved gain of function.
The NIAID then gave Daszak the opportunity to submit an amended version of his letter on June 27, 2016, after discovering a factual error in the initial filing, emails show. The agency then used Daszak’s revised letter, which kept the original June 8 filing date, as the basis of its own determination on July 7 that EcoHealth’s research did not involve gain of function.
Richard Ebright, who runs the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, said the NIAID gave EcoHealth a blank check.
“The NIH, in effect, delegated to EcoHealth Alliance the authority to determine whether its research was, or was not gain of function research subject to the funding pause, the authority to set criteria for the determination, and the authority to over-ride federal policies implemented by the White House in 2014-2017 and by HHS in 2017-present,” Ebright told the webzine.
NIH is the National Institutes of Health, NIAID’s parent agency.
More Details
The Intercept offered more details about the grant and the research.
“EcoHealth was entering the third year of the five-year, $3.1 million grant that included research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other partners,” the website explained. “In a 2016 progress report, the group described to NIH its plans to carry out two planned experiments infecting humanized mice with hybrid viruses, known as ‘chimeras.’”
The grant administrators “appeared intent on enforcing the funding pause,” the website continued. But they asked for more information from EcoHealth, including “a detailed description of changes that would allow the researchers to pursue their aims without conducting the dangerous experiments.”
That’s when “agency staff adopted language that EcoHealth Alliance crafted to govern its own work,” the Intercept reported:
But what happened next sets off alarm bells for biosafety advocates: Agency staff adopted language that EcoHealth Alliance crafted to govern its own work. The agency inserted several sentences into grant materials describing immediate actions the group would take if the viruses they created proved to become more transmissible or disease-causing as the result of the experiments.
NIH and some scientists say the viruses are not the same as the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. But the larger point is that NIH permitted a grantee to write its own rules.
“This is like the teacher giving you the opportunity to write your own homework problem and grade your own homework when you turn it in,” Ebright told the Intercept. “Then you decide the teacher is so lenient, there’s no need to hand it in. The oversight process clearly failed.”
In fact, those viruses did become more transmissible; i.e., they gained function. EcoHealth was supposed to report that fact to NIH but didn’t, NIH revealed.
EcoHealth disputes that claim.
