The acting director of the National Institutes of Health is taking the same stance as Dr. Anthony Fauci, denying the U.S. ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and downplaying the possibility COVID-19 emerged from there.
Some scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic believed the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely, but emails show that Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the NIH, worked to help shut the hypothesis down.
Collins retired in 2021, and Fauci retired at the end of 2022. Lawrence Tabak has been “performing the duties of NIH director” since Collins left, and he was grilled in front of the House last week, where he doubled down on the denials by Fauci, Collins, and the NIH about U.S. taxpayer funding ending up being used for gain-of-function research at the Chinese lab.
The NIH provided millions of dollars to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance over the years, and Daszak maintained a long working relationship with Wuhan lab “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, sending her lab at least $600,000 in NIH funding. The NIH grants to EcoHealth included funding for Wuhan lab experiments on the bat viruses, which Republicans and some virology critics of Fauci have said were gain-of-function experiments aimed at making the viruses more transmissible or lethal, which the NIH has denied.
The NIH concluded that EcoHealth violated NIH guidelines when conducting bat coronavirus research while working with the Chinese government lab, but the NIH, Fauci, and Tabak insist that this still wasn’t gain-of-function research.
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) told Tabak during the House hearing last week, “I can’t stress enough how inexplicable the failure of NIH oversight on the EcoHealth Alliance grant is to me. … Despite a bat coronavirus pandemic emerging in the city where NIH-funded bat coronavirus research was taking place, NIH failed to even ask for the missing progress report until 2021.”
Tabak responded by saying the U.S. didn’t fund viral experiments that led to the pandemic.
“The most important point to appreciate here is that the viruses that were under study in that subproject bear no relationship to SARS-CoV-2. They are genetically distinct. They are absolutely unrelated to SARS-CoV-2,” Tabak said of the Wuhan lab. “It would be equivalent to saying that a human is equivalent to a cow.”
The Chinese Communist Party-owned China Daily touted Tabak’s comments with the headline: “NIH head refutes COVID lab-leak rhetoric.”
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The NIH announced in August it was finally cutting off a subaward through EcoHealth to the Wuhan Institute after the lab continued to refuse to hand over lab notebooks and electronic files about the coronavirus research it conducted with U.S. funds, but the NIH nevertheless gave EcoHealth further bat coronavirus funding the next month.
The NIH contends that it has specific rules for dealing with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens” of concern.
“How can you state, how can the NIH know for sure, that it hasn’t funded ePPP when NIH can’t be sure it can get the lab records of experiments funded by NIH?” Lesko asked Tabak.
Tabak replied, “As a result of them failing to provide us with the adequate documentation, they no longer have any funding from NIH.” Tabak also contended that the Wuhan lab’s “work was commensurate with the modest sums of money that we provided to them” but that “I don’t know what other work they are conducting there.”
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) also asked how the NIH is implementing a legal provision banning gain-of-function research. Tabak replied that “there is no funding of ePPP research in any foreign country today that is sponsored by NIH.” He added that “there has not been in the past funded by NIH related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
Richard Ebright, the lab director for the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University who has long pointed to the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan lab and has argued Fauci and others are misleading about NIH-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, said that Tabak’s testimony was “untruthful” in at least four ways.
“First, Tabak falsely stated that NIH is not currently supporting gain-of-function research or enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research,” Ebright told the Washington Examiner. “Second, Tabak falsely stated that NIH had not supported gain-of-function research or enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research in Wuhan. Third, Tabak falsely stated that the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance that supported high-risk research in Wuhan had received the risk-benefit review mandated under the HHS P3CO Framework.”
Ebright added, “Fourth, Tabak falsely stated that the NIH-supported high-risk research in Wuhan could not have resulted in SARS-CoV-2. Apropos the fourth of Tabak’s untruthful statements: The NIH has no information on identities and sequences of the SARS-like viruses constructed by EcoHealth Alliance and its Wuhan partners subsequent to their 2018 grant progress report and their 2018 grant renewal proposal. Therefore, the NIH cannot rule out the possibility that EcoHealth Alliance and its Wuhan partners created SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor, and cannot even rule out the possibility that EcoHealth and its Wuhan partners used NIH funding to create SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor.”
Subcommittee on Health Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) said last week that the “NIH’s refusal to acknowledge any suggestion that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a lab only continues to fuel the controversy and questions around it.”
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The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rejected a $14.2 million proposal by EcoHealth in 2018 over concerns the bat virus experiments involved “gain-of-function” research.
The inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services determined in a 72-page report in January that “the National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance Did Not Effectively Monitor Awards and Subawards,” including the U.S. funding at the Wuhan lab.
