Top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are pressuring Boston University to provide more information on research that involved creating a new strain of the COVID-19 virus, combining the original strain from 2020 with the omicron variant, amid fears that the project wasn’t vetted and posed a risk of unleashing a more dangerous virus.
Energy and Commerce Republican leader Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA), Rep. Brett Guthrie (KY), the top Republican on the health subcommittee, and Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA), the Republican leader on the oversight and investigations subcommittee requested that the university provide a copy of its safety protocols, terms for their grant funding, and research reports. These requests came after a preprint study published earlier this month detailed that the lab-made hybrid virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than the omicron variant, killing 80% of the mice infected with the hybrid strain. It is worth noting that when the mice were infected with the original virus, 100% were killed.
The findings have since spurred the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to look into whether the agency should have been informed of the research, as they have provided two grants to the research group that conducted it.
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“Dr. Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID,” read the lawmaker’s letter to Boston University President Robert Brown.
Erbelding told Stat that the agency’s grant policies have a framework regarding funding research that deals with the enhancement of dangerous pathogens, one that would have required additional review from representatives of the Health and Human Services Department and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
This type of review is only required for federally funded research, which Boston University says does not apply in this case, as researchers used university funds for the project. The NIH was credited in the study with supporting the project because federal grant money was used to “help develop the tools and platforms that were used in this research,” according to the university.
The research was, however, approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee and the Boston Public Health Commission.
Boston University has also rebutted claims that the research created a more dangerous virus, claiming that the hybrid virus’s effect on the mice cannot be generalized to what it would do to humans.
Mohsan Saeed, the senior author of the study, said that the research was beneficial as it will “lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies.”
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Research involving lab-grown viruses has been increasingly divisive since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as some have theorized that COVID may have originated in a lab and then leaked out to the public. The NIH says that recent research has suggested that the virus originated from bats and was transferred to humans. Still, opponents of this type of research argue that it has more risks than benefits.
“The scientists took sequences from two different strains of the COVID-19 virus, one of which was relatively mild, and created a new strain that is far more infectious and far more deadly,” Steven Salzberg, a biomedical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in Forbes. “As many scientists (and others) have pointed out, research like this carries great risks, foremost among them the chance that an accidental lab leak could create a new pandemic, killing millions of people.”
The Washington Examiner asked Boston University and the NIAID for comment.
