Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing the Biden administration to provide information about what the U.S. government knows about the potential origins of COVID-19, with one GOP congressman pressing Dr. Anthony Fauci about his support for gain-of-function research and about National Institutes of Health funding going to a Wuhan lab.
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said that the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has killed 3.25 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University, and both administrations cast doubt on the manner in which the WHO-China study was conducted in early 2021. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, Trump officials have pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a highly plausible origin for the pandemic.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, wrote a letter to Fauci this week asking for answers on NIH’s relationship with the Wuhan lab.
“Through National Institutes of Health grants to the New York-based organization EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. government helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While this funding was no doubt well-intentioned, taxpayers deserve a detailed understanding of whether federal resources supported dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ research, and whether this might have played a role in the outbreak of the pandemic,” Gallagher wrote. “As the world seeks to recover from this pandemic, Americans deserve to understand not only how this catastrophe came about, but that their government is learning and internalizing lessons to ensure it does not happen again.”
EcoHealth Alliance received at least $3.4 million from 2014, and Peter Daszak, a key member of the WHO-China joint study team who is also the leader of the EcoHealth Alliance, steered at least $600,000 in National Institutes of Health funding to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research, also criticizing the Biden administration for appearing skeptical of the WHO’s findings and defending China to Chinese Communist Party-linked outlets.
U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about lax biosecurity at the Wuhan lab led by “bat woman” Shi Zhengli, who had worked with EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said in March that the joint WHO-China team had not fully investigated the potential of COVID-19 originating through an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, a hypothesis he insisted still needed further study despite being essentially dismissed by the WHO-China team.
WHO CHIEF SAYS INVESTIGATION WITH CHINA INTO WUHAN LAB NOT EXTENSIVE ENOUGH
Gallagher tweeted this week that “the cause of this pandemic is the most important question facing the world,” and so, “I wrote to Dr. Fauci demanding answers to questions we cannot ignore about Covid’s potential lab origins, the role of U.S. funding for Chinese labs, and his support for this reckless research.”
A State Department fact sheet released in mid-January contended Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.” The fact sheet added that the lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military.”
“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the State Department fact sheet said, arguing that “this raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
The Biden administration has declined to weigh in on the fact sheet, though the Washington Post reported that an unnamed Biden State Department official said that “there wasn’t significant or meaningful disagreement regarding the information” in the fact sheet.
“While many in the scientific community were quick to dismiss the possibility that the COVID-19 outbreak originated with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, information initially released by the Trump State Department and later confirmed by the Biden administration suggests much closer examination is needed” Gallagher told Fauci in the letter first noted by the Washington Post.
Gallagher pressed Fauci on how much U.S. government funding has gone to the Wuhan lab, how much of it supported gain-of-function research, and whether U.S. funds were flowing to the Chinese laboratory during the U.S. moratorium on gain-of-function research from 2014 to 2017.
“You have argued over the years that gain-of-function research is a risk worth taking, given the potential benefits for the creation of vaccines and therapeutics,” Gallagher told Fauci. “Does the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibility of a leak from the WIV raise questions about the future prudence of gain-of-function research? How can we quantify the risks associated with this type of research in the future, particularly when it comes to non-transparent countries like China, and at what point does this research simply become too risky?”
The Wisconsin Republican also asked the Biden adviser if he agreed with Tedros that the lab leak possibility needed further investigation with potential further missions led by specialists and experts and whether he had studied the Trump State Department fact sheet.
A trio of other House Republicans including Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the GOP’s ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee, also called upon Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week to release unclassified information and further declassify other details related to the Wuhan lab fact sheet.
This follows a March letter from Rodgers for NIH to provide Congress with “an assessment from a classified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report [that] included the possibility that the origins of SARS CoV-2 could have emerged accidentally from a laboratory in Wuhan, China due to unsafe laboratory practices” and to answer questions about why NIH was allowing funds to be steered to the Wuhan lab. And back in February, more than two dozen GOP House members called for a “prompt and thorough investigation into the NIH’s response to biosafety concerns” at the Wuhan lab, asking the HHS inspector general to investigate U.S. funding for the lab.
The NIH told the Washington Examiner earlier this year that the Wuhan lab is not an NIH grantee but that EcoHealth Alliance received NIH grants then provided a sub-award to the Wuhan lab. The agency said that its grant to EcoHealth Alliance was terminated on April 24, 2020, but reinstated July 8, 2020 — though “all activities related to the grant were immediately suspended until EcoHealth Alliance provides information and documentation demonstrating that EcoHealth Alliance and WIV have satisfied concerns NIH has about non-compliance” with award requirements.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases determined the research in the grant was not gain-of-function research because it did not involve the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied,” the NIH said, adding that this research was not subject to its “gain-of-function research funding pause.”
The Wuhan lab maintains a Foreign Assurance with NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare.
