Questions related to the frustrating search for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic keep creating commotion. Last week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) placed one of its grantees, and itself, in the hot seat when it told Congress in a letter that the EcoHealth Alliance in New York City had failed to promptly report potentially worrisome results from a virology experiment done by a collaborator in China. In a progress report for one of its grants, EcoHealth had mentioned an altered bat coronavirus made mice sicker than expected, a discovery it should have notified the agency of immediately, NIH asserted in a letter to Congress.
EcoHealth, which has directed some of its NIH money to researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), was already under attack. Some scientists, politicians, and journalists espouse the idea that the ongoing pandemic was likely sparked by a virus that escaped from WIV.
There is no concrete evidence for that. But to detractors of NIH and EcoHealth, the letter and the progress report show NIH supported what’s often called gain-of-function (GOF) virus research in China, the type of studies that can make pathogens more dangerous to humans and that some think may have spawned SARS-CoV-2. (“In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan,” Vanity Fair declared, for example.)
NIH has consistently denied that it has funded risky GOF research in China, and still does. EcoHealth’s work didn’t meet the bar, the agency says, because the more pathogenic bat coronavirus was created from one not known to infect humans. Still, NIH demanded that EcoHealth provide by this week any unpublished data beyond its last progress report, which covered year five of the grant.