Bat Research Group Failed to Submit Virus Studies Promptly, N.I.H. Says
"A US researcher who worked with a Wuhan virology lab gives 4 reasons why a coronavirus leak wou"
The federal agency told a G.O.P. House member that it had notified EcoHealth Alliance, a group criticized for its U.S.-funded work with Wuhan scientists, to file data within five days.
Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the N.I.H., in May. N.I.H. officials have rejected claims that coronaviruses studied with federal funding might have produced the pandemic. Pool photo by Stefani Reynolds
By Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller Published Oct. 21, 2021Updated Oct. 28, 2021
The National Institutes of Health said on Wednesday that a nonprofit group under fire from some congressional Republicans for its research collaborations in China .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/world/asia/china-zero-covid-virus.html .. had failed to promptly report findings from studies on how well bat coronaviruses grow in mice.
In a letter to Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, the N.I.H. said that the group, EcoHealth Alliance, had five days to submit all unpublished data from work conducted under a multiyear grant it was given in 2014 for the research. The organization’s grant was canceled in 2020 under President Donald J. Trump’s administration during his feud with China over the origins of the coronavirus.
“Naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the N.I.H. grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said in the statement. “Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”
----- [INSERT: Controversial Coronavirus Lab Origin Claims Dismissed By Experts [...] --- [INSERT: The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement "stockmule, Your certainty as regards a conspiratorial vein of thought is confusing. What you and Wade say could be true, HOWEVER, at this point in time the great preponderance of evidence says it is most likely not the case. So i ask you WHY do you take a position of certainty in the face of the evidence at hand?? [...] Experts have suspected the SARS-CoV-2 virus similarly originated in bats. Researchers in China — including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7 — have said the virus shares 96% of its genome with a bat virus collected by researchers in 2013 in Yunnan Province, China. (While that’s quite similar, Dr. Stanley Perlman .. https://medicine.uiowa.edu/microbiology/profile/stanley-perlman , a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa who studies coronaviruses and a pediatric infectious disease physician, told us it would be “impossible” to take such a virus and make the kind of changes required to turn it into SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. One would need a virus that’s 99.9% similar, and “in theory it might work.”) P - An article .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 .. published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 said that the virus likely originated through “natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer,” or “natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.” The researchers, who analyzed genomic data, said SARS-CoV-2 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” While they said an accidental laboratory release of the naturally occurring virus can’t be ruled out, they said they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” P - In an April 2020 statement, University of Sydney professor Edward Holmes, who was involved in mapping the genome of SARS-CoV-2, responded to “unfounded speculation” that the bat virus with 96% similarity was the origin of SARS-CoV-2. He said: “In summary, the abundance, diversity and evolution of coronaviruses in wildlife strongly suggests that this virus is of natural origin. However, a greater sampling of animal species in nature, including bats from Hubei province, is needed to resolve the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164053476] --- https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164746515] -----
EcoHealth Alliance has come under scrutiny because of its collaboration on coronavirus research with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is situated in the city where the pandemic began.
Robert Kessler, a spokesman for the group, said on Thursday that EcoHealth Alliance was trying to resolve what it described as a “misconception” about its findings with the N.I.H. He said that the group had reported data from its studies “as soon as we were made aware” in April 2018, and that the agency had reviewed the data and never indicated that further reviews were needed.
The controversy has drawn scrutiny to the experiments that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology carried out with funding from the N.I.H.
EcoHealth Alliance’s collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded by grant money from the N.I.H., was often the target of Congressional Republicans over the origins of the pandemic. Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
Last month .. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/ , The Intercept, an online publication, posted 900 pages of materials related to the N.I.H. grants to EcoHealth Alliance for the research. The materials provided details about experiments designed to provide new insights into the risk that bat coronaviruses have for sparking new pandemics.
According to the materials published, the researchers then engineered another bat virus, called WIV1 .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/ , to carry spike proteins from other bat coronaviruses. They then conducted experiments to see if the engineered WIV1 viruses became better at attaching to ACE2 on cells.
Such experiments reignited a debate that has been going on for years .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/science/covid-lab-leak-wuhan.html .. about what sort of research is simply too dangerous to carry out, regardless of the insights it may provide. Experiments that can endow viruses with new abilities — sometimes called “gain of function” — have caused particular concern.
In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled out the “P3CO framework” for research on “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens ... https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Pages/p3co.aspx .”
Thumbnail of page 1
N.I.H. Letter on EcoHealth Alliance’s Late Study Filings
Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the N.I.H., wrote in the letter to Representative Comer that the agency determined that the research proposed by EcoHealth Alliance did not meet the criteria for additional review under that framework “because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.”
But “out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Tabak wrote, the agency had added requirements for EcoHealth Alliance to notify it of certain results of the experiments.
Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, held hearings criticizing the use of federal funds for research related to bat coronaviruses in China. Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Dr. Tabak noted that in one line of research, the researchers had produced mice genetically engineered to produce the human version of the ACE2 protein on their cells. Infecting these animals with coronaviruses could potentially provide a more realistic sense of the risk that the viruses have of infecting humans than just using dishes of cells.
The N.I.H. required that EcoHealth Alliance notify the agency if the engineered viruses turned out to grow 10 times faster or more than WIV1 would without their new spike proteins.
In some experiments, it turns out, that viruses did grow quickly.
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as required by the terms of the grant,” Dr. Tabak wrote.
In the report, the researchers describe finding that WIV1 coronaviruses engineered to carry spike proteins were more virulent. They killed infected mice at higher rates than did the WIV1 virus without spikes from the other coronaviruses.
The filing had been submitted late, the N.I.H. said, nearly two years beyond the grant-specified deadline of 120 days from completion of the work. “Delayed reporting is a violation of the terms and condition of N.I.H. grant award,” Renate Myles, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who has called for more research into the origins of the pandemic, said the revelations raised serious questions about the risks of investigating viruses originating from animals, known as zoonotic viruses.
“In my view, some of this research on potential pandemic pathogens poses unacceptable risks,” he said. “In addition to asking if EcoHealth adhered to current regulations, we need to honestly ask what research should be done in the future to best minimize both zoonotic and lab-associated pandemic risks.”
And Michael Imperiale, a virologist at the University of Michigan, said that the N.I.H. letter raised questions about how the agency evaluated potentially dangerous research and shared it with the public — a need that critics have been pointing out for years. “First and foremost, I think this re-emphasizes the need for transparency in how the N.I.H. reviews these experiments,” he said.
Some congressional Republicans have pushed for more information for months, suggesting the research was the source of the pandemic. In a statement, Representative Comer claimed that “thanks to the hard work of the Oversight Committee Republicans, we now know that American taxpayer dollars funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.”
Dr. Tabak’s letter did not include any mention of “gain-of-function” research.
EcoHealth Alliance researchers collecting samples from bats in the field in Guandong Province in China in 2019. EcoHealth Alliance
Representative Comer also accused Dr. Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of potentially misleading the committee, vowing that the G.O.P. panel “will leave no stone unturned as we seek the truth for the American people about how their taxpayer dollars may have been associated with the start of this pandemic.”
Ms. Myles dismissed the claim that EcoHealth’s experiments constituted gain-of-function research. She acknowledged that the findings in mice were “somewhat unexpected.” But Ms. Myles said the agency had reviewed the research described in EcoHealth’s progress report, and said it would not have triggered a review under the stricter protocols for P3CO studies.
“The bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans, and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans,” she said.
Mr. Kessler, the EcoHealth spokesman, said that no coronaviruses studied by the group were genetically similar enough to the virus behind Covid-19 to have played a role in the beginning of the pandemic.
On a web page .. https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/coronavirus-bat-research .. posted Wednesday night, the National Institutes of Health provided additional details about the viruses in the EcoHealth experiments, demonstrating that they were not closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
Bats harbor thousands of species of coronaviruses, and since the start of the pandemic, researchers have searched for the closest relatives .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses-lab-leak.html ..of SARS-CoV-2 that infect the animals. They have found several coronaviruses that are much more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than WIV1.
The analysis, Dr. Tabak wrote in his letter, “confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the Covid-19 pandemic.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which the P3CO framework for research on certain potential pandemic pathogens was introduced and the government organization that introduced the framework. It was introduced in 2017, not 2019, and by the Department of Health and Human Services, not the National Institutes of Health.
Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of fourteen books, including “Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.” @carlzimmer • Facebook
Benjamin Mueller is a health and science reporter. Previously, he covered the coronavirus pandemic as a correspondent in London and the police in New York. @benjmueller
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
