Damn Trump! [ OH So the ban on new funding of potentially dangerous "gain-of-function research" was lifted in the first year of Trump's presidency: The presidency of Donald Trump began at noon EST (17:00 UTC) on January 20, 2017, .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Donald_Trump .
Sounds plausible! ;-) We will see if Tucker picks it up!
In Koogs post, the one natural theory proposed was the Wuhan scientist were regularly visiting a bat cave some 4 hrs away...If there was a natural jump it was a likely place for it to occur...FWIW....It may well have escaped the lab, just not after an engineering the virus..
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
"The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement"
This mission member seems to give as much credence to the possibility the virus was detected in Europe before it was reported in Wuhan as he does to the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak.
February 22, 2021 3.19pm AEDT
Author Dominic Dwyer Director of Public Health Pathology, NSW Health Pathology, Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney, University of Sydney
Disclosure statement [inside]
As I write, I am in hotel quarantine in Sydney, after returning from Wuhan, China. There, I was the Australian representative on the international World Health Organization’s (WHO) investigation into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus .. https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus .
Much has been said of the politics surrounding the mission to investigate the viral origins of COVID-19. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people.
As part of the mission, we met the man who, on December 8, 2019, was the first confirmed COVID-19 case; he’s since recovered. We met the husband of a doctor who died of COVID-19 and left behind a young child. We met the doctors who worked in the Wuhan hospitals treating those early COVID-19 cases, and learned what happened to them and their colleagues. We witnessed the impact of COVID-19 on many individuals and communities, affected so early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know much about the virus, how it spreads, how to treat COVID-19, or its impacts.
We talked to our Chinese counterparts — scientists, epidemiologists, doctors — over the four weeks the WHO mission was in China. We were in meetings with them for up to 15 hours a day, so we became colleagues, even friends. This allowed us to build respect and trust in a way you couldn’t necessarily do via Zoom or email. Do you value independent, non-profit news?
This is what we learned about the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Animal origins, but not necessarily at the Wuhan markets
It was in Wuhan, in central China, that the virus, now called SARS-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019, unleashing the greatest infectious disease outbreak since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.
Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location. Such “zoonotic” diseases have triggered pandemics before. But we are still working to confirm the exact chain of events that led to the current pandemic. Sampling of bats in Hubei province and wildlife across China has revealed no SARS-CoV-2 to date.
We visited the now-closed Wuhan wet market which, in the early days of the pandemic, was blamed as the source of the virus. Some stalls at the market sold “domesticated” wildlife products. These are animals raised for food, such as bamboo rats, civets and ferret badgers. There is also evidence some domesticated wildlife may be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. However, none of the animal products sampled after the market’s closure tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
After COVID-19, China brought in new regulations for the trade and consumption of wild animals. Alex Plavevski/EPA/AAP
However, when we visited the closed market, it’s easy to see how an infection might have spread there. When it was open, there would have been around 10,000 people visiting a day, in close proximity, with poor ventilation and drainage.
There’s also genetic evidence generated during the mission for a transmission cluster there. Viral sequences from several of the market cases were identical, suggesting a transmission cluster. However, there was some diversity in other viral sequences, implying other unknown or unsampled chains of transmission.
A summary of modelling studies of the time to the most recent common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 sequences estimated the start of the pandemic between mid-November and early December. There are also publications suggesting SARS-CoV-2 circulation in various countries earlier than the first case in Wuhan, although these require confirmation.
The market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. So we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins.
Frozen or refrigerated food not ruled out in the spread
Then there was the “cold chain” hypothesis .. https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/7/12/1861/5936602 . This is the idea the virus might have originated from elsewhere via the farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration or freezing of food. Was that food ice cream, fish, wildlife meat? We don’t know. It’s unproven that this triggered the origin of the virus itself. But to what extent did it contribute to its spread? Again, we don’t know.
Several “cold chain” products present in the Wuhan market were not tested for the virus. Environmental sampling in the market showed viral surface contamination. This may indicate the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 through infected people, or contaminated animal products and “cold chain” products. Investigation of “cold chain” products and virus survival at low temperatures is still underway.
The most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely.
We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology .. http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ , which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health.
We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
[INSERT: That apparently factual statement would appear to debunk this (possibly pure propaganda) WSJ story. Note there is no mention of antibody tests here. It's 3 days old Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228 ]
We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously.
But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture. While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
When I say “we”, the mission was a joint exercise between the WHO and the Chinese health commission. In all, there were 17 Chinese and ten international experts, plus seven other experts and support staff from various agencies. We looked at the clinical epidemiology (how COVID-19 spread among people), the molecular epidemiology (the genetic makeup of the virus and its spread), and the role of animals and the environment.
The clinical epidemiology group alone looked at China’s records of 76,000 episodes from more than 200 institutions of anything that could have resembled COVID-19 — such as influenza-like illnesses, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. They found no clear evidence of substantial circulation of COVID-19 in Wuhan during the latter part of 2019 before the first case.
Where to now?
Our mission to China was only phase one. We are due to publish our official report in the coming weeks. Investigators will also look further afield for data, to investigate evidence the virus was circulating in Europe, for instance, earlier in 2019. Investigators will continue to test wildlife and other animals in the region for signs of the virus. And we’ll continue to learn from our experiences to improve how we investigate the next pandemic.
Irrespective of the origins of the virus, individual people with the disease are at the beginning of the epidemiology data points, sequences and numbers. The long-term physical and psychological effects — the tragedy and anxiety — will be felt in Wuhan, and elsewhere, for decades to come.
Read more: Yes, we need a global coronavirus inquiry, but not for petty political point-scoring
Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful.
"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??"
Did coronavirus accidentally escape from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful. | The Fact Checker
VIDEO In the absence of crucial evidence of how the new coronavirus began comes many theories — one is that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. (Sarah Cahlan, Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
President Trump isn’t the only one hearing this tale. The political world, Internet theorists, intelligence analysts and global public health officials are abuzz with a big question: Is it possible that the new coronavirus — which causes covid-19 — leaked from a lab?
For months, Chinese authorities have pointed to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan as the virus’s likely origin. A cluster of early cases had contact with the market. It sold a wide variety of wildlife that, officials hypothesized, was critical to the virus’s formation and spread. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which cause similar symptoms, were formed after a coronavirus from a bat transformed in another animal and then jumped to humans.
The logic seems straightforward. But a more complete analysis of early cases suggests that locating the origin of the virus may not be so simple. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine .. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001316 .. found that of the first 425 patients, only 45 percent had connections to the market. A separate Jan. 24 analysis published in the Lancet .. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext#bib35 .. found that three of the first four cases — including the first known case — did not have market links.
Daniel R. Lucey, a pandemics expert .. https://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/daniel-lucey/ .. at Georgetown University, put it simply: “In my opinion, the virus came into the market before it came out of the market.”
That tinge of uncertainty was bolstered after Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin revealed two 2018 cables in which State Department .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/?itid=lk_inline_manual_12 .. officials warned of safety issues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory studying bat coronaviruses. Renewed questions about the virus’s origin brought a rush of alternative theories. Some claimed the virus was a bioweapon. Others suggested it had been altered for a scientific experiment or was simply a viral sample that escaped from a lab.
Let’s be clear: No scientist we spoke to thinks the new coronavirus was designed as a bioweapon. When asked, Milton Leitenberg .. https://cissm.umd.edu/our-community/faculty-staff/milton-leitenberg , a biological weapons expert at the University of Maryland, responded with a flat “No.”
[INSERT: That says "no scientists. Yet we have conservatives here saying the opposite."]
Most experts say the new coronavirus was the product of a natural process. Still, the safety issues described in the 2018 cables, the Chinese government’s response and the proximity of the labs to the market have raised eyebrows.
As college professors are fond of saying, the absence of evidence is not the same as the evidence of absence. The Fact Checker video team investigates.
The Facts
The Labs
In Wuhan, at least two labs study coronaviruses that originate in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology .. http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Home2016/ (WIV) and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention .. https://www.whcdc.org/show/86.html (WHCDC). Both are close to the seafood market. The WIV is about eight miles away. The WHCDC is right around the corner.
Despite the overlap in research, what the two labs actually do is quite different. The WIV is home to China’s first laboratory to receive the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). In addition, it houses lower-level (BSL-3 and BSL-2) labs. The WHCDC is home only to a BSL-2 lab.
She explained that the seemingly relaxed security is because coronaviruses found in bats “don’t infect human cells very well, if at all. So often they’re not considered major potential pathogens because they just don’t grow very well in other species besides bats.” If scientists were being particularly cautious, she explained, they might work in a BSL-3 lab.
Researchers from both labs faced criticism in recent years that they have not followed appropriate safety protocols. A video published in December 2019 .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI .. shows Tian Junhua, a prominent researcher based at the WHCDC, conducting field research on bats without appropriate protective equipment.
Warnings from U.S. diplomats in 2018 appeared to refer to the BSL-4 lab at the WIV. They reported: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
But Rasmussen cautioned against putting too much weight on these reports: “Without fail, every single BSL-4 lab in the U.S. gets some type of safety violation, some type of thing that they could do better.”
A 2019 paper .. https://www.horizonadvisory.org/coronavirus-series-the-prestige .. written by WIV researchers about China’s effort to add more high-level bioresearch labs warned: “The experience of laboratory biosafety personnel training is relatively lacking. … Insufficient training staff and training problems such as uneven standards require urgent improvement.” A separate 2019 paper by Yuan Zhiming, a chief scientist at Wuhan, described systemic deficiencies at high-security labs: “Maintenance cost is generally neglected; several high-level BSLs have insufficient operating funds for routine, yet vital processes.” Most laboratories “lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers,” he wrote.
Months after the new coronavirus was discovered, the Global Times, a state-run newspaper .. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml , published an article outlining new government guidelines aimed at fixing “chronic management loopholes at virus labs.” The article noted that some labs have paid “insufficient attention to biological disposal.”
Safety protocols aren’t a virus’s only barrier between a life in a test tube and one infecting millions. The virus would need to be able to infect humans (or another animal that can then infect humans), and that infection needs to be strong enough that it isn’t immediately beaten by the immune system, allowing it to spread among people.
Most known bat coronaviruses cannot do either of these things. The novel coronavirus, however, can do both. That said, it is called “novel” for a reason: It had never before appeared in scientific research.
Viruses — like people — have distinct genetic sequences that give scientists clues to their origin. Research published in the journal Nature .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7 .. on Feb. 3 found that this virus falls within a family of known coronaviruses that come from bats. It shares nearly 80 percent of the genome as the original SARS-CoV and 96 percent of the genome of a virus (RaTG13) that Shi’s team had previously sampled.
While 96 percent may sound like a big overlap to nonscientists, the 4 percent difference is found in the part of the virus that binds to human cells. Without that adaptation, Lucey, the Georgetown professor, put it simply: “It’s interesting, but it’s not going to cause any outbreaks in people.”
Moreover, the two viruses are generations apart. Edward Holmes .. https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/about/our-people/academic-staff/edward-holmes.html , an evolutionary virologist from the University of Sydney who has written about the origin of the new virus .. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420303287?via%3Dihub , explained via email that the two viruses “shared a common ancestor that lived a long time ago. What this means is that [the new coronavirus] is NOT derived from RaTG13.” Holmes noted another virus that — like RaTG13 — was sampled 1,000 miles from Wuhan in a cave in Yunnan is a closer relative to the new virus, but “not close enough to be the direct ancestor.” And critically, he said, this other virus, “is not from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nor from anywhere else in Wuhan.”
So how did this virus end up 1,000 miles from the nearest known relative? There are any number of potential explanations. A wildlife trafficker might have brought an infected bat into the city. Another animal might have picked up the virus from bats years ago, allowing it to transform in just the right way to infect humans. There are thousands of bat viruses that scientists have not sampled and even more coronaviruses that circulate in other species, so there’s no guarantee it actually came from thousands of miles away.
But even if that virus from Shi’s lab is not the source for the virus, her lab is full of bat coronavirus variants. That left us wondering: Could this virus have been the accidental product of an experiment gone awry? A 2015 paper .. https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews .. cautioned against the “gain of function” experiments with which Shi’s team was involved. In this kind of experiment, the researchers mutate a virus strain to enhance a pathogen’s natural traits. Even though the most dangerous part of that experiment was not conducted at the WIV, the 2018 State Department cables referenced similar research by Shi and her team.
In 2017, Shi and her team published a study .. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 .. revealing that they had found a coronavirus from a bat that could be transmitted directly to humans. After reviewing the study, Rasmussen said via email that just because these viruses could attach to human cells, it “does not show that they are particularly effective at doing so.” Binding is only one part of the process. “It is not the sole determinant of viral fitness (the ability of the virus to replicate robustly in a given host) or pathogenicity (the ability of the virus to cause disease).” Moreover, genomic analysis reveals that none of the virus samples used to conduct these experiments were or could have been transformed to be the new coronavirus that causes covid-19.
[Also, crucially Perlman says. Excerpt: 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 shares96% 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.”) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164219919]
“While the scientists wore gloves and masks and took other protective measures, U.S. experts who reviewed the experiments say the precautions would not necessarily protect the researchers from harmful exposures, in caves or in the lab,” The Post reported.
This kind of research filled in critical gaps in scientific understanding of SARS-like coronaviruses. It also increased the risk of accidental exposure and lab accidents. But many scientists are still dubious.
Kristian G. Andersen .. https://www.scripps.edu/faculty/andersen/ , an immunology and microbiology professor at Scripps Research, alongside Holmes and other researchers, stated firmly .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 , “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”Trevor Bedford .. https://bedford.io/team/trevor-bedford/ , a researcher in computational biology and infectious diseases at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was more specific. “You don’t see kind of large chunks of genomic material that are somehow inserted or absent,” he said. Rather, it is the opposite. “The differences are these small mutations, as you’d expect from nature.”
(Shi did not return our emails. None of her current collaborators we spoke to could precisely speak to her current research.)
Still, no scientist was willing to completely dismiss the idea — they only said that it was highly unlikely. After all, we neither know what either lab was specifically working on, nor do we have an archive of every animal in the lab and virus sequence in its freezer. Without identifying the earliest case and the evolution of the virus, everything is a hypothesis.
Richard H. Ebright .. https://www.waksman.rutgers.edu/ebright , a microbiologist and biosafety expert at Rutgers University, said: “The question whether the outbreak virus entered humans through an accidental infection of a lab worker is a question of historical fact, not a question of scientific fact. The question can be answered only through a forensic investigation, not through a scientific investigation.”
Then, in an unusual move for the government, officials quickly pinned the outbreak on the market. But they have done little to provide supporting evidence for this theory. Officials reported that 33 of 585 environmental samples .. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/27/c_138735677.htm .. from the market contained the new coronavirus. Thirty-one of the positive samples were located in the area of the market known to sell wildlife. But where exactly these samples were taken is not clear. They could just as well have been taken from animal cages or a bathroom. Moreover, China has not divulged the results .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/cdc-coronavirus-china.html .. of any tests done on any animals that were recovered from the market before it was cleaned.
The Chinese government’s actions have inhibited the scientific community’s ability to trace the origin of the virus and serve to only raise suspicions.
“It just seems like such a remarkable coincidence that you have an outbreak of a coronavirus in theory from a bat in the same city where there is this high-level BSL-4 laboratory, where not only are there foreign concerns about its safety, but there are Chinese articles about the safety protocols not being sufficient. And obviously there’s no smoking gun,” said Emily de La Bruyère .. https://www.horizonadvisory.org/team , a China expert with Horizon Advisory. “It’s all circumstantial, but it’s pretty remarkable.”
In a statement via email, the Chinese Embassy in Washington told The Fact Checker: “The source of the virus is a serious and complex matter of science that must be studied by scientists and medical experts. Many scientists have already pointed out that COVID-19 has a natural origin.”
But the U.S. government is not convinced. The intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the director of national intelligence said in a statement on April 30.
The Bottom Line
The balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature — be it the Wuhan market or somewhere else. Too many unexpected coincidences would have had to take place for it to have escaped from a lab. But the Chinese government has not been willing or able to provide information that would clarify lingering questions about any possible role played by either Wuhan lab.
That’s why intelligence agencies are still exploring that possibility, no matter how remote it may be. And even then, it’s unclear when or if we will ever know the origin story of this new virus that is causing death and economic turmoil around the globe.
A Jan. 15 State Department “fact sheet .. https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html ” states: “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 same fact sheet outlined: “ WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the covid-19 virus, including ‘RaTG13' which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.” (WIV researchers, including Shi, confirmed the origin .. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z .. of the institute’s RaTG13 sample.)
[Noted: On Jan. 15 Trump was still president. That alone is enough at least to cast some doubt on that State Department “fact sheet." As regards the suggestion the WIV researchers who got sick in autumn 2019 were sick with the virus, see: I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus [...] We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology .. http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ , which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. P - We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164055760]
A natural source of the virus has not been found and several scientists have shifted their original opinions about the lab accident theory. Columbia University pathologist, W. Ian Lipkin, previously favored the natural origin theory but was quoted in a recent Donald G. McNeil Jr. Medium post .. https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d .. stating that his view had changed from animal to lab because of new information. McNeil noted that Lipkin said there is still no direct evidence of a lab leak.
The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research
"The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement"
Analysis by Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker October 29, 2021 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
(Tasos Katopodis/Pool/Reuters) Comment
“At a Senate hearing in May, Dr. Fauci said, ‘The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ That was under oath, under testimony. On October 20th, the NIH principal deputy director in writing directly contradicted it.”
“Last week his agency admitted they had in fact funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
— Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), at the same hearing, Oct. 27
In May, we examined a high-profile spat between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At issue was whether the National Institutes of Health had funded “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology .. http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ (WIV). At a Senate hearing, Paul said “super viruses” had been created, and Fauci shot back that the senator was “entirely and completely incorrect.”
Readers have been asking for an update ever since a top NIH official sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 20 saying that the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance .. https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/ — which received NIH funding to do the research on the potential for bat-specific pathogens in nature to jump to humans — did not report an experimental finding that indicated a spike in viral growth.
Both Cruz and Cotton have cited the NIH letter to assert that Fauci lied to Congress. Cruz even told Attorney General Merrick Garland that Fauci should be prosecuted. The issue is important because of speculation that the virus that caused the coronavirus .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_12 .. pandemic might have been created in a lab .. ad in fact funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Ins . But the NIH letter does not say what they claim — and, in fact, the NIH letter appears to have inaccuracies.
The Facts
This is a complex story, on many levels. We are going to keep focused on what was disclosed in the NIH letter and in the release of grant updates by EcoHealth by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Intercept. Advertisement
Gain of function, in many ways, is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function.
But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.
That’s when gain of function becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing scientists to study how to combat them. But increasingly many scientists have decided the research was potentially dangerous — and, especially in China, not done with the proper safety precautions. Advertisement
Even now, it’s not clear whether the research funded by EcoHealth in China amounted to gain of function. When the Intercept obtained EcoHealth documents in September, seven of 11 scientists who are virologists or work in adjacent fields told the Intercept .. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-function-research/ .. that the work appeared to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research. Obviously, it’s a matter of dispute within the scientific community.
But Cotton claimed NIH admitted that it had funded gain-of-function research. That’s wrong. No such admission appears in the letter, and NIH officials continue to insist that the EcoHealth work using NIH funds did not constitute gain-of-function research.
There has long been criticism that the P3CO framework had too many loopholes. But the EcoHealth grant .. https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8674931 , awarded in 2014, does not show that it intended to create an enhanced pathogen or that its experiment posed any harm to humans.
Now let’s turn to the experiment itself, which involved the use of three chimeric (artificial, laboratory-generated) viruses that are capable of replicating efficiently in human cells with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the protein that provides the entry point for the coronavirus to hook into and infect human tissue. The experiment relied on “humanized” mice, meaning they were given an ACE2 receptor that mimicked the human form. (The mice were otherwise unchanged.)
In a report .. https://theintercept.com/document/2021/09/08/understanding-the-risk-of-bat-coronavirus-emergence/ .. filed with NIH on April 13, 2018, EcoHealth reported that the viral load in the lung tissue of the mice with the chimeric viruses for a few days went up greater than 10,000 times, as expressed in “genome copies per gram of tissue.” (Specifically, the report said, 10 to the sixth power.) This was a strong indication of potential infectivity in humans, though it depends on the specific properties of the viral spike protein.
Tabak’s letter noted that the terms of the grant award required EcoHealth to immediately report a “one log increase in growth,” a 10-fold increase, and it failed to do so. The specific language, dated 2016 .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understanding-risk-bat-coronavirus-emergence-grant-notice , was: “Should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must stop all experiments.”
But several virologists told The Fact Checker that genome copies per gram is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the viral load, as the data also could contain genomic material from inactivated, incompletely formed or dead virus.
It’s a complex subject, so we developed a rough analogy after discussions with several experts.
Imagine that a one-log viral growth is equivalent to an accounting of how many cars are assembled in a factory. Genome copies instead would tell you how many axles are in the factory — but only some of the axles are functional and can be used to make a car, some others are broken and won’t work, and some are in pieces, countable, but not useful at all. (One could also view genome copies as more like a set of instructions for making the parts of a finished car, i.e. a viable virus.) Advertisement
“RT-PCR [Reverse transcription PCR] can be used to measure the viral genome copies/gram, i.e. the axles,” Linda J. Saif .. http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/20002211.html , a veterinarian virologist at Ohio State University, said in an email. “As in your analogy this may not equate to the infectious virus titers, i.e. the whole car, because of incompletely assembled virus fragments, defective non-replicating particles, etc.”
“In virology, many authors call RT-PCR results ‘viral loads,’ ” said Stanley Perlman .. https://medicine.uiowa.edu/microbiology/profile/stanley-perlman , a physician and virologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “It is not the same as infectious virus titers because virus is inefficiently assembled. It may be analogous to cutting circles out of a square cloth, so that there is excess material that is not useful.”
Perlman said “the ratio of infectious to defective coronaviruses ranges from about 1:15 to 1:200, depending on cell type,” meaning 15 to 200 times more genomic sequence would be detected than viable replicating virus.
In a response to Tabak’s letter .. https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/EcoHealth%20letter%20(1).pdf .. this week, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth, emphasized that the report highlighted genome copies per gram. “Viral titers were not conducted in this experiment,” he said, adding that six to eight days later, there was “no discernibly significant difference among the different viral types.”
(Confusing matters, however, a graph in the 2018 EcoHealth report was mislabeled “viral load per gram of lung tissue,” even though the graph’s Y axis is clearly labeled genome copies per gram of tissue.)
Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University .. https://chem.rutgers.edu/people/faculty-bio/140-ebright-richard , a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, dismissed this explanation. “The claim is technically true. PCR is measuring viral nucleic acids, not viruses per se,” he said in an email. “But the claim is factually nonsense. PCR is a standard method for quantifying viral growth,” and “NIH, in the Tabak memo and in subsequent comments, has made it absolutely clear that the NIH interprets EcoHealth’s data as indicating a greater-than-10-time increase in viral growth.”
Robert Kessler, a spokesman for EcoHealth, told The Fact Checker that the experiment was conducted only once and involved only a few mice. He confirmed Tabak’s comment that researchers encountered an unexpected result. “This testing is intended to determine whether strains discovered in the field can infect humans and how efficiently, not to create super viruses,” he said.
“Given the small number of mice, it is also uncertain whether the survival and weight loss data were statistically relevant, and as no further replications of this experiment were performed, we are unable to corroborate these initial results,” Daszak said in his letter to NIH.
Earlier this year, EcoHealth submitted additional data on this experiment, specifically the increase in genome copies in mice brain tissue, in a fifth update .. https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-5-EHA.pdf .. of its research grant. Tabak’s letter suggested the report was filed late and it was the first notice the agency had received on the experiment. As we have noted, the experiment was disclosed in 2018 in the fourth report. The fifth report was due in 2019, but EcoHealth maintains a miscommunication with NIH and a technical glitch led to its delay until this year.
We sent questions to NIH about the failure to note the 2018 disclosure by EcoHealth and why it believed an increase in genome copies per gram would indicate 10-fold increase in viral growth. After a four-day wait, we received this emailed statement: “NIH stands by the letter provided to Congressional Committees in response to their inquiries and released by the House Energy & Commerce. NIH is not commenting on internal deliberations with the grantee beyond the information in the letter.”
James Arnold, a Cotton spokesman, defended his comments.
A Cruz spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pinocchio Test
EcoHealth’s research has come under increased scrutiny after more details about its work in China have been revealed, either through congressional or journalistic pressure. The NIH letter, flawed though it may be, indicates the federal government is taking a closer look, too.
But we see no reason to change the Two Pinocchio rating we awarded Paul. There is a split in the scientific community about what constitutes gain-of-function research. To this day, NIH says this research did not meet the criteria — a stance that is not an outlier in the scientific community. Indeed, it appears as if EcoHealth halted the experiment as soon as it seemed to veer in that direction.
Meanwhile, Cotton and Cruz are spinning the letter as confirming what it does not say. They are welcome to offer an opinion about its meaning. But, so far, it’s not a fact that NIH has admitted funding gain-of-function research. So they also earn Two Pinocchios.
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