What happened at Wuhan?
Will the public ever know?

It begins with FOIA

The recent release of documents by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) resulting from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the First Look Institute, Inc., a not-for-profit American news organization headquartered in New York City on behalf of investigative reporters at The Intercept, an award-winning, nationally recognized news organization with a reputation for holding power to account whose in-depth investigations focus on politics, war, surveillance, corruption, the environment, science, technology, criminal justice, and the media clearly establishes there is a substantial probability that research conducted in Wuhan, China at either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment or perhaps both institutions may have been the actual source of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus which triggered the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without full disclosure by both these institutions and the Chinese government, there is no way anyone will ever know with any reasonable scientific certainty what was the actual origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, the two principal documents finally released by the National Institutes of Health on September 6, 2021, over a year following the demand by The Intrepid reporters now provide sufficient information available to the American people to cause them to demand dramatic changes in the way scientific research is supported by the federal government.

The “grants”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases engaged in what the U.S. government defines as “gain-of-function research of concern,” intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them. Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence

The EcoHealth Alliance is a research organization which studies the spread of viruses from animals to humans, and their grant included subawards to Wuhan Institute of Virology and East China Normal University. The principal investigator on the grant is EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.

Scientists working under a 2014 NIH grant to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses combined the genetic material from a “parent” coronavirus known as WIV1 with other viruses. They twice submitted summaries of their work that showed that, when in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, three altered bat coronaviruses at times reproduced far more quickly than the original virus on which they were based. The altered viruses were also somewhat more pathogenic. The researchers reported, “These results demonstrate varying pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanized mice.”

The terms of the grant clearly stipulated that the funding could not be used for gain-of-function experiments. The grant conditions also required the researchers to immediately report potentially dangerous results and stop their experiments pending further NIH review. According to both the EcoHealth Alliance and NIH, the results were reported to the agency, but NIH determined that rules designed to restrict gain-of-function research did not apply.

Robert Kessler, communications manager for EcoHealth Alliance, denied that the work on the humanized mice met the definition of gain-of-function research, but did acknowledge that, while the original bat coronavirus in the experiment did not spread among humans, the research was designed to gauge how bat coronaviruses could evolve to infect humans.

A paragraph describing the research, as well as two figures illustrating its results, were included in both a 2018 progress report on the bat coronavirus grant and an application for its 2019 renewal. NIH confirmed that it reviewed them.

Research on the bat viruses in Wuhan showed that infecting live animals with altered viruses can have unpredictable consequences. A report to NIH on the project’s progress in the year ending in May 2018 described scientists creating new coronaviruses by changing parts of WIV1 and exposing genetically engineered mice to the new chimeric viruses.

Inside the lungs of the humanized mice, however, the novel viruses appear to have reproduced far more quickly than the original virus that was used to create them, according to a bar graph shown in the documents. The viral load in the lung tissue of the mice was, at certain points, up to 10,000 times higher in the mice infected with the altered viruses than in those infected with WIV1.

NIH requires the increase in viral reproduction to be immediately reported, according to a note in the Notice of Award the agency issued in July 2016. “No funds are provided and no funds can be used to support gain-of-function research…”If any new MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras show “enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain, …” the researchers were instructed to stop all experiments with the viruses and send the data to NIAID grant specialists, as well as to the Wuhan Institute of Virology biosafety committee. The enhanced growth of the chimeric coronaviruses in the humanized mice was, at one point, up to 4 log greater — or 10,000 times — the rate of the original virus; but there are no indications the research was stopped.

The most troubling aspect of the report published by The Intercept is the information that experimental work with “humanized” mice — genetically engineered to display human type receptors on certain of their cell types —was conducted “at a biosafety level 3 lab at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment” not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This information lends some credence to the theory that the pandemic may have been triggered by a laboratory accident.

A history of controversy

The practice of making chimeric viruses in order to study how they might become more contagious was under scrutiny long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In October 2014, the federal government put a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens that could be “reasonably anticipated” to lead to spread in humans. In December 2017, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with new guidelines for oversight of research using potential pandemic pathogens.

The 2020 grant

The second grant, Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia was awarded in August 2020 to EcoHealth Alliance and extends through 2025. The proposal, written in 2019, often seems prescient, focusing on scaling up and deploying resources in Asia in case of an outbreak of an “emergent infectious disease” and referring to Asia as “this hottest of the EID (Emerging Infectious Disease) hotspots.”

Transparency

Effective representative democracy requires transparency at all levels of government particularly where substantial amounts of public money are being distributed and the results are not obvious to the taxpayers who provide the funds. This is especially true with respect to basic scientific research where the United States Congress which is responsible for appropriating and distributing the funds delegates its responsibility to academic institutions and quasi-academic institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Just as the evidence clearly establishes the existence of an “old boy network” within the peer review structure of academic research and the publishers of scholarly and learned journals, the process of reviewing applications for research grants within the family of federal agencies and organizations such as the National Academies and the specialty Institutes within the NIH.

Wuhan, China

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in central Hubei province, China has a long association with a very large naturally occurring concentration of bats of more than one species. These well-established populations of bats are known to be carriers of more than 60 identified viruses, including a number of coronavirus types. The bat populations are apparently immune from diseases caused by the viruses they carry although they are capable of transmitting those viruses into populations of animals, including human beings who can develop diseases from the viruses.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been a center for research on viruses carried by and transmitted by bats. It has been no secret that funding from American institutions including the federal government has been provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct research on viruses endemic to bats, the results of which were supposed to be reported and published in the international open literature. There is no way of knowing whether the results of all this research paid for by Americans has ever been fully reported and published.

There is no question that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the premier Center for the study of viral diseases carried by and transmitted by bats, however, the relationship between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Animal Experiment an institution generally associated with Chinese bioweapon research should have raised serious concerns at the NIH about funding research which involved modifying a coronavirus endemic in bats, first into a form which can infect human beings and then allowing a military research institution to conduct experiments with the modified virus in mice which have been genetically modified to provide cells which are susceptible to infection by human viruses, a preliminary step toward weaponization of the virus.

When trying to evaluate information concerning the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China there are two almost insurmountable problems. The first and most obvious is that the Institute is managed by the government of China and its operations are not publicly reported in the international media nor are its scientific efforts published in the open literature without significant oversight and perhaps modification by the Chinese government.

The basic scientific research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology appears to be intermingled with secret research by the Chinese government on biological weapons. In the United States we have at least one well-known laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland which is committed to working on chemical and biological weapons. All of its work and portions of its budget are classified and highly secret. Civilian research on biological pathogens, however, in the United States unless it is conducted by a proprietary institution such as a pharmaceutical company is generally reported in the open literature or at least shared among specialists in the particular area of research.

Is EcoHealth Alliance culpable?

The bio-company which obtain the grant and was responsible for the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology knew, or with the exercise of even reasonable care and prudence should have known, that modifying the virus into a form which can attack human beings in the context of the Chinese research system was a threat to the national interest of the United States and considering the nature of virus transmitted diseases, perhaps the entire world. Support for moving that research to the Wuhan center for Animal Research should have raised warning signals sufficient to terminate support for the research by American taxpayers.

Government has failed the American People

The American people should be concerned about the lack of scientific rigor and intellectual integrity characterizing the management of the Centers for Disease Control and to an even greater extent, the Food & Drug Administration.

The lack of coordination between funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and public agencies charged with the protection of public health such as CDC and the FDA is not just appalling, but represents a real and present danger to the health of the American people as well as the people of the rest of the world.

The lack of meaningful oversight of publicly funded research by Congress and lack of transparency in the agencies responsible for public health as well as the rapidly revolving doors among and musical chairs played by regulatory agencies, funding agencies, and multinational biopharmaceutical corporations has placed all Americans at risk of debilitating disease and death.