A nonprofit-based nonprofit that has been working for decades to better understand and prevent the type of coronavirus pandemic that is now spreading the world was abruptly stripped of its federal research funding in April. The White House specifically ordered the National Institutes of Health to cancel the multimillion-dollar grant after President Donald Trump promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was released from a lab in Wuhan, China – a lab that works together with the non-profit.
Now, the NIH has told the nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, that it may have its funding back – if it collects and transmits material and information about the Chinese lab, which is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
In a July 8 letter seen by The Wall Street Journal, the NIH outlined seven criteria that EcoHealth Alliance must meet in order to recover its peer-reviewed funding. The list includes:
- A SARS-CoV-2 sample isolates the Wuhan lab used to determine the genetic sequence at the onset of the pandemic
- An inspection by an external group that would “pay specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession before December 2019”
- An explanation of proposed restrictions at the WIV, including “reduced telephone traffic in October 2019, and proof that there were roadblocks around the facility from 14-19 October 2019”
- A statement for the “apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the WIV coronavirus lab and was claimed by some on social media to be “patient zero” (the WIV has said in previous statements that the person in question was a graduate student had gone elsewhere to obtain her master’s degree)
- The WIV’s responses to security concerns described in a 2018 cable sent to the US state
Former officials said the requests were inconsistent with the role of the NIH. Jimmy Kolker, a former U.S. ambassador and former assistant secretary for global affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the WSJ that the NIH should not ask about matters beyond the reach of the funded investigator.
“What they are asking for is intelligence information that will be used for policy making,” he said.
Former NIH Director Harold Varmus called the NIH applications “scandalous.”
In a statement, EcoHealth said the NIH letter “attempts to create impossible and irrelevant circumstances that will effectively block us from continuing this critical work.”
The statement is about:
These demands include asking us to provide evidence to refute conspiracy theories that are unscientific and harmful; put pressure on us to conduct research unrelated to our collaboration; and examine us after research that was conducted by other organizations, and years prior to our NIH-funded work.
In all, “the termination of the subsidy will continue de facto,” EcoHealth said.
Eye of the storm
The researcher at the center of all this is virologist Shi Zhengli, who studies bat coronaviruses in her lab at WIV and has worked with EcoHealth in the past. The NIH initially funded a grant to study bat coronaviruses to EcoHealth in 2014, providing about $ 3.1 million over five years. Of that, about $ 599,000 went to Shi over the years. The agency then renewed the grant in 2019 after excellent peer-review scores. But EcoHealth said it had not sent any additional funds to Shi as the WIV before it was terminated in April.
Shi has denied claims that her lab had anything to do with the origin of the pandemic. Although the laboratory has studied more than 2,000 bat coronaviruses over the years, almost all of these studies were merely genetic material related to the viruses, not infectious viruses.
In an e-mail response to Science, Shi noted that the lab had isolated and grown only three coronaviruses in the past 15 years – none closely related to SARS-CoV-2. While the lab genetic material had sequences of one virus that was considered a close genetic relative of SARS-CoV-2, the two viruses are still rumored to have diverged from a common ancestor between 20 and 70 years ago.
“U.S. President Trump’s claim that our institute’s SARS-CoV-2 is leaking is contrary to the facts,” Shi wrote to the magazine. “It affects and influences our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology. ”
