It has been three years since the COVID-19 virus first began to spread throughout the world. Since that time, U.S. officials have gone from stifling the idea of a lab leak theory to begrudgingly accepting it as a possible explanation for the virus’ emergence. In fact, many now believe that a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is the most likely explanation for COVID’s origin.
But despite the now growing acceptance that COVID may have come from a lab, the U.S. government, under President Joe Biden, continues to fund risky gain-of-function research involving the mutation and genetic engineering of man-made “frankenviruses”, some of which may be even deadlier and more transmissible than the original Wuhan coronavirus.
Last week it was revealed that the Department of Defense (DOD) awarded a $3 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit at the center of the COVID-19 Lab Leak theory. The grant will be used by EcoHealth to reduce the chance of a viral pandemic originating from wild animals in the Philippines.
Much of EcoHealth’s work involves the collection of dangerous pathogens for research and experimentation with the aim of predicting where potential pandemics could occur. EcoHealth officials say its work is critical to stopping the next Pandemic.
However, critics argue that EcoHealth’s work is more likely to cause a pandemic through an accidental lab leak than prevent one through viral hunting and pathogen analysis. Such concerns seem to have merit, given EcoHealth’s previous work in Wuhan, China where COVID-19 first originated.
At the time of the initial Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, EcoHealth was found to have been conducting gain-of-function experiments on SARS-related bat coronaviruses, which made the viruses more infectious to humans. The funds for that project were administered through an EcoHealth subcontract to the company’s research partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is only a few miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market where COVID-19 cases were first reported.
In the Fall of 2021, it was revealed that EcoHealth had worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to evade regulations on gain-of-function in Wuhan so that EcoHealth could continue to enhance the ability of bat coronaviruses to cause disease under a grant that was administered by the NIH’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
These circumstances, in conjunction with other pieces of scientific evidence, have led some experts to believe that EcoHealth’s experiments could have been the cause of the 2020 Pandemic.
In November, GOP congressional leaders on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce wrote a letter to the NIH expressing concern over a grant that the agency recently awarded to EcoHealth Alliance.
Given EcoHealth’s questionable work in Wuhan, Congressional leaders wanted to know why the NIH had given EcoHealth a new grant, which would involve collecting and researching bat coronaviruses in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. Moreover, the financial award, granted in September 2022, was given just one month after the NIH suspended a previous grant to EcoHealth for refusing to provide key documents from the organization’s work in the Wuhan lab, which could contain pertinent information regarding the origins of the COVID virus.
In the October GOP letter, congressional leaders called into question the NIH’s decision to award a new grant to EcoHealth and renew a previous grant which included work with the WIV. That grant was suspended in 2020 for noncompliance with NIH regulatory grant requirements.
The recent grants to EcoHealth by the NIH and the DOD reflect the Biden Administration’s latest initiative to collect and conduct research on unknown viral threats around the world. The $125 million project called Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens – Viral Zoonoses (also known as Deep VZN) was announced by the federal USAID program in 2021.
Deep VZN is Biden’s reinstatement of a similar retired program called project PREDICT. Under the banner of predicting and responding to potential pandemics, PREDICT collected more than 140,000 viruses from various animals (including over 10,000 bats) within a ten-year period. As part of their work, PREDICT participants such as EcoHealth Alliance, UC Davis, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted experiments on animal viruses that made them more infectious to humans, a process that is consistent with the definition of gain-of-function.
While health officials claim that this kind of research is beneficial for humanity, scientists are expressing concerns that it may actually cause pandemics.
In written testimony to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee, Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology explained to congressional leaders that gain-of-function research has the potential for “existential risks” while offering only limited benefits. According to Ebright, “Gain-of-function research of concern poses material risks by creating new or enhanced potential pandemic pathogens. If a resulting new potential pandemic pathogen is released into humans, either by accident or deliberately, this can cause a pandemic.”
Ebright’s concerns have recently come to light as news of multiple gain-of-function experiments have caused public alarm.
In October, researchers at Boston University used government funds to create a new strain of COVID-19 by combining the spike protein of the Omicron variant to the original Wuhan strain. Of ten humanized mice (mice that were genetically modified to contain human cells), eight died. While the death rate was slightly less than with the original Wuhan variant, it was eight times higher than with the original strain of omicron, which is far more transmissible. The work was funded in part by the U.S. NIAID.
Prior to that, researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a similar study in which scientists injected mice with genetically engineered coronavirus strains containing Omicron’s spike protein.
Additionally, a U.S. government lab in Bethesda Maryland is planning to insert a deadly strain of the monkeypox virus with the one that spread throughout the world last May, according to a recent article from Science Magazine.
But government funded gain-of-function experiments may just be the tip of the iceberg. Just last week, Pfizer Inc. admitted to doing similar research on the original SARS-CoV-2 strand of the virus on their own dime. According to a press release, Pfizer has been combining spike proteins of different COVID variants with the original Wuhan COVID strand in experiments designed to “determine whether a vaccine update is required.” Pfizer also stated that the company has been “engineering” viruses to further assess the effectiveness of the companies’ antiviral drug, Paxlovid.
The statements were made in response to a viral video of a Pfizer director explaining how the company plans to “mutate” the COVID virus through “directed evolution” for the creation of new vaccines. While Pfizer admits that its’ researchers are engineering viruses in biolabs, the company denies that it is performing gain-of-function research.
According to Richard Ebright however, Pfizer’s statement indicates that the company is “unequivocally” performing “high-risk gain-of-function research and enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research.”
