Fauci admits ‘modest’ NIH funding of Wuhan lab but denies ‘gain of function’
The National Institutes of Health earmarked $600,000 for the Wuhan Institute of Virology over a five-year period to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told lawmakers Tuesday.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the money was funneled to the Chinese lab through the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance to fund “a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus.”
But Fauci emphatically denied that the money went toward so-called “gain of function” research, which he described as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
“That categorically was not done,” he insisted.
Earlier in the hearing, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing “gain of function research” before adding “we are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”
The NIH cut off funding to EcoHealth Alliance in April of last year, at the height of the pandemic and over the protests of EcoHealth President Peter Daszak
Fauci traced the NIH’s interest in bat coronaviruses to the SARS outbreak from nearly two decades ago.
“We had a big scare with SARS-CoV-1 {SARS] back in 2002, 2003 where that particular virus unquestionably went from a bat to an intermediate host to start an epidemic and a pandemic that resulted in 8,000 cases and close to 800 deaths,” he said. “It would have been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn’t study this, and the only way you can study these things is you’ve got to go where the action is.”
Fauci added: “You don’t want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species.”
NIH funding of work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks, with Republican senators like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Tom Cotton of Arkansas accusing Fauci of lying about whether the money was used for gain of function research.
Meanwhile, the theory that the virus accidentally leaked from the lab rather than spreading from bats to humans via another animal, is gaining increasing acceptance among mainstream media.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers at the lab became so ill in November of 2019 that they sought hospital treatment. Though it is not clear whether the workers contracted coronavirus, their hospitalization coincides with the period when most experts believe the virus was spreading through the city of Wuhan.
