Fauci under fire: House grilling over NIH funding to Wuhan lab

Appearing before the House of Representatives, Dr. Fauci argued that, in his opinion, the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus resulted from the transmission of the pathogen between animals and humans. As reason.com recalls, in 2021, during an exchange with Senator Rand Paul, he denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which oversees the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), funded research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The portal points out that Dr. Fauci was not truthful at that time. Evidence includes documents obtained by congressional investigators and journalists investigating the matter. According to the information they gathered, NIAID funded research on enhancing the functionality of coronaviruses attacking bats at the Wuhan laboratory through a grant awarded to the non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance.

These revelations lead to the conclusion that Fauci, at best, was misled about NIH-funded research at Wuhan. Hence, many believe these studies could not be excluded as the source of a potential lab leak at Wuhan, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his testimony before the House Oversight Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci tried to dismiss both of these claims.

He argued that although NIH-funded EcoHealth research in the Wuhan laboratory matched the general definition of "gain-of-function" research [a term that describes a situation where a mutation in a gene leads to an increase or change in the gene's function - editor's note], it did not meet the narrower federal regulatory definition of hazardous gain-of-function research aimed at enhancing potential pandemic pathogens.

Fauci emphasized that he was not dishonest in claiming that the NIH did not fund this specific type of regulated gain-of-function research. He stated that while NIH-funded research might match the broader definition of gain-of-function (i.e., studies improving virus properties), these studies would not have successfully created SARS-CoV-2.

Fauci argued that "it would be molecularly impossible" for the viruses that EcoHealth and Wuhan researchers manipulated with NIH financial support to become the virus that caused the pandemic. Many believe that Fauci's assertion misleads the public.

Understanding the first reason why Fauci's testimony was misleading requires some history. In 2014, EcoHealth received a five-year $3.7 million grant from NIAID to collect and analyze bat coronaviruses in China. That same year, the Obama administration halted government funding for gain-of-function research, defined as studies that could make flu, SARS, and MERS viruses transmissible via the respiratory route in mammals.

Thus, EcoHealth operated without the definition Fauci mentioned for the first three years. In 2016, EcoHealth reported to NIAID that it planned to use the viruses collected in the wild to create "chimeric" or hybrid SARS-like viruses that could better infect human lung cells in genetically modified (humanized) mice.

NIH ultimately allowed EcoHealth to continue its research on the condition that they immediately halt work and notify the agency if any of their hybrid viruses showed increased viral growth in humanized mice. The organization did not do so.

EcoHealth did not immediately suspend work or notify NIH. Instead, they waited until 2018 and the annual progress report to disclose the results of their experiments.

In his testimony, Fauci also assured that the entire investigation into whether EcoHealth's research in Wuhan meets one or another definition of gain-of-function is irrelevant to the inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. The viruses they worked on in Wuhan could not have caused the pandemic, as they differ significantly from SARS-CoV-2.

Here, another misleading element of Fauci's testimony arises because we do not know all the viruses that Wuhan researchers experimented with. In a "New York Times essay," Harvard molecular biologist Alina Chan argued that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus "probably" started in the Wuhan lab. She added that this lab houses thousands of unpublished virus samples, and Chinese researchers have long been highly reluctant to share all their virus sample studies with their American collaborators.

Chan notes that in 2018, EcoHealth also proposed developing viruses in Wuhan with traits "strikingly similar" to SARS-CoV-2. When officials asked Fauci whether Wuhan researchers could have conducted experiments on unpublished viruses that could have caused the pandemic, he repeatedly responded that he could not comment on all virological work conducted throughout China. If Fauci does not know the full scope of NIH-funded work, he cannot state with certainty that they did not cause the pandemic.