Fauci and other top scientists had another secret COVID-19 origins call, records reveal



A group of the world's top virologists held secretive private discussions in February 2020 on "all theories" of the origins of COVID-19 days after they began drafting an influential article that would attempt to debunk the lab-leak theory, newly reported emails reveal.

The group was led by Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar and University of Sydney virologist Edward Holmes. Members of these discussions included then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins and the U.S. government's top pandemic spokesman, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

A Freedom of Information Act request by U.S. Right to Know reveals that their discussions on the pandemic's origins continued on Feb. 7, 2020, three days after an article purporting to show the virus "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus" was drafted and a week after a previously reported conference call on Feb. 1.

“Eddie Holmes and a small group have been looking extensively at the origins and evolution of n-CoV including all theories,” Farrar wrote to National Academy of Medicine President Victor Dzau on Feb. 8, 2020, using an abbreviation for "novel coronavirus" in reference to the emerging SARS-Cov-2 virus.

“This is the latest summary, written as part of a series of [teleconference] discussions we set up and included [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci] and [National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins] as well as a small group from USA, UK, Europe and Australia,” Farrar wrote.

The records obtained by U.S. Right to Know included six pages of notes from the Feb. 7 discussion, but the material is fully redacted.

\u201cHere\u2019s the email from @JeremyFarrar to @VictorDzau and @edwardcholmes with the Feb. 2020 summary of the virologists\u2019 conclave with Tony Fauci and Francis Collins on the origins of Covid-19. All six pages of the summary are redacted. https://t.co/BXTg7XAEUB\u201d
— Gary Ruskin (@Gary Ruskin) 1654174531

The newly unearthed records reveal that scientists continued to consider the lab-leak origins theory of COVID-19 in private while working to dismiss the theory in public. But exactly what they discussed remains unknown, hidden behind redacted records and repeated refusals to comment.

There are two competing theories of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The first is that the virus has natural origins — that it was carried by an animal host and evolved to be contagious among human beings. This is the view widely accepted by most scientists.

The second theory is that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that studies coronaviruses, may have genetically manipulated one of their virus samples, creating SARS-CoV-2, and somehow that engineered virus leaked from the lab. This theory was maligned as a crackpot conspiracy theory by most public health officials.

Neither hypothesis of the pandemic's origins has been definitively proven or ruled out. An intelligence review by President Joe Biden's administration determined the theories were "equally plausible" and that the lab-leak hypothesis was "a credible line of inquiry."

In previously reported email chains, Farrar, Fauci, and other public health officials were shown to have discussed the possibility that the Wuhan coronavirus was "engineered." But after holding private conference calls on the matter, many of those involved waged a vigorous public campaign to discredit the lab-leak theory, apparently with no outstanding scientific reasons for doing so.

That public campaign began with a Feb. 19, 2020, statement signed by Farrar and other top health and medical professionals that strongly condemned "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin". It continued with various public statements from Fauci and others that the lab-leak theory was a "conspiracy," which led social media companies to censor any discussion of the possible lab origins of COVID-19.

Perhaps the most significant blow to the credibility of the lab-leak theory came on March 17, 2020, with the publication of a letter titled, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." This letter sought to definitively squash the idea that COVID-19 came from a laboratory setting. "We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible," the authors wrote, words that were seized by the national media and used to attack President Donald Trump because he had made statements supportive of the lab-leak theory.

Yet just one month before the "proximal origins" letter was published, three of its five authors had privately concluded that aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory" and that "some of the features (potentially) look engineered." Their opinion was revealed in a Feb. 1 email to Fauci, first published by BuzzFeed News.

A subsequent Feb. 4 email from Farrar to Fauci and Collins revealed he was split "50-50" between the natural origins and lab-leak theories and that Holmes was "60-40" in favor of the lab origin.

Emails transcribed by Republican staff on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show that on the same day Farrar sent a draft of the "proximal origins" paper with Fauci.

Farrar, Fauci, and the rest have stated that while they were initially open to all theories of the virus' origins, their change of opinion and embrace of the natural origins theory reflected the weight of scientific evidence.

However, there is a potential conflict of interest in how Fauci and Collins shaped the narrative that the lab-leak theory of COVID-19's origins was a "conspiracy theory." The nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance had received federal grants from Fauci's agency to study coronaviruses and had sub-awarded nearly $600,000 to the Wuhan lab in the years preceding the pandemic.

Whether the Wuhan lab used that grant money to conduct risky gain-of-function research to create new artificially enhanced viruses is a hotly contested claim, with Fauci and others denying it and Republican lawmakers like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) accusing them of lying.

The truth is likely redacted.

NIH Director Francis Collins faces tough questions from CNN about Wuhan lab research, misleads with answers



CNN's Pamela Brown confronted National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on Sunday on whether there was an "oversight failure" under his leadership that resulted in U.S. taxpayers funding risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Last week, the NIH released documents and sent a letter to a Republican lawmaker confirming that EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, used an award from the agency to fund gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, China. The letter said that EcoHealth funded an experiment "testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model." The documents released by the NIH revealed the experiment involved cloning MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012, and then engineering the clone by giving it a receptor-binding domain from a bat coronavirus to see if it would be able to enter human cells that were put into mice.

This experiment had the "unexpected result" of making the MERS-based virus more transmissible among the humanized mice, which would apparently meet the NIH's definition of gain-of-function research. And the NIH said in its letter that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant by failing to report those results. But Collins and his subordinate, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, have each publicly denied many times that the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research.

Interviewing Collins on Sunday night, Brown asked, given the NIH's admission that EcoHealth Alliance funded research that made a virus more transmissible among human cells, how the agency could claim "the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute."

"You're just now finding out U.S. tax dollars were being used to pay for this risky research in that Wuhan lab two years ago," Brown said. "So the question is how can you know what this money is going toward? What kind of research this is going toward in places like the Wuhan lab if you're just now finding this out from EcoHealth Alliance how the U.S.' taxpayer dollars were being used?"

In answer, Collins acknowledged that "EcoHealth did violate the terms of their grant award" by failing to report the experiment's "unexpected result" in a timely fashion. But then he argued that even if EcoHealth Alliance had reported its results to the NIH, its gain-of-function experiment was not the kind that requires "special high level oversight," and he emphasized this experiment was "in no way connected" to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Yeah, they messed up," he said. "We're going to hold them accountable. They sent us a progress report two years late that they should have sent a while ago, and it had information in it that they should have told us about."

But Brown pressed the issue, noting that the NIH's recognition that EcoHealth violated the terms of its award "does show ... that there was risky research being conducted in that lab with U.S. taxpayer dollars that the NIH was unaware of and is just now finding out."

"So it raises the question of what other risky experiments could be going on with taxpayer funding that you don't know about," she asked. "Does that concern you?"

"It does. I think in this instance, the particular grantee, which is EcoHealth Alliance, failed to follow the terms of their grant award that they should have followed, and they're in some trouble as a result of that," Collins replied.

"I don't think this is indication that there is a broad range of this kind of difficulty going on," he added.

"But isn't this also an oversight failure of the NIH?" Brown then asked. "Because the NIH is responsible for taking taxpayer money and giving these grants. So would you say this is also an oversight failure?"

Collins responded by shifting blame to Congress, stating that the NIH is not permitted by law to have direct oversight of a sub-award like that issued by EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for this gain-of-function experiment.

"That needs to be changed. We are actually interested in asking the Congress to change that," he said.

Brown kept pressing: "Why should Americans trust you and the NIH on the issue of COVID origins when you didn't even know about the programs it was funding with taxpayer dollars in China?"

Collins seemed taken aback by the question. "Well, that's a little too strong, Pam. We did know exactly what the funding was intended to support in terms of the research on these bat coronaviruses, and the vast, vast majority of what they did was exactly what we had given them permission to do," he said.

"In this one instance, they failed to report the results of an experiment that they should have told us about immediately. Frankly, it's not an experiment that we think has a huge impact on any of the work that was done, but they missed the opportunity to be completely responsive as they should have been.

"So please, relax, here. This is not a circumstance where I think you could say there was a major failure that put human lives at risk. It was a mess-up in terms of their being responsive to the requirements they should have followed."

Asked if the NIH will pull funding from EcoHealth Alliance given the organization's failure to comply with the terms of its award, Collins correctly stated that the specific grant that was sub-awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been suspended since last year. However, he declined to mention that the NIH and NIAID have awarded millions of dollars in new grants to EcoHealth Alliance for other research projects.

The interview concluded with Collins promising to be completely transparent with what happens regarding other unpublished data EcoHealth Alliance must turn over to the NIH.

"We want to be completely transparent about it. The last thing that needs to happen right now is any sense that we're not revealing everything that we know," Collins said.

Although Collins assured CNN viewers he was being "fair and open" with what the NIH knows, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin observed that Collins made many misleading statements in this interview.

For instance, his statement that EcoHealth Alliance's gain-of-function experiment is not the kind that requires "special high level oversight" makes no sense because the NIH said the organization should have reported its "unexpected results."

"The whole point of the NIH letter to Congress was that if EcoHealth HAD reported its research results, it WOULD HAVE triggered the extra, high level oversight," Rogin pointed out on Twitter. "Why is Collins pretending he knows they would have been exempt from that?"

The whole point of the NIH letter to Congress was that if EcoHealth HAD reported its research results, it WOULD HAV… https://t.co/8zPW58UQ2a

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) 1635207358.0

Rogin also observed that while Collins blamed Congress for restricting the NIH's ability to oversee grant sub-awards, the NIH failed to enforce its reporting requirements on EcoHealth Alliance for two years, which is why the agency is just now learning that EcoHealth was noncompliant with the terms of its grant.

(H/T: Mediaite)

EcoHealth Alliance violated terms of NIH grant with experiments on deadly MERS virus in China



New evidence has emerged that EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that studies infectious diseases, and its research partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China worked together on risky virus experiments that violated the terms of a National Institutes of Health grant awarded to the organization.

In September, the Intercept reported two grant proposals that were submitted to the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases by EcoHealth Alliance. One of those grants, for a five-year project called "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," appeared to show that researchers at the Wuhan lab were conducting experiments with bat coronaviruses that made those viruses more transmissible — which several experts told the news outlet fit the basic definition of gain-of-function research. Federal funding for such research was banned when the grant proposal was submitted, but the NIH granted an exemption and approved this grant.

When the NIH initially turned over documents detailing the grant proposal to the Intercept after a lawsuit earlier this year, the outlet said a progress report for the grant's fifth and final funding year was missing. Yesterday, the missing documents were provided to the Intercept and to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who had inquired about the status of the progress report for the 2018-19 grant period.

NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak wrote in a letter to Comer that EcoHealth Alliance submitted the progress report in August 2021 "in response to NIH's compliance enforcement efforts," but did not explain why this "progress report" was submitted two years after the final grant period concluded.

The Intercept reported that the documents reveal that in the final year of the project, EcoHealth Alliance conducted gain-of-function experiments with clones of the MERS-CoV virus, which caused a deadly viral outbreak of the Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012:

Yesterday, the NIH provided that missing report for the period ending May 2019, which was inexplicably dated August 2021. That summary of the group's work includes a description of an experiment the EcoHealth Alliance conducted involving infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012. MERS has a case-fatality rate as high as 35 percent, much higher than Covid-19's. The scientists swapped out the virus's receptor-binding domain, or RBD, a part of the spike protein that enables it to enter a host's cells, according to the report. "We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China," the scientists wrote.

"Changing the receptor binding site on MERS (from DPP4 to ACE2) is sort of crazy," wrote Jack Nunberg, a virologist and director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana, in an email to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Nunberg described the experiment as "definitely gain of function," or experiments that may increase the transmissibility or virulence of pathogens, because it gave the virus "a new receptor, a new host range, and unpredictable properties." A virus's host range is the range of species and cell types it is able to infect. The researchers' intent, which some scientists consider integral to defining gain-of-function, remains unclear.

In his letter to Comer, Tabak doesn't mention MERS and describes the experiment as "limited." He states that "EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model."

"In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do," Tabak wrote.

EcoHealth Alliance has previously denied that the research covered in the NIH grant included work with "potential pandemic pathogens" and claimed that the viruses studied were bat viruses, not human viruses. "But MERS is known to infect and spread in humans, and was specifically designated under the NIH's former pause on funding gain-of-function research of concern," the Intercept reported.

Tabak acknowledged that the research detailed in the documents appears to violate the terms of EcoHealth Alliance's NIH grant.

Between 2014 and 2017, the federal government issued a moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research experiments with potential pandemic pathogens because of concerns that making these diseases more transmissible could be disastrous in the event of a lab accident. In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services lifted the moratorium after creating a framework known as P3CO to review gain-of-function research proposals and provide oversight.

The award EcoHealth Alliance received stipulated that if experiments conducted showed unexpected results that met the definition of restricted gain-of-function research, the non-profit was to "stop all experiments with these viruses and provide the NIAID Program Officer and Grants Management Specialist, and Wuhan Institute of Virology Institutional Biosafety Committee with the relevant data and information related to these unanticipated outcomes."

As previously reported by the Intercept, an earlier experiment EcoHealth Alliance conducted with NIH grant money involved mice that had been genetically engineered to contain an enzyme receptor found in human cells. Scientists infected these "humanized mice" with bat coronaviruses that had been altered with parts of other viruses. Some of the results showed that the engineered viruses spread far more quickly in the mice than the original bat coronaviruses — meaning the artificial disease had become more transmissible among the humanized mice, which would appear to meet the NIH's definition of gain-of-function research.

Tabak said EcoHealth Alliance's research plan "was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans. As such, the research was not subject to departmental review under the HHS P3C0 Framework."

He added that "out of an abundance of caution," the terms and conditions of the award included the language requiring EcoHelath Alliance to report any unexpected results as an "additional layer of oversight." But the findings of the MERS gain-of-function experiment weren't reported until the progress report was submitted in August 2021, two years after the final year of the grant period.

"EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant. EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award," Tabak wrote.

No explanation was offered for why EcoHealth Alliance was permitted to submit its progress report for 2018-19 two years past due, but the organization has a pattern of flouting the rules set in place to provide oversight of its work. Earlier this month, the Intercept reported that EcoHealth also handed in the 2017-18 progress report for its NIH grant research two years late, in September 2020. Neither the NIH nor EcoHealth responded to the outlet's request for an explanation.

The revelations in these documents are concerning. EcoHealth Alliance appears to have shown a careless disregard for oversight rules established by the NIH, turning in its work late and making false claims about the kind of experiments it supported in Wuhan with U.S. taxpayer funding.

And facing public scrutiny, NIH leaders have been defensive rather than transparent about the agency's role in supporting gain-of-function research. Both NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and outgoing NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins have publicly denied that the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research experiments to make deadly pathogens (like MERS) more transmissible among humans.

The context of those denials is that some have suggested the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic are related to gain-of-function experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the possibility that the virus was leaked from there or another lab in Wuhan. Fauci has vigorously denied that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is related in any way to viruses experimented on by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology or that the NIH funded experiments that created the virus.

Tabak's letter, and other scientists who spoke to the Intercept, emphasized that the viruses studied in EcoHealth Alliance's experiments were too evolutionarily distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have mutated into the virus that causes COVID-19.

But critics say Fauci's denials that the NIH ever supported gain-of-function experiments go too far in light of what is now known. Commenting on Tabak's letter, Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function experiments, accused Fauci and Collins of lying to the press and the public about the NIH's support for gain-of-function research experiments in Wuhan, China.

The NIH received the relevant documents in 2018 and reviewed the documents in 2020 and again in 2021. The NIH--s… https://t.co/PIUMhpgQnd

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) 1634768509.0

Public evidence does not suggest that EcoHealth Alliance used NIH grant money to conduct experiments that led to the creation of COVID-19. But the NIH admitted in Tabak's letter that the agency is not fully aware of all of EcoHealth Alliance's research.

What other experiments could the NIH have funded without its knowledge?