A scientist insisted Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci is hiding the truth about the U.S. funding of research that could shed light on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic during the first hearing on the matter.
At issue during the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs subcommittee on emerging threats hearing is gain-of-function research, which can enhance the severity or transmissibility of existing viruses that may infect humans. Since the pandemic erupted globally in early 2020, many American suspicions have pointed to China.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been adamant that the National Institutes of Health did not fund gain-of-function research at a Chinese government lab.
But Dr. Richard Ebright, lab director for the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, told senators Wednesday that Fauci was lying.
“The statements made on repeated occasions to the public, to the press, and to policymakers by … Dr. Fauci have been untruthful,” Ebright said. “I do not understand why those statements are being made because they are demonstrably false.”
Ebright said last year that Fauci “lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public.” He told the Senate he stands by those remarks and explained in his written testimony why he believed EcoHealth Alliance, a longtime collaborator with the Chinese government lab, had indeed conducted gain-of-function research while receiving U.S. taxpayer funding.
FBI INVESTIGATED NIH AWARD TO ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE & WUHAN LAB
EcoHealth was reprimanded by the NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, in October, when Tabak found that the organization delayed revealing that a U.S.-funded experiment conducted with the Chinese lab in Wuhan determined that mice with implanted human cells became sicker with an engineered version of bat coronavirus. NIH found more EcoHealth violations in January.
“That’s not merely a financial violation. That is a serious hazard violation and a violation that may be connected to the origins of the current pandemic,” Ebright said Wednesday.
EcoHealth received grant funding from NIH and steered to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research. Questions linger on whether that research could be tied to the virus that may have leaked from the lab.
“Gain of function research has the potential to unleash a global pandemic that threatens the lives of millions, yet this is only the first time the issue has been discussed in a Congressional committee,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who organized the Senate hearing, tweeted on Wednesday. “We have had this pandemic, and we have changed not one bit of behavior.”
Fauci wrongly claimed in March that a February 2020 letter in the Lancet did not dismiss the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis despite the letter being signed by dozens of scientists clearly condemning the idea that it emerged from a Chinese government lab as a conspiracy theory.
The letter praised China’s response and said, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Peter Daszak, a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and who leads EcoHealth, steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH funding to the Chinese lab and helped organize the letter. Daszak was also a key World Health Organization-China joint study team member in early 2021.
Ebright said Wednesday that the Lancet letter “certainly” had the effect of slowing down investigations into the origins of COVID-19 and that that letter “was only one of two efforts to impose the false narrative that science shows SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover and that that is the consensus view of scientists.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment last summer stating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Steven Quay, CEO of Atossa Therapeutics, argued to the Senate that COVID-19 “has three genomic regions that have the signature of synthetic biology, that is, gain-of-function research.”
Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, said he would call what the Wuhan lab was doing gain-of-function research.
“I am reasonably confident that pandemic virus identification represents a greater near-term threat to national security than anything else in the life sciences,” Esvelt also told the Senate.
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Quay said gain-of-function research should be paused, while Ebright said the research should be dramatically limited. Esvelt said gain-of-function research generally should not be done because it is far more likely to kill humans than save them.
