Media coverage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s origins is increasingly focusing on the possibility of an accidental escape from either of two laboratories in Wuhan, China: the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Wuhan CDC) and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Both are known to have been working on the bat coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The first lab is about 280 metres from the Huanan “wet market” that was first fingered as the origin of the virus, while the second is about 10 kilometres away.

Bolstering the lab escape hypothesis in the eyes of the media is the news that the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has updated its assessment of the origin of the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 to reflect that it may have been accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan due to "unsafe laboratory practices".

But while many media outlets are whipping up fury over the alleged culpability of China, few are mentioning an uncomfortable fact: the dangerous research that could have led to the virus escaping was largely funded by the US. Furthermore, as we shall see, that funding itself had its roots in major safety lapses in US labs, involving deadly infectious diseases.

In 2019, with the backing of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included “gain-of-function” work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions. “Gain-of-function” work is research that seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, including making pathogens airborne that previously were not and altering them to be better adapted to new hosts. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.

The NIAID was – and still is – led by Dr Anthony Fauci, the doctor in charge of the US’s current coronavirus strategy.

US safety lapses

For why the US was funding China to do dangerous gain-of-function work with bat coronaviruses, we need to look back to 2014, when the US Centers for Disease Control (US CDC) had a series of safety lapses involving Ebola, anthrax and a deadly strain of bird flu, and a US army laboratory inadvertently shipped live anthrax samples to nearly 200 laboratories across the world.

The Lancet later recalled: “The news that dozens of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) might have been exposed to anthrax, that vials of smallpox virus had been left lying around in an NIH storeroom, and that the CDC had unwittingly sent out samples of ordinary influenza virus contaminated with H5N1, shook faith in the country's biosafety procedures.”

Moratorium

As a result of these alarming events, in 2014 the US government placed a temporary moratorium on funding “gain-of-function” research on certain viruses – influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

However, one experiment that created a genetically engineered chimeric version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS – was already underway before the US moratorium began. The research was a collaborative program between the University of North Carolina, Harvard, and China’s WIV.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to go ahead while it was under review by the agency, according to Ralph Baric, an infectious disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was involved in the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, Baric said.

A report for the Washington Post describes the gain-of-function lab work that was being done at the WIV: “Dozens of routine studies required extracting viruses from bat feces and growing them in batches for use in a wide array of experiments. For some projects the researchers spliced genetic material from different coronaviruses to create chimeras that could more easily infect human cells for laboratory experiments.”

The research prompted Chinese scientists to issue repeated warnings about the possibility of a new SARS-like disease jumping from bats to humans. As the Post remarks, “with each experiment came opportunities for an accidental exposure to dangerous pathogens”.

In 2015 a research paper detailing the US and Chinese scientists’ lab work with bat coronaviruses was published in Nature Medicine. The work was controversial, with one scientist commenting, “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.”

The research had received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.

The president of EcoHealth Alliance is Peter Daszak, who has been a vocal proponent of the theory that SARS-CoV-19 jumped from an animal into humans. It might be considered to be in EcoHealth’s interests to distract from the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab whose work it helped to fund.

Read on – and access linked sources – here:
https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19391