COVID-19 origin dispute: US suspends funding for Wuhan lab, say reports
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has imposed new sanctions on a Chinese lab that is in the centre of debates on the origin of COVID-19 pandemic.
A House subcommittee investigating into the pandemic’s origin has publicized a nine-page HHS memo. suspending and proposing debarment of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from taking part in the United States Federal Government procurement and non-procurement programs. The memo, in effect, bars WIV from getting US government funding at present and maybe forever. The memo also states that the suspension is necessary to mitigate any potential public health risk, according to Science.
Although there is no compelling evidence that supports the chance of SARS-CoV-2 being leaked from a Chinese lab and served as a trigger to the pandemic, WIV has been a key suspect in the theory. It is to be noted that the institute has studied bat coronaviruses for a long time, Science added.
The report said that some of the Lab-leak proponents applauded the memo and said that the WIV’s long-time US collaborator, EcoHealth Alliance, should be disbarred as well, while others think that HHS is inclining to the political pressure and underscoring the relationship with Chinese scientists who could help protect the people from future pandemics.
Richard Roberts, the Nobel laureate who led a letter campaign to oppose the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) termination of an EcoHealth grant in 2020 due to its association with WIV has said that the memo is just another example of how Republicans are pressuring a public institution to create trouble.
HHS’s Office of Inspector General in January 2023 issued an audit report of EcoHealth, a nonprofit based in New York that conducts fieldwork to understand potentially dangerous pathogens to humans. The report faulted EcoHealth for not effectively monitoring a sub-award to WIV from an NIH grant that the nonprofit started receiving in 2014. The Inspector General report recommended that NIH refer the matter to HHS’s Suspension and Debarment Official, Science recalled.
WIV was not already banned from receiving US funding. Several House bills have included provisions to ban future funding to WIV and, in some cases, to EcoHealth, But none of these bills have been signed into law or voted on in the Democratic-led Senate. WIV has not received US government funding since 2019.
According to Science, WIV had collected a large library of genetic sequences of coronaviruses found in fecal and oral samples obtained from bats. But, owing to technical reasons, WIV could only grow a few of these viruses in lab cultures. To determine whether these sequences came from viruses that potentially posed threats to humans, WIV researchers put sequences for the surface proteins of viruses they couldn’t grow into another virus called WIV-1, which did grow.
They then put these chimeric viruses into the noses of transgenic mice that had a human receptor for coronaviruses. The results of these experiments have received intense scrutiny because of the possibility that the chimeric viruses may have become more dangerous to humans than WIV-1 itself.
Science quoted EcoHealth as saying that this controversy is riddled with misunderstandings. It contends that the experiments with WIV-1 do not constitute GOF research, regardless of how the chimeric virus behaved. In a detailed back-and-forth with NIH, EcoHealth argued that the viral assay used in the study included both dead and live viruses, so it did not indicate that viable virus titers had multiplied 10-fold.