National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak informed a leading House Republican lawmaker on Wednesday that the agency funded gain-of-function experiments …
National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak informed a leading House Republican lawmaker on Wednesday that the agency funded gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in China after over a year of denials from the agency’s leadership. Tabak said that its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, first notified the NIH in August that it conducted the gain-of-function experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China between June 2018 and May 2019. Tabak said EcoHealth failed to immediately notify the agency that they created lab-generated chimeric coronaviruses that exhibited a greater than one log, or ten-times, increase in growth. “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” Tabak said in a letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee Ranking Member Rep. James Comer of Kentucky. “EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award. Additional compliance efforts continue.” EcoHealth informed the NIH in the progress report that it created a lab-generated SARS-related coronavirus called rWIV1-SHC-014 S that was more pathogenic towards mice with humanized cells than the natural virus on which it was based.
