Infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday defended the flow of funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for bat coronavirus research, saying it would have been “almost a dereliction of our duty” for the NIH not to collaborate with Chinese scientists to study how the pathogen might jump from animals to humans.
Fauci made the remarks in testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health & Human Services, with the discussion touching on the as-yet-undetermined origin of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the pathogen that causes the disease COVID-19.
At issue is around $600,000 of the some $3.7 million in overall NIH funding provided to EcoHealth Alliance that was channeled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research coronaviruses in bats in 2014. Fauci defended collaboration with the Wuhan facility, pointing to an earlier coronavirus outbreak with a confirmed bat origin as justification.
“Why do research in collaboration with our Chinese colleagues? Well, the underlying reason for that is that we had a big scare with SARS-CoV-1 back in 2002, 2003, where that particular virus unquestionably went from a bat to an intermediate host to start an epidemic and a pandemic that resulted in 8,000 cases and close to 800 deaths,” Fauci said. “It would’ve been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn’t study this, and the only way you can study these things is, you’ve gotta go where the action is,” he added.
“I often say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, you don’t want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species,” Fauci continued. “So we had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant to EcoHealth. The sub-grant was about $600,000 over a period of five years. So it was a modest amount. And the purpose of it was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance, and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of transmitting infection to humans,” he added.
The Wuhan facility, which is home China’s only P4 lab—the highest level of biosafety—has been in the spotlight amid concerns that the CCP virus may have originated there rather than by making a natural jump from bats to humans.
Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee argued in a May 19 report (pdf) that it is more likely the virus escaped from the lab.
“There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence … to support a lab leak as the origination of COVID-19,” stated the report, which was led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking member on the committee. “By contrast, little circumstantial evidence has emerged to support the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] claim that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, having jumped from some other species to humans.”
BY TOM OZIMEK
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