NIH Officials Worked With EcoHealth Alliance to Evade Restrictions on Coronavirus Experiments – The Intercept
November 4, 2021
But what happened next sets off alarm bells for biosafety advocates: Agency staff adopted language that EcoHealth Alliance crafted to govern its own work. The agency inserted several sentences into grant materials describing immediate actions the group would take if the viruses they created proved to become more transmissible or disease-causing as the result of the experiments.
Although the experiments demonstrate a lack of oversight and present dangers to public health, according to several scientists contacted by The Intercept, none of the viruses involved in the work are related closely enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have sparked the pandemic.
In December 2017, the funding for some gain-of-function research was resumed under carefully constructed guidelines for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight, or P3CO but the language suggested by Daszak helped the group evade this oversight as well. In July 2018, NIAID program officers decided that the experiments on humanized mice which had been conducted a few months earlier would get a pass from these restrictions as long as EcoHealth Alliance immediately notified appropriate agency officials according to the circumstances that the group had laid out.
While it is not unusual for grantees to communicate with their federal program officers, the negotiation of this matter did not appropriately reflect the gravity of the situation, according to Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The discussions reveal that neither party is taking the risks sufficiently seriously, said Bloom. MERS-CoV has killed hundreds of people and is thought to pose a pandemic risk, so its difficult to see how chimeras of MERS-CoV with other high risk bat coronaviruses shouldnt also be considered a pandemic risk.
In a written response to questions submitted in September and October, an NIH spokesperson told The Intercept that the rule that was supposed to trigger a stop to the research was added out of an abundance of caution. Similarly, in a letter sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last month, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak called the rule an additional layer of oversight, implying that the agency had devised the rule itself. But the notes reviewed by The Intercept show that the language was inserted at Daszaks suggestion and that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance worked together to evade additional oversight.
Daszak responded to the NIH on June 8, 2016, arguing that, because EcoHealth Alliances proposed hybrid viruses were significantly different from the SARS virus, which was already known to infect humans, the experiments were not gain-of-function research and should not be restricted.
Daszak also pointed out that WIV1, the parent of the proposed chimeric SARS-like viruses, has never been demonstrated to infect humans or cause human disease, according to the transcribed emails. And he said that previous research strongly suggests that the chimeric bat spike/bat backbone viruses should not have enhanced pathogenicity in animals. The NIH would go on to accept these arguments.
But the groups argument that its viral research did not pose a risk of infection appears to contradict the justification for the work: that these pathogens could potentially cause a pandemic. The entire rationale of EcoHealths grant renewal on SARS-related CoVs is that viruses with spikes substantially (10-25%) diverged from SARS-CoV-1 pose a pandemic risk, said Bloom. Given that this is the entire rationale for the work, how can they simultaneously argue these viruses should not be regulated as potential pandemic pathogens?
The NIH has not made the correspondence public. Instead, the agency arranged for an in camera review for select congressional staff. The staffers were allowed to read and take notes on printed copies of the written exchange an unusual approach for grant communications that are in the public interest. The Intercept reviewed notes taken by congressional staff.
Given the importance and interest in this topic, its important for the NIH to be fully transparent about the research they support and how they make crucial decisions about the regulation of research on potential pandemic pathogens, said Bloom.
Regulating risky research is the NIHs role. But Daszak gave his group a way out. If the recombinant viruses grew more quickly than the original viruses on which they were based, he suggested, EcoHealth Alliance and its collaborators would immediately stop its research and inform their NIAID program officer. Specifically, he suggested a threshold beyond which his researchers would not go: If the novel SARS or MERS chimeras showed evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than1 log (or 10 times) over the original viruses and grow more efficiently in human lung cells, the scientist would immediately stop their experiments with the mutant viruses and inform their NIAID program officer.
In a July 7 letter to EcoHealth Alliance, NIHs Greer and Stemmy formally accepted Daszaks proposed rule. The chimeric viruses were not reasonably anticipated to have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route, the administrators concluded, according to the transcribed emails.
The language that the NIH later inserted into the grant was strikingly similar to what Daszak proposed: Should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must stop all experiments with these viruses.
But when the scientists conducted the experiments in 2018, one of the chimeric viruses grew at a rate that produced a viral load of log 4 or10,000 times greater than the parent virus. Even so, the work was allowed to proceed.
Despite the careful wording meant to assure the agency that the research would be immediately halted if it enhanced the viruses pathogenicity or transmissibility, EcoHealth violated its own rule and did not immediately report the concerning results to NIH, according to the letter from NIHs Tabak.
In a letter sent to NIH on October 26, Daszak insisted EcoHealth Alliance did comply with all the requirements of its NIH grant, pointing out that the group reported the results of its experiment in its year four progress report, which it submitted to the agency in April 2018 and that no one at the agency responded to the description of the experiment. At no time did program staff indicate to us that this work required further clarification or secondary review, hewrote.
Daszak also argued intheletterthat the viral growth reported in the year four progress report did not correspond to the viral growth outlined in the rule he himself had devised. The experiment we reported to NIH actually shows genome copies per gram not viral titer.
Daszak emphasized that the growth of the chimeric viruses in the genetically engineered mice was enhanced only in the early part of the experiment. By day 6-8, there was no discernably significant difference among the different viral types, he wrote.
Yet virologists contacted by The Intercept dismissed both the distinction between viral titer and viral growth and the focus on the latter part of the mouse experiment, when the rate of growth between the viruses had evened out.
I dont agree with their interpretation, said Wain-Hobson, of the Pasteur Institute. He described the EcoHealth Alliances response as hairsplitting and said that viral growth inevitably peters out. Every growth of a virus comes to a plateau. This has been known since time immemorial, said Wain-Hobson, who explained that the eventual cessation of viral growth is due to a lack of nutrients. They have chosen this interpretation because it suits them.
NIH officials have previously stated unequivocally that the agency did not fund any gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIAID, during a Senate hearing in May. Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate health committee tomorrow morning.
In its statement to The Intercept, an NIH spokesperson wrote, the Agency did not support the kind of gain of function research warranting the additional and unique P3CO oversight identified by stakeholders during extensive prior policy development. To claim otherwise is incorrect and irresponsible. And in his letter last month, Tabak reiterated the claim that the research was not gain-of-function.
But the correspondence with Daszak makes clear that at least some at the agency were concerned that EcoHealth Alliances proposed experiments met the criteria for gain-of-function research of concern as early as 2016.
According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has criticized the lack of federal oversight of gain-of-function research, the fact that the NIH allowed EcoHealth Alliance to write its own rules is further evidence of the NIHs regulatory failure. This is like the teacher giving you the opportunity to write your own homework problem and grade your own homework when you turn it in. Then you decide the teacher is so lenient, theres no need to hand it in, said Ebright. The oversight process clearly failed.
Beyond the question of oversight, others question whether these experiments should be conducted at all.
In addition to the legalistic questions of whether EcoHealth and NIH were adhering to current guidelines, said Bloom, we urgently need a broader discussion about whether its a good idea to be making novel chimeras of coronaviruses that are at this point universally acknowledged to pose a pandemic risk to humans.
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NIH Officials Worked With EcoHealth Alliance to Evade Restrictions on Coronavirus Experiments - The Intercept
