US indirectly helped controversial Wuhan research

Proof of concept research into the ease with which viruses from other animals could be made transmissible between humans was being carried out at the Wuhan international research centre. There is a tide of opinion, strongest in the States, that such an altered bat virus escaped through poor lab. security to cause the pandemic of SARS/CoV-2 from which the world is now suffering. This is, however, by no means proven and the original view that the virus mutated naturally in its bat host has not been refuted.

Now Anthony Fauci, for long regarded as one of the good guys in the States for standing up to President Trump's anti-science directives, has been caught out in not telling all the truth about US support for research into engineered viruses. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

 ‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it,” tweeted GOP Sen. Rand Paul this week. In a scathing exchange earlier this summer, the Kentucky senator accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of not being straight with Congress about whether U.S. taxpayer dollars had been used to carry out a risky type of coronavirus research in Wuhan, China. “The NIH [National Institutes of Health] has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” responded a clearly perturbed Dr. Fauci. 

A lack of transparency has undermined trust in public health officials and scientists, who are not only dealing with the current pandemic but also trying to understand how to prevent future ones. At issue was research overseen by a New York-based organization, EcoHealth Alliance. Together with its partners in China, EcoHealth has worked extensively on identifying bat coronaviruses that could spill over into humans, with the idea that such work could help researchers get ahead of and thus prevent a pandemic. Dr. Fauci has long been a proponent of such research, and EcoHealth funneled at least $600,000 of NIH grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to carry out this research since 2014. But many scientists see such work as unnecessarily risky, especially when carried out in foreign labs that don’t have the same safety protocols and reporting requirements as in the U.S. 

 In a new twist, the NIH admitted this week that the U.S.-funded research had produced “unexpected” results. The agency, which wrote a letter to Republican lawmakers who have been demanding answers for months, maintained it had done no wrong. But it blamed EcoHealth Alliance for failing to immediately report back when a bat coronavirus it was tinkering with started killing humanized mice at an unusually high rate during the fifth and final year of its grant in 2018-19. EcoHealth filed its progress report on that research on Aug. 3 of this year. NIH told the Monitor it requested the belated report in July, and EcoHealth Alliance said it was working with NIH to address a “misconception” about its research and the reporting requirements. The NIH letter fuels mounting concerns about funding and oversight.

Rather like "climategate" over the supposed manipulation of data, which BBC security correspondent has examined on Radio 4 recently, this is liable to tarnish both the reputation of Dr Fauci