They had nothing to hide.
That’s why they hid it.
Now what should happen to people responsible for the deaths of millions and a global economic disaster?
A U.S. partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology manipulated a coronavirus to generate up to 10,000 times the viral load, violating provisions of its National Institutes of Health contract that forbade unregulated research that could make a disease significantly more dangerous or transmissible.
The information was revealed this week in a letter from the NIH to House Republicans. NIH said the nonprofit partner, EcoHealth Alliance, must submit any unpublished data to the agency by Monday to come back into compliance with its NIH grant. Any new documents could shed further light on the controversial nonprofit’s research.
The EcoHealth project ran afoul of NIH terms because it experimented with changing the spike protein of a bat coronavirus identified by researchers as “poised for human emergence” and tested how well it infected human airway cells, according to the letter released by House Oversight and Reform ranking member James R. Comer, R-Ky., late Wednesday. The committee also released a long overdue progress report detailing the group’s work from 2018 to 2019. EcoHealth, a New York-based intermediary between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, did not submit it to NIH until August.
The NIH’s letter states that EcoHealth violated a provision in its contract requiring a report to government funders should one of the viruses in its experiment produce “a one log increase in growth.” In other words, EcoHealth was not supposed to enhance a virus’s ability to grow by a factor of 10 without notifying NIH.
EcoHealth, working with the Wuhan lab, created novel coronaviruses that enhanced viral growth by 1,000-fold to 10,000-fold, orders of magnitude greater than the limit that should have triggered further NIH review, according to agency documents made public in recent weeks. The increase in viral load, which is closely tied to transmissibility, also resulted in more severe disease in mice in some cases.
www.rollcall.com
That’s why they hid it.
Now what should happen to people responsible for the deaths of millions and a global economic disaster?
A U.S. partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology manipulated a coronavirus to generate up to 10,000 times the viral load, violating provisions of its National Institutes of Health contract that forbade unregulated research that could make a disease significantly more dangerous or transmissible.
The information was revealed this week in a letter from the NIH to House Republicans. NIH said the nonprofit partner, EcoHealth Alliance, must submit any unpublished data to the agency by Monday to come back into compliance with its NIH grant. Any new documents could shed further light on the controversial nonprofit’s research.
The EcoHealth project ran afoul of NIH terms because it experimented with changing the spike protein of a bat coronavirus identified by researchers as “poised for human emergence” and tested how well it infected human airway cells, according to the letter released by House Oversight and Reform ranking member James R. Comer, R-Ky., late Wednesday. The committee also released a long overdue progress report detailing the group’s work from 2018 to 2019. EcoHealth, a New York-based intermediary between the NIH and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, did not submit it to NIH until August.
The NIH’s letter states that EcoHealth violated a provision in its contract requiring a report to government funders should one of the viruses in its experiment produce “a one log increase in growth.” In other words, EcoHealth was not supposed to enhance a virus’s ability to grow by a factor of 10 without notifying NIH.
EcoHealth, working with the Wuhan lab, created novel coronaviruses that enhanced viral growth by 1,000-fold to 10,000-fold, orders of magnitude greater than the limit that should have triggered further NIH review, according to agency documents made public in recent weeks. The increase in viral load, which is closely tied to transmissibility, also resulted in more severe disease in mice in some cases.
NIH grantee in Wuhan faces questions, deadline for more info on research
NIH said EcoHealth Alliance must submit any unpublished data to the agency by Monday to come back into compliance with its NIH grant.
www.rollcall.com
