In a bombshell admission, National Institute of Health’s top official Lawrence A. Tabak admits to what is ‘gain-of-function’ research conducted in the Wuhan lab, and that the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance was dishonest in its transparency about the research. EcoHealth, which funneled the NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, used money to research how to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.
Admission was revealed in a letter Tabak wrote Wednesday to Republican Representative James Comer. National Review reports of the letter, “In keeping with Fauci’s refusal to use ‘gain-of-function,’ Tabak avoids the term, though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely.”
NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964. pic.twitter.com/cFOtJlRoWl
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) October 20, 2021
Dr. Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University tweeted a copy of the letter Wednesday evening with the caption, “NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. NIH states that EcoHealth Alliance violated Terms and Conditions of NIH grant AI110964.”
National Review writes Dr. Ebright had previously rebutted Fauci’s claim that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]” as “demonstrably false.”
Ebright “told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV ‘epitomizes’ the definition of gain-of-function research, which deals with ‘enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)’ or those pathogens ‘resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”
Tabak also mentions in the letter a “limited experiment” that was conducted to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” The lab mice infected “became sicker” than those with the unmodified bat virus.
EcoHealth had filed a “previously unpublished” grant proposal with the NIAID. The proposal was obtained and reported by The Intercept, which exposed that $599,000 of the total grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was for research figuring out how to make viruses more dangerous and/or infectious.
In his letter, Tabak reveals EcoHealth failed to comply with its reporting responsibilities under the grant, and therefore has only five days to submit to NIH “any and all unpublished data” regarding the project.
