Fauci denies us funded controversial study

 In COVID Origins Storm, Fauci Denies US Funded Controversial Study in WuhanBengaluru: Earlier this month, former New York Times and Science reporter Nicholas Wade posted a 10,000-word article on Medium arguing that the possibility that the novel coronavirus was a human-engineered pathogen and that it had escaped, by chance or otherwise, from a lab in Wuhan, China, couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

Soon after it was published, Wade’s article used to be seized upon by both political commentators and conspiracy theorists; it additionally drew comments from some scientists that the virus’s origins warrant further investigation. At the identical time, the people whose research Wade criticised in the article, which includes Anthony Fauci, have hit back at the article and said Wade has acquired many of his facts wrong.

In his article, Wade cited the work and remarks of molecular biologist Richard Ebright and virologist David Baltimore, among others. His principal argument centred on the furin cleavage site. This is the phase on the virus where a human-body molecule called furin chops off two components of the virus to help the latter attach to a cell. Wade argued that the cleavage site’s homes suggested controlled manipulation, now not natural evolution.

He drew on other lookup to insist a circumstantial case could be made that the virus was born in a lab, now not in the wild. He also alleged that the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had funded gain-of-function (GoF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci heads the NIAID. GoF refers to manipulating viruses to add features they haven’t evolved to have, ostensibly in an effort to understand how they may affect humans.

At a Senate hearing on May 10, Kentucky senator Rand Paul and Fauci interrupted every other in a conversation about the virus’s origins. Paul alleged first that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) – of which NIAID is a infant organisation – funded GoF research at the Wuhan Institute. This is one of the claims in Wade’s article. According to The Hill, Fauci retorted: “Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, completely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever, and does no longer now, fund ‘gain of function research’ in the Wuhan Institute.”

According to Fauci, the NIH gave a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, “a nonprofit targeted on research that aims to forestall pandemics” (source), which in turn passed a section of it to the Wuhan Institute – but not for GoF research. The Hill reported, “Fauci cited that although the NIH did fund a project at the Wuhan lab, it used to be not meant for ‘gain of function’ lookup into human-made superviruses” but to investigate bat viruses that should infect humans in future.

Wade also criticised Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, on two fronts. First, for failing to divulge a conflict of interest after he put collectively a group of experts in the pandemic’s early days to declare the virus couldn’t have come from any lab. The conflict was that Daszak had funded work at the Wuhan Institute. Second, Wade alleged that neither Daszak nor all and sundry else could have known the virus’s origins so early into the pandemic – February 2020 – so claiming it couldn’t have come from a lab at that time used to be disingenuous and “unscientific”.

Another person, Kristian Andersen, virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, and his colleagues had also claimed in a research letter in Nature in March 2020 that the virus had advanced naturally. Wade wrote that the Andersen group’s conclusion was “grounded in nothing but two inconclusive speculations”.

Daszak has referred to as Wade’s piece “biased, disingenuous and wildly erroneous,” and speculated that Wade “got paid” to write it. Daszak also cited a Wall Street Journal article (paywalled) that quoted a declaration issued by the NIAID:

“The research by using EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. that NIH funded was for a project that aimed to characterise at the molecular degree the function of newly discovered bat spike proteins and naturally going on pathogens. Molecular characterisation examines functions of an organism at the molecular level, in this case a virus and a spike protein, without affecting the surroundings or development or physiological state of the organism. At no time did NIAID fund gain-of-function lookup to be conducted at WIV.”

When pressed by the newspaper for a straight reply to its query – whether the instituted carried out GoF research – the NIAID added: “WIV is a Chinese institution which we expect has multiple sources of funding. It is impossible for us to be conscious of nor can we account for all of their activities.”

Andersen also published a technical Twitter thread purporting to rebut Wade’s claims, beginning by saying, “The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is but again in the news – this time due to the fact of a quote by Nobel laureate David Baltimore. The site is no longer a ‘smoking gun’, nor does it ‘make a powerful challenge to the thought of a natural origin’. Quite the opposite”.

Wade had also written that the novel coronavirus is the solely coronavirus known to have a furin cleavage site with a positive genetic coding that he said was unusual. Andersen countered: “There is nothing mysterious about having a ‘first example’ of a virus with an FCS. Viruses sampled to date solely give us a teeny-tiny fraction of all the viruses circulating in the wild. Fragments – such as the CTCCTCGGCGGG – come and go all the time.”

Andersen also argued that if the encoding used to be unusual, it should have gone away as the virus replicated and mutated, leaving later lines with the more ‘usual’ encoding. He added, after more technical posts, that “Baltimore’s first factor – that the FCS found in SARS-CoV-2 is somehow uncommon – is simply incorrect. FCSs are found in a multitude of extraordinary coronaviruses” and that the fingerprint in question “can be found in different coronaviruses”.

Other experts that The Wire Science has corresponded with in the course of its reportage have stated that there is no conclusive evidence for any argument about the novel coronavirus’s origins. Scientists will need to habits more research, sequence more samples of the virus from exceptional parts of the world and undertake ground-level studies in areas internet hosting the animal population among which the virus ought to have first circulated.

The last part has been complicated, however, with the aid of China’s attempts at every flip to control or block access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and hospitals in the Hubei province. A group of investigators led by the WHO, and including Daszak, visited Hubei in the past this year. The report they published after their day out said that the virus most likely originated naturally and no longer in a lab, adding that the team would proceed its investigation and may return to China in future.

According to The Hill, “The White House said it believes that China has ‘not been transparent’ in releasing its findings on the origins of COVID-19, and the WHO was once severely limited in its investigation.” Earlier, the New York Times had also stated that the WHO may have given China too many concessions for favourable remedy in return. As The Wire Science reported:

The newspaper accessed internal documents and performed interviews with more than 50 public-health officials, scientists and diplomats that show how the “disempowered” WHO used to be eager to “win access and coordination” from China however achieved neither. The documents additionally show that China was in a position to extract concessions from WHO which allowed the government to delay vital research and avoided a “potentially embarrassing” assessment of its early response.

At the Senate hearing, Fauci repeated: “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m utterly in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has no longer funded gain of function lookup to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute.”