In an about-face that led U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to tweet “’I told you so’ doesn’t begin to cover it,” the National Institutes of Health issued a letter to U.S. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., admitting that the NIH had indeed funded gain-of-function (GOF) research conducted by NIH’s grant recipient EcoHealth.
The admission is important because of emerging evidence that GOF experiments may have triggered the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Doggedly, the NIH director, Dr. Francis Collins, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have insisted for months that their agencies never participated in or funded GOF studies.
Fauci even testified at a Senate hearing in May 2021 that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Yet, that’s exactly what did happen. In a letter signed by NIH’s principal deputy director Lawrence A. Tabak, the NIH admitted that “EcoHealth failed to report” that EcoHealth was “testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
Tabak added that the research was “far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” and that “it is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2.”
While Fauci and Collins defenders were quick to tweet that the letter didn’t admit to GOF research or knowledge of it, Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist who in March 2021 joined 26 world scientists in calling for a full forensic investigation into the origins of COVID, responded with this breakdown of the research:
“The NIH funded the construction of novel chimeric coronaviruses that combined spike gene of one SARS-related coronavirus with rest of genetic information of another, and that yielded viruses that exhibited 10,000-fold higher viral load and higher pathogenicity in humanized mice.”
SOURCES:
Rand Paul Twitter October 20, 2021
Richard H. Ebright October 20, 2021
Breitbart October 20, 2021