Politics The Jihad Against Fauci

The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research
“Last week his agency admitted they had in fact funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

— Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), at the same hearing, Oct. 27

In May, we examined a high-profile spat between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At issue was whether the National Institutes of Health had funded “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). At a Senate hearing, Paul said “super viruses” had been created, and Fauci shot back that the senator was “entirely and completely incorrect.”



We awarded Two Pinocchios to Paul, saying “there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.”

Readers have been asking for an update ever since a top NIH official sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 20 saying that the nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance — which received NIH funding to do the research on the potential for bat-specific pathogens in nature to jump to humans — did not report an experimental finding that indicated a spike in viral growth.


Both Cruz and Cotton have cited the NIH letter to assert that Fauci lied to Congress. Cruz even told Attorney General Merrick Garland that Fauci should be prosecuted. The issue is important because of speculation that the virus that caused the coronavirus pandemic might have been created in a lab. But the NIH letter does not say what they claim — and, in fact, the NIH letter appears to have inaccuracies.

The Facts
This is a complex story, on many levels. We are going to keep focused on what was disclosed in the NIH letter and in the release of grant updates by EcoHealth by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Intercept.



Gain of function, in many ways, is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function.

But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.

That’s when gain of function becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing scientists to study how to combat them. But increasingly many scientists have decided the research was potentially dangerous — and, especially in China, not done with the proper safety precautions.



Even now, it’s not clear whether the research funded by EcoHealth in China amounted to gain of function. When the Intercept obtained EcoHealth documents in September, seven of 11 scientists who are virologists or work in adjacent fields told the Intercept that the work appeared to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research. Obviously, it’s a matter of dispute within the scientific community.

But Cotton claimed NIH admitted that it had funded gain-of-function research. That’s wrong. No such admission appears in the letter, and NIH officials continue to insist that the EcoHealth work using NIH funds did not constitute gain-of-function research.

In 2014, gain-of-function research was paused for three years as the U.S. government set up a case-by-case review process to oversee funding, known as the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) framework. Under that framework, funding of enhanced potential pandemic pathogens would receive greater scrutiny if research was intended to create such pathogens and if the virus was highly transmissible and could create a pandemic among humans.



There has long been criticism that the P3CO framework had too many loopholes. But the EcoHealth grant, awarded in 2014, does not show that it intended to create an enhanced pathogen or that its experiment posed any harm to humans.

“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence A. Tabak, NIH principal deputy director, wrote in his letter to Congress dated Oct. 20. “Regardless, the viruses being studied under this grant were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2,” which causes covid-19.

Now let’s turn to the experiment itself, which involved the use of three chimeric (artificial, laboratory-generated) viruses that are capable of replicating efficiently in human cells with the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the protein that provides the entry point for the coronavirus to hook into and infect human tissue. The experiment relied on “humanized” mice, meaning they were given an ACE2 receptor that mimicked the human form. (The mice were otherwise unchanged.)



In a report filed with NIH on April 13, 2018, EcoHealth reported that the viral load in the lung tissue of the mice with the chimeric viruses for a few days went up greater than 10,000 times, as expressed in “genome copies per gram of tissue.” (Specifically, the report said, 10 to the sixth power.) This was a strong indication of potential infectivity in humans, though it depends on the specific properties of the viral spike protein.

Tabak’s letter noted that the terms of the grant award required EcoHealth to immediately report a “one log increase in growth,” a 10-fold increase, and it failed to do so. The specific language, dated 2016, was: “Should any of the MERS-like or SARS-like chimeras generated under this grant show evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log over the parental backbone strain you must stop all experiments.”

But several virologists told The Fact Checker that genome copies per gram is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the viral load, as the data also could contain genomic material from inactivated, incompletely formed or dead virus.



Viral load (or titer) generally refers to a quantitative assessment of intact virus capable of infection and replication in a tissue culture system, generally using a plaque assay. Genome copy relies on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a laboratory technique used to amplify DNA sequences — which could be intact virus, but also include genetic material testing positive by PCR but incapable of infection and replication.

It’s a complex subject, so we developed a rough analogy after discussions with several experts.

Imagine that a one-log viral growth is equivalent to an accounting of how many cars are assembled in a factory. Genome copies instead would tell you how many axles are in the factory — but only some of the axles are functional and can be used to make a car, some others are broken and won’t work, and some are in pieces, countable, but not useful at all. (One could also view genome copies as more like a set of instructions for making the parts of a finished car, i.e. a viable virus.)



“RT-PCR [Reverse transcription PCR] can be used to measure the viral genome copies/gram, i.e. the axles,” Linda J. Saif, a veterinarian virologist at Ohio State University, said in an email. “As in your analogy this may not equate to the infectious virus titers, i.e. the whole car, because of incompletely assembled virus fragments, defective non-replicating particles, etc.”

“In virology, many authors call RT-PCR results ‘viral loads,’ ” said Stanley Perlman, a physician and virologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “It is not the same as infectious virus titers because virus is inefficiently assembled. It may be analogous to cutting circles out of a square cloth, so that there is excess material that is not useful.”

Perlman said “the ratio of infectious to defective coronaviruses ranges from about 1:15 to 1:200, depending on cell type,” meaning 15 to 200 times more genomic sequence would be detected than viable replicating virus.



In a response to Tabak’s letter this week, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth, emphasized that the report highlighted genome copies per gram. “Viral titers were not conducted in this experiment,” he said, adding that six to eight days later, there was “no discernibly significant difference among the different viral types.”

(Confusing matters, however, a graph in the 2018 EcoHealth report was mislabeled “viral load per gram of lung tissue,” even though the graph’s Y axis is clearly labeled genome copies per gram of tissue.)

Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, dismissed this explanation. “The claim is technically true. PCR is measuring viral nucleic acids, not viruses per se,” he said in an email. “But the claim is factually nonsense. PCR is a standard method for quantifying viral growth,” and “NIH, in the Tabak memo and in subsequent comments, has made it absolutely clear that the NIH interprets EcoHealth’s data as indicating a greater-than-10-time increase in viral growth.”

Robert Kessler, a spokesman for EcoHealth, told The Fact Checker that the experiment was conducted only once and involved only a few mice. He confirmed Tabak’s comment that researchers encountered an unexpected result. “This testing is intended to determine whether strains discovered in the field can infect humans and how efficiently, not to create super viruses,” he said.

“Given the small number of mice, it is also uncertain whether the survival and weight loss data were statistically relevant, and as no further replications of this experiment were performed, we are unable to corroborate these initial results,” Daszak said in his letter to NIH.

Earlier this year, EcoHealth submitted additional data on this experiment, specifically the increase in genome copies in mice brain tissue, in a fifth update of its research grant. Tabak’s letter suggested the report was filed late and it was the first notice the agency had received on the experiment. As we have noted, the experiment was disclosed in 2018 in the fourth report. The fifth report was due in 2019, but EcoHealth maintains a miscommunication with NIH and a technical glitch led to its delay until this year.

We sent questions to NIH about the failure to note the 2018 disclosure by EcoHealth and why it believed an increase in genome copies per gram would indicate 10-fold increase in viral growth. After a four-day wait, we received this emailed statement: “NIH stands by the letter provided to Congressional Committees in response to their inquiries and released by the House Energy & Commerce. NIH is not commenting on internal deliberations with the grantee beyond the information in the letter.”

James Arnold, a Cotton spokesman, defended his comments.

“While the letter does not use the phrase ‘gain of function’ to avoid the obvious political consequences, it describes work that matches the commonly accepted definition of ‘gain-of-function’ research, as confirmed by members of the scientific community,” Arnold said. “Senator Cotton said the NIH admitted funding gain-of-function research because the NIH did in fact fund gain-of-function research, whether the letter used that phrase or not.”

A Cruz spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The Pinocchio Test
EcoHealth’s research has come under increased scrutiny after more details about its work in China have been revealed, either through congressional or journalistic pressure. The NIH letter, flawed though it may be, indicates the federal government is taking a closer look, too.

But we see no reason to change the Two Pinocchio rating we awarded Paul. There is a split in the scientific community about what constitutes gain-of-function research. To this day, NIH says this research did not meet the criteria — a stance that is not an outlier in the scientific community. Indeed, it appears as if EcoHealth halted the experiment as soon as it seemed to veer in that direction.

Meanwhile, Cotton and Cruz are spinning the letter as confirming what it does not say. They are welcome to offer an opinion about its meaning. But, so far, it’s not a fact that NIH has admitted funding gain-of-function research. So they also earn Two Pinocchios.

Two Pinocchios

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ied-congress-about-gain-of-function-research/

 

Republicans Spin NIH Letter About Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research

Republicans say a letter from a National Institutes of Health official is an admission that the agency funded so-called gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in China, with some falsely linking the work to the pandemic coronavirus. But the research, which the NIH maintains is not gain-of-function, could not have led to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

On Oct. 20, the Republican staff of the House Oversight and Reform Committeereleased a letter from NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak responding to an inquiry about a grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific nonprofit focused on pandemic prevention and conservation.

The grant — which was awarded in 2014 and renewed in 2019 before it was canceled in April 2020 — has been the subject of much controversy. It assessed the potential for bat coronaviruses in China to spillover and infect people and included some experiments mixing and matching elements of different viruses to better understand them. It also involved a collaboration with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.



In the letter, Tabak said EcoHealth Alliance had violated the terms of its grant by not immediately reporting an unexpected experimental result in which mice became sicker when infected with a modified coronavirus.

Republicans were quick to interpret the letter as an admission that the agency had funded gain-of-function research.

In commentary accompanying the shared letter, the committee said on Twitter that the NIH “confirmed today EcoHealth and the WIV conducted GOF research on bat coronaviruses” and that NIH was “lied to” by EcoHealth.

Other conservativemediaoutlets echoed these statements, adding that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “lied” about the funding.

As we’ll explain, whether or not the experiments count as “gain-of-function” — research in which a virus or other pathogen is modified to become more virulent or infectious to humans — is up for debate. The NIH has said they do not qualify under its criteria and reiterated that position after the release of Tabak’s letter; other experts have expressed a range of views. There is no evidence that Fauci knowingly gave false information or misled anyone.

Some Republicans, however, went further, using the letter to falsely link the NIH-funded research to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an Oct. 21 interview on Fox’s Ingraham Angle, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking member of the committee, erroneously said that the NIH letter “proves all along that this virus was started in the Wuhan lab.”

The letter does not prove that. In fact, it goes to great lengths to explicitly state the opposite, noting that the viruses used in the experiments are “decades removed from SARS-CoV-2 evolutionarily” and that they “could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2.”

Previously, other Republicans, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have at timesfalsely insinuated that the work could have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Paul got into a heated debate with Fauci in July when both men accused the other of lying.

The falsely suggestive hashtag #FauciLiedPeopleDied also started to appear on Twitter after the letter was posted on the platform.

No Connection to the Pandemic Virus
The EcoHealth Alliance experiments have nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic and did not produce SARS-CoV-2, the NIH says.

“Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic,” NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in an Oct. 20 statement, referring to an analysis posted to the NIAID’s website. “Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

The analysis shows that the viruses used in the EcoHealth Alliance experiments share only around 80% of their genomes with SARS-CoV-2 — a huge difference when making these comparisons.

Much more similar viruses that share 96% to 97% of their genomes with SARS-CoV-2 have been identified. These include BANAL-52, a bat coronavirus found in Laos and reported in September, and RaTG13, a virus sequence collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology that has also been the subject of much misplaced speculation.

But even these, the analysis explains, are still much too dissimilar to have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.

Setting aside the specific experiments performed with the grant funds, there is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, and manyexperts say that it’s virtually impossible for it to have been engineered.

The NIH Letter
In the letter, Tabak describes an alleged grant reporting infraction related to an experiment the agency said was conducted in 2018-2019 and related in a progress report EcoHealth submitted in August 2021.

The experiment, Tabak said, tested whether spike proteins from bat coronaviruses were capable of binding to human ACE2, the receptor that the viruses use to enter cells, in mice.

The experiment is similar to research published in PLOS Pathogens in 2017, which studied two of the same modified viruses. In that paper, researchers used the backbone of WIV1, a bat SARS-like virus reported in 2013, and swapped in the spike proteins of two newly identified bat coronaviruses to see if they, like WIV1, could use the ACE2 receptor to enter human cells grown in a petri dish. They could.

This time, the researchers did a similar experiment, but tested the chimeric viruses in mice. Since mice have their own ACE2 receptor, the animals were engineered to express the human form, but were otherwise unchanged.

“In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus,” Tabak wrote. “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

As is shown in section 3.1 of the grant progress report, which was provided to and released by the Republicans on the House committee, infection with the viruses killed some of the mice, with the one chimeric virus being especially lethal. That virus killed six of the eight mice, replicated better than WIV1 in various mouse tissues and caused more pathology in the lung.

Tabak said in his letter that the research plan had been reviewed by the agency before funding, and the agency determined that it did not meet the NIH’s definition of gain-of-function — or what the agency terms research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential — “because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.” It therefore was not subject to review under the Department of Health and Human Services’ framework for enhanced pathogens.

But, he added, “out of an abundance of caution and as an additional layer of oversight,” the agency had outlined criteria in the terms and conditions of the grant award for a secondary review, “such as a requirement that the grantee report immediately a one log increase in growth,” meaning a 10-fold increase in viral growth, to “determine whether the research aims should be re-evaluated or new biosafety measures should be enacted.”

“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant,” the letter reads. “EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award.”

Tabak then spent the bulk of the letter’s second page explaining that bat coronaviruses used in the experiments “could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic,” as we’ve established.

For its part, EcoHealth disputes NIH’s characterization.

“EcoHealth Alliance is working with the NIH to promptly address what we believe to be a misconception about the grant’s reporting requirements and what the data from our research showed,” said Robert Kessler, the group’s spokesperson, in a statement provided to FactCheck.org. “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year 4 report in April 2018. NIH reviewed those data and did not indicate that secondary review of our research was required, in fact year 5 funding was allowed to progress without delay.”

The progress report notes that its experiments in mice were “continued” in year 5.

In his statement, Kessler confirmed that the organization’s grant was not ongoing. Collins similarly told CNN that the grant had been suspended “since last year.”

Gain-of-Function Debate
Although Tabak does not say in his letter that the EcoHealth experiment in question was gain-of-function, numerous Republicans interpreted it to be such an admission.

As we’ve written, gain-of-function can refer to a lot of scientific experiments that aim to add a function to a virus or organism that is entirely benign, such as making a viral stock easier to grow to better increase the yield for a vaccine. What is controversial is research that could make viruses or other infectious microbes more dangerous, either by increasing their transmissibility or virulence.

Some people have argued that very little or none of this research should be allowed because it is too risky, while others say the work needs to be done to better prepare for events such as pandemics.

Recognizing the debate, the U.S. government instituted a pause in 2014 on new funding for research that “may be reasonably anticipated” to enhance the transmissibility or virulence of influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses. Three years later, the government lifted the moratorium and unveiled a new framework for making funding decisions for these types of projects on a case-by-case basis.

The framework pertains to funding decisions on “proposed research that is reasonably anticipated to create, transfer, or use” what it calls “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” or ePPPs. A potential pandemic pathogen, or PPP, is one that is both “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” An ePPP is a PPP “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.” Even if a virus has the potential to spark a pandemic, it would not be considered “enhanced” if it is found in nature.

This formal definition differs in a few possible respects from what is described in the grant progress report — namely, that the research would need to be expected to produce an ePPP and that the virus in question would have to be “likely highly” virulent and transmissible, specifically in humans.

The NIH argues that the EcoHealth Alliance experiments, although they produced a more virulent virus in mice, did not meet that definition.

“The bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans, and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans,” an NIH spokesperson told the New York Times following the release of the letter, adding that the experiments would not have triggered a review.

The NIH says it has only ever greenlighted three projects under its ePPP framework.

It’s worth noting that, as before with their 2017 experiments, the researchers were working with WIV1, a virus that already had the ability to bind to human ACE2, so swapping in spike proteins from other viruses was aimed at replacing a function, not giving the virus a new ability, as King’s College London virologist Stuart Neil has pointed out before.

The NIH also explains on its website that WIV1 “is not known to cause infection in humans but has been shown in the laboratory to infect both human cells and ACE2 transgenic mice, making it an ideal tool to use for these studies.”

We reached out to the NIH for more information but did not receive a reply.

Other experts disagree. Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University who is a vocal critic of gain-of-function research, sided with Republicans about the interpretation of the letter. “NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” he wrote on Twitter.

Multiple other experts told the Intercept, which published other similar documents last month after suing the NIH, that the work EcoHealth Alliance was doing would be considered gain-of-function, although one said it wasn’t problematic.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told the Intercept that the research clearly was not gain-of-function because it’s not possible to conclude the viruses would be harmful to humans. “You can’t predict that these viruses would be more pathogenic, or even pathogenic at all in people,” she said. “They also did not study transmissibility.”

Still other experts say regardless of the technical definition of gain-of-function, the research described in the progress report strikes them as too risky and raises concerns about the NIH review process.

Fauci has defended himself, responding in an Oct. 24 ABC News interview to claims from Sen. Paul that he “lied” by saying that neither he nor Collins “lied or misled” anyone because he was operating under the framework. “There are people who interpret it that way,” he said, referring to those who view the work as gain-of-function, “but when you look at the framework under which the guidance is, that is not the case.”

Rasmussensaid that the committee’s tweet was “wrong” since the letter “clearly states that this wasn’t GOF by the P3CO definition, which for NIH-funded work is the relevant standard,” referring to gain-of-function and the policy framework for handling such research.

But she also criticized EcoHealth, saying the “lack of transparency & failure to comply with NIH requirements is indefensible.”

Collins pinned blame on EcoHealth as well.

“They messed up here. There’s going to be some consequences for EcoHealth,” he told the Washington Post in an interview.

But he also acknowledged that this new information did not mean anything that happened was risky. Had the group reported its result earlier, he said, “it would not have been a reason to sort of hit the panic button and say my god this is dangerous stuff.”

“In this one instance, they failed to report the results of an experiment that they should have told us about immediately,” Collins also said of EcoHealth Alliance in an interview with CNN. “This is not a circumstance where I think you could say there was a major failure that put human lives at risk.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/s...-about-coronavirus-gain-of-function-research/

 

What a corrupt (or traitorous, if you prefer) official wants most is to fool all of the people all of the time. As the saying goes, you can't do that.

The second best thing is to convince everyone that corruption isn't a problem. That's difficult.

The next option is to convince people that all officials are corrupt, and thus, your corruption is expected and normal.

That last option is actually pretty easy, because the press loves to both-sides everything, and people are cynical and ready to believe the worst of everyone (except themselves, of course!).

But it's important to resist that urge, because proclaiming that everyone is corrupt makes the problem worse, not better!
It encourages more corruption, because it removes any penalty for bad (or worse) behavior.

All humans are flawed, but some are better than others. We should do what we can to encourage people to be better, not worse. "A pox on all their houses" does the opposite.

barfo

 

"Trump poisons everything he touches, and the latest institutions poisoned are the CDC and the NIH.~"

 

Only until the new variant arrives.

barfomicron