NIH official finally admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — after years of denials
It’s about time!
At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”
“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”
The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials — including Tabak himself and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci — about the controversial research practice that modifies viruses to make them more infectious.
Tabak added that “this is research, the generic term [gain-of-function], is research that goes on in many, many labs around the country. It is not regulated. And the reason it’s not regulated is it poses no threat or harm to anybody.”
Dr. Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and co-founder of the pandemic oversight group Biosafety Now, told The Post the exchange “was two people talking past each other.”
“Tabak was engaging in the usual obfuscation and semantic manipulation that is so frustrating and pointless,” Nickels said, adding that the NIH bigwig was resisting accountability for risky research that can create pathogens of pandemic potential.
“Instead of addressing this directly, Tabak launched into a useless response about how ‘gain-of-function’ encompasses many types of experiments,” he added.
In July 2023, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal grants for the next 10 years.
EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission statement declares it is “working to prevent pandemics,” had all of its grant funding pulled by HHS for the next three years on Tuesday.
EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, in a hearing earlier this month before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, testified that his organization “never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition.”
But that claim directly contradicted Daszak’s private correspondence, including a 2016 email in which he celebrated the end of an Obama administration pause on gain-of-function research.
The EcoHealth head was also called out in sworn testimony to the COVID panel by Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirologist who initiated the research himself and declared it was “absolutely” gain-of-function.
In an October 2021 letter to Congress, Tabak had acknowledged NIH funded a “limited experiment” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
He did not describe it as gain-of-function research — but disclosed that EcoHealth “failed to report” the bat coronaviruses modified with SARS and MERS viruses had been made 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of its grant terms.
The NIH scrubbed its website of a longstanding definition for gain-of-function research the same day that the letter was sent.
Tabak also noted in his October 2021 letter that the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but other grant proposals from EcoHealth have since drawn scrutiny for their genetic similarities.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that the Wuhan lab research involved gain-of-function experiments, clashing with Republicans in high-profile hearings and “playing semantics” with the term during a closed-door interview with the House COVID panel earlier this year.
“He needs to define his definition of gain-of-function research, because as I have through this process in the last three years, read many, many published articles about gain-of-function research, or creation of a chimera, this is a new one,” COVID subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said following Fauci’s grilling in January.
The ex-NIAID head and White House medical adviser under President Biden was escorted by Capitol Police and his attorneys to and from the committee room for his two days of interviews — and repeatedly dodged The Post’s questions about gain-of-function research and pandemic lockdown restrictions.
In 2021, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held Fauci’s feet to the fire over the evasions in several hearings.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci declared that May.
In another House hearing the same month, then-NIH director Dr. Francis Collins testified that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing gain-of-function research.”
“We are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed,” Collins added cautiously at the time.
That ignorance about what experiments came about as a result of the NIH grants was underscored by Daszak during his COVID subcommittee hearing last week.
The EcoHealth leader acknowledged he had not asked longtime collaborator and Wuhan Institute of Virology deputy director Shi Zhengli for any viral sequences since before the pandemic began.
In his own closed-door testimony to the House subcommittee released Thursday, Collins echoed Tabak’s comments but went further by saying there “is a generic description of gain-of-function which is utilized in scientific and public conversation, but is not appropriate to apply that to a circumstance where we’re talking about a potential pathogen.”
“We need to be highly cognizant of the risks of gain-of-function technology now that scientific capabilities exist for creating something in a lab that didn’t exist 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago,” Wenstrup told The Post following Thursday’s hearing.
“Drs. Fauci and Collins, over a decade ago, both conceded that there are risks associated with gain-of-function research.”
EcoHealth received more than half a million dollars for its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of a grant of more than $4 million to study the emergence of bat coronaviruses between 2014 and 2024.
That grant was revoked in 2020, reinstated in 2023 and finally suspended and proposed for debarment this week.
The House subcommittee is still investigating whether COVID-19 accidentally leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, which has been described as the most likely cause of the pandemic by the FBI, US Energy Department, ex-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Robert Redfield and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
Nickels also slammed Tabak Thursday for still claiming the evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 originating in a “wild animal market in Wuhan.”
“No credible scientist still believes this. In fact, the wet market theory has even been refuted by the world’s leading coronavirus expert, Ralph Baric, in his testimony from January,” Nickels said.
The Rutgers prof added that Thursday’s hearing highlighted the lack of oversight for scientific research on pathogens that poses a threat to humans, making it “up to the grantee to oversee themselves,” as Wenstrup put it.
“It’s pure insanity to continue to delegate responsibly for risk/benefit analysis of research that poses an existential threat to humanity to the scientist that will perform the work and their institutions,” Nickels claimed.
“We just had a devastating pandemic likely caused by creation of a [Pathogen with Enhanced Pandemic Potential] in a lab, and yet scientists want the public to trust them that they can police themselves?” he balked. “That’s just total and complete nonsense.”
Fauci is scheduled to answer questions about the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and theories of the origin of the pandemic in a public subcommittee hearing set for June 3.
