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. @NIH's "outrageous" demand: @EcoHealthNYC has to fulfil 7 criteria before funding on the grant can resume, a step many say is unusual and impossible. Nobel Laureate and former NIH director Harold Varmus calls it “outrageous”. @betswrites 1/27 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nih-presses-u-s-nonprofit-for-information-on-wuhan-virology-lab-11597829400 via @WSJ
Trump, the Trump administration, and conservative commentators have asserted, without evidence, that SARS-CoV-2 causing the current pandemic originated in Wuhan Institute of Virology, a long-term collaborator of @EcoHealthNYC, says a story by @meredithwadman @ScienceMagazine 2/27
On 17 April, a reporter asked Trump about the NIH-funded $3.7-million research project that @EcoHealthNYC received. “We will end that grant very quickly,” Trump relied. “It was funded quite awhile ago.” @owermohle @politico 3/27
NIH awarded @EcoHealthNYC the original grant for the project during the Obama administration. The project, ranked top 3% by NIH, was renewed in July 2019. The funding allotted this year, which has been cut, came from the Trump administration. @owermohle @politico 4/27
In late April, NIH told @EcoHealthNYC that all future funding was canceled and it must stop spending $370,000 remaining from its 2020 grant immediately, saying that its goal of studying bat coronavirus spillover into human did not “align with…agency priorities” @politico 5/27
Now, NIH required @EcoHealthNYC to provide a sample of the new coronavirus that researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology used to determine its genetic sequence. The new virus was isolated and characterised in a study that the nonprofit did *not* participate in any way. 6/27
NIH ordered @EcoHealthNYC to arrange for an independent investigation of Wuhan Institute of Virology “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV-2 in their possession prior to December 2019”. 7/27
Jimmy Kolker, a former US ambassador and former assistant secretary for global affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said NIH shouldn’t ask about matters outside the scope of the funded research. 8/27
The NIH list of conditions “is outrageous, especially when a grant has already been carefully evaluated by peer review and addresses one of the most important problems in the world right now—how viruses from animals spill over to human beings,”says former NIH director Varmus 9/27
Varmus is one of 77 Nobel laureates who asked @NIHDirector Francis Collins and Secretary of Health and Human Services @HHSGov Alex Azar in May to review NIH’s termination of the grant the month before. 10/27
. @EcoHealthNYC said grant suspension by NIH unjustified and the imposed conditions “impossible” and “irrelevant”. @PeterDaszak told @ScienceMagazine the conditions are outside the scope of the grant, and so his nonprofit doesn’t have access to the information NIH is seeking 11/27
. @PeterDaszak told @ScienceMagazine: “It undermines biomedical science to give in to politics. I think that’s a failure. And I think that [ @NIHDirector Francis Collins] fell at the first hurdle. When challenged by the White House to cancel this grant he just gave in.” 12/27
. @jeremymberg, who directed NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, told @meredithwadman @ScienceMagazine that Francis Collins is a political appointee who serves at the president’s pleasure. He said that: … 13/27
…“The question for anybody in [such] a leadership position is: ‘Is there a line that you are not willing to cross? And that you think it would be more appropriate to stand on principle and resign rather than to give in?’…In my view, that line has been crossed with this.” 14/27
Other demands from NIH: @EcoHealthNYC must “explain the apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the Wuhan institute, who was rumored on some social media to be the “patient zero” of the pandemic. 15/27
NIH also required @EcoHealthNYC to explain purported restrictions at the Wuhan institute, including “diminished cell-phone traffic in October 2019, and the evidence that there may have been roadblocks surrounding the facility from October 14-19, 2019.” 16/27
On 31 May, @PeterDaszak and scientists at Wuhan Institute posted a paper online that analyzed partial genetic sequences of 781 coronaviruses they found in bats in China, over a third of which haven’t been published.17/27 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.31.116061v1
Note that the team has got only the genetic materials, which are dead nucleic acids and do not infect people. No viral isolates (yet), says @PeterDaszak, which are extremely difficult to get, especially from swabs and faeces (because of extremely low virus concentrations). 18/27
Bad news: the new @EcoHealthNYC study, yet to be peer-reviewed, shows that a group of viruses known as alpha-coronaviruses may be better at jumping species barriers—and could lead to new epidemics in animals and humans (SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2 belong to betacoronaviruses) 19/27
Duke Univ Feng Gao told @ScienceMagazine that the new work underscores that researchers have just sampled “the tip of the iceberg” of coronaviruses circulating between bats that could jump into humans and other species. “We really have to survey the wild population better”. 20/27
A major limitation of the study, Gao notes, is that it’s based on only 440 bases from a gene encoding a key viral enzyme, out of the entire genome of 30,000 RNA bases. Getting full viral sequences would have provided much more biological information on the different viruses.21/27
But obtaining full sequences is often difficult and expensive. @PeterDaszak told @ScienceMagazine that was the next step but then NIH cut the grant. “We were planning to get full genome sequences from these samples and find out which [viruses] are likely” to infect humans. 22/27
There is plenty of evidence that some of those viruses are spilling over to humans all the time in southern China, @PeterDaszak told @ScienceMagazine. The world needs to identify dangerous coronaviruses before they emerge, rather than merely reacting to full-blown outbreaks.23/27
Many more coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are just lurking around in wildlife waiting to be discovered, @PeterDaszak told @sciencecohen @kakape @ScienceMagazine. “We are looking at maybe 10,000 to 15,000 bat coronaviruses that are out there.” 24/27
Story by @owermohle @politico, cited above. Trump cuts U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission over China ties. 25/27 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/27/trump-cuts-research-bat-human-virus-china-213076
Story by @meredithwadman @ScienceMagazine, cited above. NIH imposes ‘outrageous’ conditions on resuming coronavirus grant targeted by Trump. 26/27 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/nih-imposes-outrageous-conditions-resuming-coronavirus-grant-targeted-trump#
Story by @sciencecohen @kakape @ScienceMagazine, cited above. NIH-halted study unveils its massive analysis of bat coronaviruses. 27/27 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-halted-study-unveils-its-massive-analysis-bat-coronaviruses
