On Wednesday, Molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright shared a letter from the National Institute of Health on Twitter proving there was a grant that funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci had testified in May in front of the Senate, claiming that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.
The NIH Later was sent to James Comer, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member, and showed that the grant was awarded to EcoHealth Alliance and then sub-awarded to the Wuhan lab.
The funding allowed 2018-19 research to test “if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model”.
The letter explained, “In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus”.
National Institutes of Health Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak said EcoHealth failed to immediately notify the agency that they had created lab-generated chimeric coronaviruses. These viruses exhibited a greater than one log, or ten-times, increase in growth.
“EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award. Additional compliance efforts continue,” Tabak stated.
EcoHealth reported to the NIH that a lab-generated SARS-related coronavirus called rWIV1-SHC-014 S was created and that it was more pathogenic towards mice with humanized cells.
Tabak noted that, despite EcoHealth Alliance failing to properly report their research, the viruses “could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic”.
The grant in China was approved by Fauci and The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It involved the transfer of $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for research.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who has repeatedly accused Fauci of lying about funding this research, tweeted “‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it here”.