“While denying once again that it helped create the virus that triggered the Covid pandemic, the US National Institutes of Health (Nih) revealed in a letter sent to Republicans to the US Congress that the experiments that the body funded through a non-profit organization based in the States in 2018 and 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Wiv) in China, they had the ‘unexpected result’ of creating a more infectious coronavirus in mice “. It is the new development reported today in an article published online in ‘Science’. What is explained in the report is also commented in Italy by Alberto Zangrillo, Vice Rector of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, in a tweet in which he states that “the world has the right to know how things really went between Nih, Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology “.
At the heart of the debate is the definition of what can be configured as a risky experiment. According to Science, the Nihs said the organization holding the grant, the EcoHealth Alliance, failed to immediately report the unexpected result to the agency, as required by the grant rules. A recently published report on the progress of that grant also shows that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute have conducted experiments to modify the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which is raising additional questions.
In the letter, the Nihs point out that when the original EcoHealth grant proposal was examined, it was determined that the proposed experiment – designed to understand whether some bat coronaviruses could infect humans – “did not fall within” the case that implies the ” so-called gain of function (Gof, gain of function), ie experiments that can make pathogens more dangerous for humans “. At the same time, the article published in the scientific journal points out, the US body, in an analysis just released, pointed out that all the viruses studied at the Wiv as part of the grant were “too far from Sars-CoV-2 evolutionarily. “for having been transformed into this pathogen.
For the Nihs, these are “viruses that could not have caused the Covid-19 pandemic. Any assertion to the contrary is demonstrably false”, reads a note from the institution. The Nihs sent the October 20 letter to Republican James Comer, along with a final report on the progress of the EcoHealth Alliance grant that Nih had funded and later canceled at the request of then President Donald Trump (it was later also reinstated. , but under conditions that EcoHealth said it could not comply with).
The report describes the studies conducted at the WIV between June 2018 and June 2019 on the latest bat coronaviruses. Some of these experiments examined whether the spike proteins of these viruses could, when expressed in an already known bat coronavirus called Wiv1, bind to the human cell receptor in a mouse model. In a “limited experiment”, mice infected with one of these chimeras “became sicker than those infected with the bat coronavirus Wiv1. As is sometimes the case in science, this was an unexpected result,” reports the letter quoted by ‘Science ‘, which is signed by Lawrence Tabak, Principal Deputy Director of Nih.
The US agency originally, examining the project, had established “that this was not a research involving what it calls ‘pathogens enhanced by pandemic potential’, because neither the new bat coronaviruses nor Wiv1 were known to infect humans. humans, “the letter states. But EcoHealth should have informed the Nihs immediately of the unexpected result, and the agency would carry out a “secondary review” of the research to see if it needed to reassess it or impose new biosecurity measures. EcoHealth now has 5 days to submit all unpublished project data. For its part, EcoHealth replies: “These data were reported as soon as we were informed, in our April 2018 report. Nih reviewed that data and did not indicate that a secondary review of our research was necessary, in fact the Financing to proceed “.
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