Gain-of-Function Research
Dr. Anthony Fauci claims that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) “did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
IN FACT, Fauci admitted in a 2020 email it is a “fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain of function experiments.” And the U.S. Government Accountability Office documented in 2023 that:
• the NIH gave $1,413,720 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology during 2014-2019 via a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance.
• some of this money was used to fund “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized” coronavirus strains.
• the research to generate these coronaviruses “was not subject to” a “gain-of-function research funding pause.”
• the lab conducted a “limited” experiment “to test whether the spike protein from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses” could bind “to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
• the NIH claims this research “could not have been the source of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the Covid-19 pandemic” because “NIH analyzed” the “experiments” and “concluded that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses were genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2.”
The NIH’s claim is refuted by a study published by the journal Nature in 2022, which found that “SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2” “circulate in cave bats living in the limestone karstic terrain in northern Laos, in the Indochinese peninsula.”
In 2021, The Intercept released NIH grant documents for EcoHealth Alliance to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology involving “experimental work” to “understand the ability of bat coronaviruses to bind to human receptors.” This involved bats from multiple locations, including Laos.
