What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 23
Shi Zhengli’s colleague Ben Hu then started to work on a project looking at two new bat coronaviruses. Ben Hu received ¥250,000 (US$2275) in funding from the Youth Science Fund Project, distributed by the Natural National Science Foundation of China, to work on a project called, “Pathogenicity of 2 new bat SARS-related CoVs to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2”. The project was approved in 2018 and was set to run from January 2019 to December 2021. The results of this study, including details of which two new coronaviruses he was experimenting with – to specifically see if they can infect humans – were due to appear around the time of the outbreak but have never been published.
Luke McWilliams, a researcher for this book, discovered the title for this research project on the National Natural Science Foundation of China project website on March 17, 2020, and had it translated. But when he revisited the website on January 6, 2021, all of the projects relating to the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been wiped. Cyber-security expert Robert Potter confirmed it that same day, noting on Twitter: “Checked this and it looks more than 300 items aren’t there anymore and we’re all sitting here wondering how are there still things to hide at this point.” Luckily, McWilliams had archived and saved the relevant website pages.
Ben Hu and Shi Zhengli’s team had sampled bats from 22 provinces in China, mostly in the southern provinces, detecting 200 positive samples of SARS-like coronaviruses. But they focused on the Yunnan cave. “Since we found so many SARS-like coronaviruses here, personal protective measures were necessary each time we entered the cave for sampling,” Hu said in an interview in December 2017. He also spoke about the type of genetic manipulation they were doing with these viruses. “In addition to the newly isolated strain, we obtained a series of chimeric viruses with different S genes by replacing the S genes of the newly discovered strain onto the constructed full-length infectious clones of the WIV1 strain of SARS-like coronavirus by a reverse genetics approach. Our results confirm that multiple strains of SARS-like coronaviruses without deletions in the S gene can all replicate efficiently in Vero E6 cells and invade HeLa cells using the human ACE2 receptor.”
Shi Zhengli has in total collected 19,000 samples and coronavirus was detected in 2481 of them, according to information she provided to the WHO in February 2021. “Her laboratory used recombinant viruses to test whether bat CoVs could use ACE2 to bind but used bat spike protein on a bat-CoV backbone, not human SARS,” the WHO report states. She told the WHO the Wuhan Institute of Virology began recombinant work in 2015 with WIV1. “It received ACE2 mice in 2016 and started recombinant experiments with WIV + SHC014 in 2018 but did not finish them owing to the COVID outbreak.” This is further proof that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has not made public all of the virus samples it has been working with. “All samples are stored but not all have been examined yet,” the WHO report states, based on their interview with Shi Zhengli.
Before the outbreak was publicly known, a Professor of Molecular Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, Andrew Rambaut, said on Twitter that there was little point to finding new viruses. “The more we look, the more new viruses we find. The problem is that we have no way of knowing which may be important or which may emerge,” he said. “There is basically nothing we can do with that information to prevent or mitigate epidemics.”
Peter Daszak publicly disagreed with him and in doing so opened a window into the worrying work he and other scientists were conducting. “Not true – we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs, ID’ing more than 50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, ID’ing ones [that] bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines,” he tweeted. His mention of vaccines is also interesting, implying scientists had been looking at trying to develop vaccines for coronaviruses, a possible source of a virus leak.
A thesis by a Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist, Lei-Ping Zeng, dated April 2017, was uncovered by international research group DRASTIC. In it, Lei-Ping Zeng discusses how they can alter the spike protein and create a chimeric recombinant virus “without leaving any trace”. “The S genes of the successfully cloned different strains of SL-CoV were inserted into the BAC vector together with the Es and Fs fragments and the A to D and G fragments . . . respectively, to construct an S gene chimeric recombinant viral infectious BAC clone with WIV1 as the backbone and without leaving any trace sequences (e.g. incorporated enzymatic sites) in the recombinant viral genome,” it states.
Dr Ebright says there are two other risky scientific experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that are possible gain-of-function research and are of concern. One is a project called, “Two Mutations were Critical for Bat-to-Human Transmission of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus”, published in June 2015. It was done by Shi Zhengli, Baric and two scientists, Lanyiang Du and Shibo Jiang, from the Lindsley Kimball Research Institute’s New York Blood Centre. The University of Minnesota Medical School’s Fang Li, Chang Liu and Yang Yang were also co-authors.
The second is a research paper published in August 2020 titled, “A Zika Virus Envelope Mutation Preceding the 2015 Epidemic Enhances Virulence and Fitness for Transmission”. This was done by the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Because of the type of risky research underway at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus broke out, Dr Ebright instantly suspected it may have originated from the Institute. “To scientists and science policy specialists who have been engaged since 2015 in discussions and debates about WIV’s extremely high-risk gain-of-function research on bat SARS-related coronaviruses, the news in early January 2020 that an outbreak involving bat SARS-related coronavirus was occurring in Wuhan, on WIV’s doorstep, immediately suggested a possible laboratory origin for the outbreak,” he tells me. This was particularly the case since only three laboratories globally were conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses: the University of North Carolina, the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As Ebright has been at pains to point out, the type of gain-of-function research that has been undertaken worldwide in the last half-decade, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, does not leave signatures. You cannot tell from studying the virus if it has been subjected to genetic manipulation.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
America’s Doctor
Anthony Fauci, with his calm and measured manner of speech, has cultivated an image as a wise grandfatherly figure. Called “America’s Doctor” in the media, the 80-year-old has spent 50 years in the public service, joining the NIH during the Vietnam War after studying as a physician. He was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984.
Like many medical officials around the world, he became a household name during the pandemic. Populations crippled with anxiety clung onto every utterance by medical experts who were suddenly thrust into the spotlight, gaining almost deified status. Fauci’s newfound fame saw him appear in flattering profile pieces in major publications, like The New Yorker, which entrenched his image as a saviour working hard to protect Americans during this unprecedented pandemic. “Americans have come to rely on Fauci’s authoritative presence. Perhaps not since the Vietnam era, when Walter Cronkite, the avuncular anchor of the CBS Evening News was routinely described as the most trusted man in America, has the country depended so completely on one person to deliver a daily dose of plain talk,” the magazine fawned. That same article would also note as fact that the “novel coronavirus emerged, first from bats and then from a live-animal market” in Wuhan.
Even Brad Pitt, in an Emmy-nominated Saturday Night Live sketch in April 2020, while impersonating Fauci, broke character to praise the health official. “Thank you for your calm and your clarity in this unnerving time,” Pitt said. Fauci won popularity with Trump critics during the pandemic because he would often correct the President publicly while other officials kept their disagreements private.
During his first press conference after the handover to the Biden administration, Fauci said it was a “liberating feeling” to have Biden in office. “One of the new things about this administration is that, if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess – just say you don’t know the answer,” Fauci said.
Early in the pandemic he dismissed suggestions Covid-19 could have originated in a laboratory. “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward [the idea that] this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” he said in an interview with National Geographic in May 2020. “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
A year later, he recast these early statements by claiming he hadn’t been part of any attempt to suppress discussion about a potential laboratory leak, and insisted he had always kept an open mind. His public statements do not support these claims.
Fauci’s public persona as a cautious, careful medical professional is contradicted by his central role in kickstarting exceptionally fraught gain-of-function research in the United States after the ban introduced in the Obama era, along with his role in funding coronavirus research in China in unsafe laboratories. Laboratories that intelligence agencies suspect may have sparked the pandemic.
In June 2021, halfway through a television interview that began soft and friendly, like most of the sit-downs Fauci agrees to, host Leland Vittert wanted to know why the NIH had bankrolled coronavirus research in Wuhan. Fauci’s answer was truly shocking. Not only did he say it was to avoid an outbreak in America, he claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was safe and highly qualified. But the NIH and America had no oversight at all over the activities within the facility.
“You say why do it in China? You do it in China through a very well-known, highly qualified laboratory. Now you’re absolutely correct that I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab, we can’t do that, but it is our obligation as scientists and public health individuals to study the animal–human interface because we had a very difficult experience that we lucked out, that we didn’t get hurt too badly with the original SARS in 2002 and 2003, which was clearly a jumping of species from a bat to a civet cat to a human,” Fauci told Vittert. “It was incumbent upon us to study the animal–human interface and to understand what potential these viruses have of infecting humans, which then might damage the United States. You don’t want to go to Hoboken, New Jersey or to Fairfax, Virginia to be studying the bat–human interface that might lead to an outbreak, so you go to China.”
David Stilwell concurs that concerns about coronavirus research sparking an outbreak in America is exactly why the United States funded it in China. “My personal view is it’s the same reason we do heavy metals in China, because they don’t care about their environment so we outsource all these toxic things there,” Stilwell tells me. “It meant we didn’t have to do it [coronavirus and gain-of-function research] on US soil with the risk of a leak here. The Chinese were very interested in SARS coronaviruses because of the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003 so we had this unholy overlapping interest. They were willing to accept American money and cover for the research.”
Fauci’s organisation was very familiar with the work undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the NIH and the National Science Foundation visiting the facility in the year prior to April 2018.
In total, the NIH has funded at least 60 scientific projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology over the past decade, according to an analysis of Shi Zhengli’s work at the Wuhan lab we undertook for this book in conjunction with US bipartisan taxpayer watchdog, White Coat Waste Project.
USAID funded at least 16 (10 of which were jointly funded with the NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services funded three, the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the China–US Collaborative Program on Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases individually each funded one project in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It is concerning that, at the same time Obama cut off funding for gain-of-function research in America, US money was still flowing to China for risky coronavirus research.
Peter Daszak of not-for-profit group EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) has reportedly boasted that his China bat research project was funded entirely through NIH grants. “So with the funding terminated, we won’t be able to do this work. The fieldwork will not carry on,” he told National Public Radio in April 2020. He also said that he would lose the ability to study the “vast collection of new coronavirus samples already collected”. “They’re in freezers in China. We had free and open access while we were doing this collaboration to get the genetic sequences of the virus from those samples. But without the funding, we won’t be able to get that,” he said.
EcoHealth Alliance has received more than US$60 million in grants and awards from the US government since 2002, and this isn’t including sub-grants from other organisations that have subcontracted work to EHA. Agencies that have awarded money include the Department of Defense (US$41.91 million) and the Department of Health and Human Services (US$11.66 million).
In May of 2015, and for the following four years, EcoHealth Alliance would send a total of US$598,500 of US taxpayer funds directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The description for the sub-award was “conduct[ing] high-quality testing, sequencing, and analyses of field samples; maintenance of cold-chains from field to lab; ensuring quality control of sample storage and testing; collaborating on scientific publications and programmatic reporting.” In 2016 and 2017, EcoHealth Alliance also sent US$200,000 to the Wuhan University School of Public Health.
From 2014 to July 2020, NIAID – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of 27 institutes that makes up the NIH – awarded US$3,748,715 to EcoHealth Alliance under a project titled, “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence”. According to the description on US government grant website USAspending.gov, the project was to “examine the risk of future coronavirus emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China”.
Other institutions that frequently collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology include the New York Blood Centre, the University of North Carolina and University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston.
White Coat Waste Project was the first to expose the money flow between EcoHealth and the Wuhan laboratories, with a strong campaign run by its President Anthony Bellotti and Deputy Justin Goodman. Bellotti said the NIH and other agencies should never have funded these experiments in China. “Shipping millions of US tax dollars to the dangerous Wuhan animal lab and dozens of other facilities in China where there’s no real transparency and accountability about how the money is spent is a recipe for disaster,” he said. “Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll this reckless spending and new polls show that a majority of Democrat and Republican voters in the US want to cut funding for animal labs in China and other foreign countries.”
United States House Intelligence Committee member and former Chair Devin Nunes told Fox News that when gain-of-function research was banned in America it continued in Wuhan, “likely with US dollars that we still haven’t accounted for”. He said it was “routed through a non-profit and routed into China. The point is when something wasn’t allowed in the United States, it was going on in China. This type of activity, this gain-of-function, is really weaponising a virus. The question is something like this, that can be so dangerous and so deadly and turned into a weapon, is that something we really want . . . taxpayer money being involved in?”
The United States continued to allow funding to flow through to the Wuhan Institute of Virology until April 2020. Finally in April – four months after the coronavirus outbreak – the NIH sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance effectively saying it was cutting off its funding unless it answered a series of questions related to the origins of Covid-19. It was sent far too late, but it was a bombshell from NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer.
“The NIH has received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a sub-recipient of EcoHealth Alliance under R01AI110964, has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious biosafety concerns and, as a result, create health and welfare threats to the public in China and other countries, including the United States,” it said. “We have concerns that WIV has not satisfied safety requirements under the award, and that EcoHealth Alliance has not satisfied its obligations to monitor the activities of its sub-recipient to ensure compliance.”
Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made the decision to cut off funding and EcoHealth was outraged. Fauci – who knows Daszak and was thanked by him for publicly saying the virus had a natural origin – took up the case on behalf of EcoHealth Alliance. First he complained to his superior, Alex Azar, who said it was not his decision. “Tony, you have to take it up with the boss. Meadows is the one making this call,” Azar told him. Fauci then had no qualms going to see Meadows to try to convince him to overturn the EcoHealth decision – even though it was now public that this not-for-profit group had been funding the Wuhan laboratories conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started.
