Closer looks and background on Wuhan lab and origins of coronavirus

Renewed interest in a lab-leak hypothesis prompted a few questions about the coronavirus’s origins at a House Appropriations subcommittee meeting Tuesday, amid discussion of the National Institutes of Health budget.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) held up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, referring to its recent story about workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China who became sick in November 2019. Harris asked Francis S. Collins, who directs NIH, whether it was correct that $600,000 of $3.7 million in NIH funding, given to the research group EcoHealth Alliance, was directed to the Wuhan facility. That was accurate, Collins said.

Harris also asked whether the agency knew whether gain-of-function research, which artificially enhances the contagiousness or danger of a pathogen, had been conducted there. “They were not approved by NIH to do gain-of-function research,” Collins said.

Anthony S. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described this as a “modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists” following the SARS-CoV-1 scare of 2002 and 2003. That virus “unquestionably” went from a bat to an intermediate host and started an epidemic among humans, Fauci said at the hearing.

“You’ve got to go where the action is” to study viruses like these, he said. “You don’t want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species.” The $600,000 funded surveillance of coronaviruses in bats, Fauci said, and none of the grant materials would have called for gain-of-function studies. “That categorically was not done.”

Earlier this year, a World Health Organization investigation did not resolve the question of the virus’s origin, although discovering the original animal host can take years. Ebola’s natural reservoir, for instance, remains unknown.

Many scientists who study zoonotic diseases — pathogens that spill from animals to humans — say it’s more likely that this virus jumped to people who were exposed to infected animals. There have been recent calls among experts to investigate the lab hypothesis because an accident has not been ruled out.

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