The Morning Dispatch: NIH, EcoHealth, and ‘Gain of Function’ Research

Happy Thursday! Sure it’s a corporate money grab transparently seeking to capitalize on millennials’ childhood nostalgia, but you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be buying tickets for next year’s gritty Buzz Lightyear reboot on opening weekend.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The State Department announced Tuesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok on the phone, noting that Sudan’s military leaders had released Hamdok from custody and the prime minister and his wife had returned home. Other government officials reportedly remain in detention, and it’s unclear whether the military is allowing Hamdok to leave his house. As of Wednesday night, at least 12 people have reportedly been killed in protests following the coup.

• Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued new guidance Wednesday prohibiting immigration enforcement agents to the “fullest extent possible” from making arrests or conducting searches in or near designated “protected areas,” including schools, health care facilities, places of worship, social services establishments, and parades or demonstrations. “Individuals should not be restrained or limited in their access to essential services,” Mayorkas said.

• Iran’s top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said Wednesday the country plans to resume the nuclear talks that stalled over the summer by the end of November. U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley said earlier this week that efforts to revive the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal were at a “critical phase” and the United States’ patience with Iran was “wearing very thin.”

• Members of the January 6 select committee said Wednesday they will defer some of their requests for former President Donald Trump’s White House records until a later date in an effort to avoid a drawn out legal battle. A spokesman for the committee, however, said it will “continue to engage with the executive branch to ensure we get access to all the information relevant to our probe.”

• A new Federal Trade Commission report found that cigarette sales in the United States rose slightly in 2020, marking the country’s first increase in 20 years. Sales of smokeless tobacco also rose last year.  

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell formally endorsed Herschel Walker in the race to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia next year, heading off a potential clash with former President Trump, who is backing the ex-football star. The endorsement is McConnell’s first of a non-incumbent candidate in the 2022 cycle.

• Hong Kong’s legislature passed a new film censorship law on Wednesday that builds on the city’s Chinese Communist Party-backed national security law and prohibits content that officials believe endorses, supports, or glorifies “activities that might endanger national security.” 

Understanding the Fight Over EcoHealth and Coronavirus Research in Wuhan

Washington is a town known for its nasty disagreements, petty squabbles, and decades-long feuds, but you’d be hard-pressed to find two people in the capital today who loathe one another as much as Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Over the past few months, the Kentucky Republican has labeled the immunologist a “massive fraud,” called for his resignation (and eventually his firing), and referred him to the Justice Department over claims he perjured himself. Fauci has been more diplomatic in his responses, but has taken his fair share of potshots at Paul as well, accusing him of being “absolutely incorrect” and “quite frankly” not knowing what he is talking about. “If anyone is lying here, senator, it is you,” Fauci said in a particularly testy exchange back in July.

At the heart of this months-long spat is an incredibly complex disagreement over genome sequencing, human ACE2 receptors, and the National Institutes of Health’s grantmaking and sub-award process—and because the terms of the debate are inaccessible to most (including, until a few days ago, your Morning Dispatchers), it’s proven a perfect lightning rod around which to polarize. Not a fan of Paul’s laissez faire approach to the pandemic or curmudgeonly demeanor? He’s probably blowing whatever this is way out of proportion. Distrustful of Fauci and the public health establishment’s overbearing approach over the past 18 months? Of course he’s lying about this, too. 

But as inscrutable as the discussion may be, it’s a crucial one to have. Did top NIH officials present false claims to Congress about the nature of studies funded by the U.S. government? Maybe. Did U.S. taxpayer dollars fund research that caused the pandemic? Unlikely. Let’s break it down in plain English—or at least non-microbiologist English.

Ambiguity over the definition of gain-of-function research.

In a series of congressional hearings dating back to May, Paul and Fauci have repeatedly sparred over whether the NIH is funding a particular kind of research.

The latest round of controversy kicked off last week, when House Oversight Committee Republicans released a letter from NIH Principal Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak, in which he provided additional details about a five-year grant the agency awarded in 2014 to American nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance to study “the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.” This grant has received outsized interest because, as Alec noted in a Dispatch Fact Check a few months ago, although the NIH has not funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) directly, approximately $600,000 of the $3.7 million granted to EcoHealth was channeled to the Chinese laboratory through a sub-grant.

Tabak’s letter addressed research conducted with that money. “The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model,” he wrote in the letter to GOP Rep. James Comer. “In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

Republicans were quick to resurface Fauci’s May congressional testimony in which, speaking to Paul, he asserted that “the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Did Tabak’s recent concession render that contention false?

It depends on which definition of “gain-of-function research” you use. At the broadest level, it simply means an experiment where an organism is imbued with some sort of new property. In the context of virology, however, the practice—for which the NIH paused funding in October 2014 before resuming it in December 2017—typically describes research in which scientists genetically alter a virus to tweak its transmissibility, pathogenicity, or host range and make it more contagious and deadly. This allows researchers to peek around the corner with respect to potential virus mutations and get a head start on developing therapeutics and/or vaccines.

In a statement provided to The Dispatch, an NIH spokesperson sought to narrow the relevant definition further still, focusing on a subset of gain-of-function research involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP). “The proposed research was … determined not to meet the definition of [ePPP] research because the bat coronaviruses used in this research have not been shown to infect humans and the experiments were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans,” the spokesperson said. “The term ‘gain of function’ has a common usage in scientific research, but only certain types of ‘gain of function’ research are captured by the HHS P3CO Framework; carelessness with this terminology has led to confusion and should be avoided.”

“NIH is making it clear that the Agency did not support the kind of ‘gain of function’ research warranting the additional and unique P3CO oversight identified by stakeholders during extensive prior policy development,” the statement continued, notably adding a qualifier to the denial that was not present in Fauci’s May testimony.

But several virologists told The Dispatch this week that the NIH’s definition is too limited in scope. “Any way that you can give a virus a new property qualifies as gain of function,” said Dr. Vincent Racaniello, Columbia University professor of microbiology and immunology. He noted that last week’s letter just confirms what FOIA’d documents reported by The Intercept last month showed. “What they did in Wuhan with EcoHealth is they gave SARS coronaviruses from bats different spike proteins, and that caused them to have different properties. NIH, Fauci have previously argued that you can only do gain of function by passaging viruses in animals until they acquire a new function that way, but that’s simply a restrictive definition. That’s not right, it’s not in any textbook of virology.”

Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University critical of gain-of-function research, said this should not even be up for debate. “The only definition of gain-of-function research of concern that is relevant is the definition in the [federal] policy from 2014 to 2017,” he told The Dispatch. “There are established definitions. The definitions are not in question, the definitions are not obscure, the definitions are not unclear.” 

An internet archiving tool shows that, as recently as October 19, the NIH’s page on “Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens” included a subsection on gain-of-function research that is now gone. The site—which says it was “last reviewed” on October 20—now includes a new sentence: “While ePPP research is a type of so called ‘gain-of-function’ (GOF) research, the vast majority of GOF research does not involve ePPP and falls outside the scope of oversight required for research involving ePPPs.”

The Tabak letter did acknowledge that EcoHealth failed to comply with an “additional layer of oversight” included in the NIH grant that required researchers to “immediately” report a one log (meaning “tenfold”) increase in an altered virus’ ability to grow, but Ebright criticized that admission as an attempt to shift the blame. “The issue for NIH is that it is not possible to declare that EcoHealth Alliance violated those terms and conditions without simultaneously acknowledging that EcoHealth was carrying out research incompatible with the terms and conditions [regarding gain-of-function research],” he said.

This EcoHealth research was almost certainly not the genesis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his interview with The Dispatch, Racaniello expressed confusion as to why Fauci and the NIH have been going to such great lengths to redefine gain-of-function research. “It’s harmless!” he said. “I don’t know why you would want to say you’re not doing it, or not funding it at all, because it’s harmless research—and the results are important, actually. I’m not sure what the issue is there.”

Reading through all of the NIH’s messaging over the past week, however, it quickly becomes clear what the issue is:

• Tabak letter: “It is important to state at the outset that published genomic data demonstrate that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are not and could not have become SARS-SoV-2.”

• Tabak letter part two: “The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic.”

• Statement from NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins: “Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.”

• NIH statement provided to The Dispatch: “The NIH-funded experiments at EcoHealth/WIV involved bat coronaviruses that were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2, and therefore could not possibly have led to the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are false. These viruses are as genetically different from each other as humans are from cows.”

Can you see a pattern? The NIH wants everyone to know it did not inadvertently cause the hell we’ve all been living through during the past year and a half. And for the record, even the virologists critical of Fauci’s alleged gain-of-function obfuscation agree. “Those [viruses] are very distant from SARS-CoV-2, there’s no way that could have led to SARS-CoV-2,” Racaniello said. “And in fact, nobody had SARS-CoV-2 before December 2019 so there’s just no way that those experiments led to the pandemic.”

“The three artificial, laboratory-generated, chimeric, SARS-related coronaviruses that are reported in the progress reports and proposals on the NIH grant from EcoHealth Alliance have sequences that make it clear that they were not SARS-CoV-2 and were not progenitors of SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright added. “So to that extent, Fauci’s comments are truthful. But as he surely knows, exactly the same experimental approach that was used to construct those three chimeric coronaviruses—if it starts with a different spike gene and a different genomic backbone—could have yielded SARS-CoV-2 or a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.”

Some of the usual suspects on the right have gotten ahead of the evidence and accused Fauci of “creating” the pandemic, but in the aforementioned July hearing, even Rand Paul told the NIAID director that “no one is saying those viruses caused the pandemic.”

“What we’re alleging is that gain-of-function research was done in that lab, and NIH funded it,” he continued. “You can’t get away from it, it meets your definition, and you are obfuscating the truth.”

About a week after that hearing, Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad published an essay for Slate describing what they saw as the public health community’s increasing reliance on “noble” lies. “When experts or agencies deliver information to the public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda, they are telling what is called a noble lie,” they wrote, referencing Fauci’s March 2020 dismissal of widespread masking that he later explained as a bank-shot attempt to avoid shortages for healthcare workers. “Although the teller’s intentions may be pure … the consequences can undermine not only those intentions but also public trust in experts and science.”

Something similar may be playing out now, with Fauci refusing to budge on his previous statements about gain-of-function research in an effort to prevent people from jumping to more nefarious conclusions. “There’s all of this concern about what’s gain of function or what’s not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19,” he told ABC News over the weekend. “[Anybody] that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2. And yet when people talk about gain of function, they make that implication which I think is unconscionable to do, to say, well, maybe that research led to SARS-CoV-2.”

Worth Your Time

• New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo understands the concerns of those who want to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but writes in his latest piece that proposals to do so—on both the left and the right—fill him with dread. “Many legal experts argue that many Section 230 proposals, including the Klobuchar-Luján bill, likely violate the First Amendment, which makes it extremely difficult for Congress to dictate to private companies and their users what people can and can’t say online,” he notes, adding that the plans could backfire catastrophically. “Rather than curbing the influence of Big Tech, altering Section 230 might only further cement Facebook and other tech giants’ hold over public discourse—because the giants might be the only companies with enough resources to operate under rules in which sites can be inundated with lawsuits over what their users post. Smaller sites with fewer resources, meanwhile, would effectively be encouraged to police users’ content with a heavy hand. ”

• A lot of Democratic voters and leaders are at the end of their rope with Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but Karl Smith argues in Bloomberg they should be thanking the two moderates for preventing the party from overreaching. “Supply-chain bottlenecks, rising prices and a labor shortage are more than enough to explain the party’s troubles,” Smith writes, citing Biden’s falling approval numbers and the unexpectedly tight Virginia gubernatorial race. “In fact, Manchin has explicitly cited those three pressures as a reason to be hesitant about passing a big spending bill. He’s right—and his fellow Democrats should listen.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• This week’s Capitolism (🔒) makes the case for eliminating daylight saving time. “Daylight saving time hasn’t achieved its primary public policy goal—energy conservation—and may actually undermine it, imposing significant environmental, health, safety, family, and economic harms along the way,” Scott Lincicome writes.

• On Wednesday’s Dispatch Podcast, Sarah, Jonah, David, and Declan break down the insanity of Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s unrealized capital gains tax for billionaires, and discuss whether the era of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan is over.

• “I’m coming to believe that ‘What price are you willing to pay for it?’ may be the most important question in American life these days,” Jonah writes in Wednesday’s G-File (🔒). “When you’re talking to, or performing for, a bunch of people inside your bubble, it’s easy to let your mouth write enormous checks you’d never think about cashing.”

Let Us Know

Is a public official ever justified in trumpeting a “noble lie”? Do you think Fauci’s denial regarding gain-of-function research is one?

Bonus Let Us Know: Are you planning to join David’s inaugural ask me anything tonight at 7 p.m. ET?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).