A newly released document provides details of US-funded research on several strains of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China. This was revealed by The Intercept, which claimed to have obtained the documents after suing the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a US government health and biomedical research agency, using the public information disclosure law.
The Intercept obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing what the EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based health organization, is using American state money to fund research on coronaviruses from bats in laboratories in China.
This document includes two previously unpublished grant proposals. The proposal was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as a project update related to EcoHealth Alliance research, which has been researched amid the scrutiny of the origins of the pandemic.
The documents were released in connection with The Intercept's Freedom of Information Act litigation against the NIH. The Intercept makes the complete document publicly available.
"This is a roadmap to high-risk research that could lead to the current pandemic," said Gary Ruskin, Executive Director of US Right To Know, an organization investigating the origins of COVID-19. /2021).
One document entitled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for the new coronavirus.
The study also involved a selection of people who worked with live animals, and some important details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that the main experimental work with mice was carried out in a biosafety level 3 laboratory at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not at the Wuhan Institute. of Virology as many assumed before.
The documents then raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have started from a laboratory accident. However, this idea was strongly rejected by Daszak.
EcoHealth Alliance's funding for bat coronavirus research was USD 3.1 million, including USD 599 thousand used by the Wuhan Institute of Virology to identify and modify bat Corona viruses that may infect humans.
Even before the pandemic hit, many scientists were concerned about the potential harm that such experiments could pose, and the grant funding proposal acknowledged some of those dangers.
"This fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and potential for inhalation of fecal dust," the proposal states.
According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the document contains important information about research conducted in Wuhan, including about the creation of new viruses.
"The virus they created was tested for their ability to infect mice engineered to display human-type receptors on their cells," Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents.
Ebright also said the document made clear that two strains of the new coronavirus could infect human mice. "When they were working on the SARS-related coronavirus, they were doing a parallel project at the same time on the MERS-related coronavirus," Ebright said.
Meanwhile, at the end of August, the US announced that their 18 intelligence agencies failed to determine where COVID-19 came from. The report comes after US President Joe Biden in May ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of COVID-19. Biden gave 90 days to investigate and report it.
