In a move that has more symbolic than practical impact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has imposed new sanctions on a Chinese lab at the center of the debate about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A nine-page HHS memo made public by a House of Representatives subcommittee that’s investigating the pandemic’s origin suspends and proposes debarment of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) “from participating in United States Federal Government procurement and nonprocurement programs.” In effect, this bars WIV from receiving U.S. government funding now and possibly ever. The memo says the suspension is necessary “to mitigate any potential public health risk.”
WIV, which has long studied bat coronaviruses, has been a key suspect in the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a Chinese lab and triggered the pandemic, although no compelling evidence supports this possibility. An alternate hypothesis contends that the virus jumped from bats into humans, likely through an “intermediate host” species that vendors sold at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The dueling theories have set off debates between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and even within divisions of the U.S. intelligence community that have investigated COVID-19’s possible origin.
The new memo is being applauded by lab-leak proponents, some of whom have said WIV’s longtime U.S. collaborator, the EcoHealth Alliance, should be disbarred as well. But others think HHS is bowing to political pressure and undermining relations with Chinese scientists who could help protect us from future pandemics. “This is just another example of the Republicans pressuring a public institution to cause trouble,” says Richard Roberts, the Nobel laureate who led a letter campaign to oppose the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) termination of an EcoHealth grant in 2020 because of ties to WIV.
Here’s an overview of how the memo came to be and what it says.
What led HHS to issue this memo?
HHS’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) in January issued an audit report of EcoHealth, a nonprofit based in New York City that conducts fieldwork to understand potentially dangerous pathogens to humans. That report faulted EcoHealth for not effectively monitoring a subaward to WIV from an NIH grant the nonprofit received starting in 2014. The OIG report recommended that NIH refer the matter to HHS’s suspension and debarment official.
Wasn’t WIV already banned from receiving HHS funding?
No. Several House bills have included provisions to ban future funding from NIH or other agencies at HHS to WIV and, in some cases, to EcoHealth. But none of these bills has been signed into law or voted on in the Democratic-led Senate. WIV has not received U.S. government funding since 2019. (The passed omnibus spending bill for this fiscal year already prohibits the State and Defense departments from funding WIV.)
Does the HHS memo suggest WIV leaked SARS-CoV-2?
No. The new memo focuses on WIV’s disclosures around mouse experiments it conducted as part of the 5-year grant that EcoHealth received from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2014 to study the risk of coronaviruses in China moving from bats to humans, possibly through animals sold at wildlife markets. EcoHealth subcontracted with WIV to conduct some of the research, including studies in mice with coronaviruses isolated from bats.
HHS does not allege that the experiments created SARS-CoV-2, but faults WIV for refusing to share its laboratory notebooks and electronic files related to the experiment.
Former President Donald Trump alleged in April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 came from WIV and directed NIH to cancel the grant to EcoHealth, which it did, triggering a controversy. EcoHealth promptly agreed to cut WIV from the grant, and NIH reinstated it, but suspended funding, citing a need to review compliance issues. WIV refused to share the requested information about its studies, so NIH formally terminated the subaward in August 2022.
NIH in May renegotiated the grant with EcoHealth, which no longer included a subaward to WIV.
What is the gist of the scientific dispute?
WIV had accumulated a large library of genetic sequences of coronaviruses found in fecal and oral samples taken from bats. But, for technical reasons, WIV could only grow a few of these viruses in lab cultures. To determine whether these sequences came from viruses that potentially posed threats to humans, WIV researchers put sequences for the surface proteins of viruses they couldn’t grow into another virus called WIV-1, which did grow. They then put these chimeric viruses into the noses of transgenic mice that had a human receptor for coronaviruses. The results of these experiments have received intense scrutiny because of the possibility that the chimeric viruses may have become more dangerous to humans than WIV-1 itself.
Did the chimeric virus work constitute risky gain-of-function (GOF) experiments?
The definition of risky GOF has sparked a great deal of controversy, but NIH determined in 2016, before the WIV mouse studies were conducted, that they did not rise to the level of concern that would require banning them, mainly because WIV-1 had not infected, let alone harmed, humans. But a stipulation of the NIAID grant said EcoHealth had to stop the experiment and notify NIH immediately if the chimeric viruses had “enhanced viral growth”—defined as more than “1-log,” or 10-fold difference, in growth compared with WIV-1. EcoHealth had two progress reports that described the results of the mouse experiments, in years 4 and 5 of the grant. Both showed increased viral growth, and in year 5 reported that the chimeric viruses had a higher rate of killing the mice. EcoHealth did not immediately report the increased growth and it also failed to submit the year 5 report by the deadline.
What was EcoHealth’s response?
EcoHealth insists that this controversy is riddled with misunderstandings: It contends that the experiments with WIV-1 don’t constitute GOF research regardless of how the chimeric virus behaved. In a detailed back-and-forth with NIH, EcoHealth also argued that the viral assay used in the study included both dead and live virus, so did not indicate that viable virus titers had increased 10-fold. And EcoHealth said the year 5 report gave details about the pathology done on the mice studied in year 4, which meant the experiment had already ended. It says the failure to file the year 5 report on time was a technical glitch in the NIH system, noting that it included those very mouse results in a grant renewal application filed long before the missed deadline.
EcoHealth told NIH it did not have copies of the requested laboratory notebooks and electronic files from WIV.
What does the new memo say about these rebuttals?
HHS disputes the details, saying that “experts at the NIH” believe the year 5 report “likely” describes a different experiment than the one in the year 4 report. It reasserts that the mouse experiment “had possibly yielded a greater than 1-log increase in viral activity, in violation of the terms of the grant.” The memo also casts WIV’s failure to dispute the charges, which essentially say its mouse experiments violated NIH biosafety protocols, as something of an admission of guilt. “NIH has given WIV several opportunities to disprove this finding, but WIV has failed to do so,” it states. And it concludes, “There is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety.” But it offers no new evidence that the experiments violated GOF rules or created public health risks.
Correction, 21 July, 3:30 p.m.: The original story said WIV had not previously been banned from U.S. funding. A bill passed in late 2022 prohibited several other government branches from funding WIV, but HHS funding had not yet been banned.