The Lancet’s COVID Commission

Critic of congressional probe into gain-of-function research helped fund Wuhan gain-of-function study

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Posted on by Emily Kopp

Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine President Peter Hotez funded research on a chimeric virus that has come under Congressional scrutiny. (Photo credit: U.S. Mission in Geneva)

A prominent scientist who has denounced a congressional investigation into gain-of-function research helped fund Wuhan Institute of Virology gain-of-function work flagged by congressional investigators. 

Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, has been a fierce critic of potential hearings next year into a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and whether the National Institutes of Health prematurely discredited the hypothesis.

Hotez decried the hearings as nothing less than “a plan to undermine the fabric of science in America” in a viral tweet thread last week. Hotez also dismissed as an “outlandish conspiracy” the possibility that a lab accident sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Hotez’s own 2012 to 2017 NIH grant for the development of a SARS vaccine had the stated aim of responding to any “accidental release from a laboratory,” in addition to a possible zoonotic spillover of the virus. 

The $6.1 million NIH grant also raises the possibility of “deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack.” 

“SARS outbreaks remain a serious concern mainly due to possible zoonotic reintroduction of SARS-CoV into humans, accidental release from a laboratory or deliberate spreading of the virus by a bioterrorist attack,” the grant’s description reads. 

It’s not clear why Hotez has dismissed a possible lab release of SARS-CoV-2 as preposterous, after having conducted research for years to prepare for a possible accidental or deliberate release of SARS-CoV.

Hotez did not reply to emailed questions.

Hotez helped fund research on controversial chimeric coronavirus

While casting concerns about Wuhan’s labs as “fringe,” Hotez has not mentioned his own connection to a project involving a laboratory-generated chimeric SARS-related coronavirus that has come under Congress’ microscope. 

The project was helmed by Zhengli Shi, a senior scientist and “virus hunter” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology nicknamed the “Bat Lady.” 

As part of his NIH grant, Hotez subcontracted funding for research on combined or “chimeric” coronaviruses, a scientific paper shows. Hotez’s grant underwrote two of Shi’s collaborators on the project.

In the 2017 paper co-funded by Hotez, Shi and her colleagues generated a recombinant virus from two SARS-related coronaviruses: “rWIV1-SHC014S.” 

It’s not clear whether the paper co-funded by Hotez should have been stopped under a temporary “pause” on gain-of-function work before 2017. However, some independent biosecurity experts have said research on this chimeric virus in some ways epitomizes lapses in NIH oversight of risky research in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

A prior study of one of the coronaviruses that comprised the chimera, WIV1, found it to be “poised for human emergence.” Another prior paper on the other coronavirus, SHC014, stated that its future study in lab-generated viruses may be “too risky to pursue.” 

“The work here should have been at the very least, heavily scrutinized,” said David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity expert. “This work should have been heavily reviewed for [gain-of-function], and probably should have been subject to the pause prior to December 2017.” 

Shi’s participation in the joint project was funded in part by EcoHealth Alliance, the paper shows. This NIH grant to EcoHealth — “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — has garnered scrutiny for its research on manipulated novel coronaviruses in Wuhan labs. 

Specifically, an EcoHealth Alliance grant report obtained by congressional investigators demonstrated that a WIV1-SHC014 chimera generated thousands of times the viral load and enhanced lethality in mice with human airway cells. This prompted concerns among some biosecurity experts, scientists and members of Congress. 

In response to questions from congressional Republicans, NIH acknowledged that the research was out of compliance with its own regulations on gain-of-function research. 

“In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with WIV1 bat coronavirus,” the letter read. “As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result rather than something the scientists set out to do.”

An investigation could shed light on whether the risks of such experiments outweigh the benefits, but Hotez has not been forthcoming about this apparent conflict of interest.

“The construction and threat-characterization of rWIV1-SHC014 was – unequivocally – gain-of-function research,” said Richard Ebright, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers University. “It is a conflict of interest that, to my knowledge, has not previously been disclosed to The Lancet Commission … and that surely will be of interest to The Lancet Commission.” 

The Lancet Commission

Hotez serves on The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a panel of experts working to scrutinize the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

Commission Chair Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist, has in recent weeks called for an impartial investigation of the lab leak hypothesis.

Meanwhile, Hotez has suggested that the commission’s final reports should not incorporate Sachs’ concerns.

“Whenever I discussed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was a laboratory release, Hotez strongly rejected that possibility, but never explained to me or to the Lancet Commission that he actually had a grant that was based on that very kind of risk. He should certainly have been clear on that,” said Sachs.

Sachs said the 2017 paper generated questions about whether a potential conflict of interest should have been disclosed to the commission. 

“I asked all of the Commissioners repeatedly to be transparent about any possible conflicts of interest,” Sachs added.

Virologist who tried to discredit the lab leak theory was once a ‘partner’ to EcoHealth Alliance

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Posted on by Emily Kopp

Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin has coauthored several articles with EcoHealth Alliance since 2011. (Photo credit: kris krüg)

A virologist who coauthored a paper marginalizing the lab leak theory did not disclose his ties to the research group at the center of it.

Director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity Ian Lipkin has often worked with EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the group confirmed in an email. 

EcoHealth Alliance listed Lipkin as a “partner” from 2012 to 2014, an archived version of the group’s website shows. Lipkin has coauthored at least ten scientific papers with EcoHealth researchers from 2011 to 2021, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak said in an email. These publications include a paper about novel coronaviruses EcoHealth and its partners sampled around the world. 

EcoHealth Alliance hunts for novel viruses in wildlife and funds research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Lipkin did not disclose his partnership with EcoHealth in “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a highly influential paper that states that COVID-19 arose from nature.

A central premise of that paper: COVID-19 is too dissimilar from viruses commonly employed in experiments to have spilled out of a lab. 

“It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus,” the paper states. “The genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.”

But Lipkin did not disclose his connection to a nonprofit that uncovers new and novel viruses. Some of those viruses were likely studied at its partnering lab in Wuhan, which housed one of the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses. 

Lipkin did not return several requests for comment. 

At 5.7 million views, the Nature Medicine article may be one of the most widely read scientific papers in history — though the piece is formally a “correspondence.” 

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist and emerging infectious diseases expert for the National Academies, said conflicts of interest are especially troublesome when writing on high profile issues. 

“For any major, controversial issue, I believe that all of us have an even greater responsibility to reveal those conflicts upfront—and let others have an opportunity to judge what effect those conflicts might have had,” said Relman.

Relman also called into question the logic of the paper’s premise. The Wuhan Institute of Virology may have simply been experimenting with unfamiliar viruses. The disappearance of the lab’s coronavirus sequence database in 2019 and the lab’s history of gain-of-function experiments also weaken the claims of Lipkin and his coauthors, Relman said. 

“The Proximal Origins paper is flawed in its assumptions, logic and the soundness of its conclusions. I was very surprised that it passed review at Nature Medicine,” he said. 

Columbia University Center for Sustainable Development Director Jeffrey Sachs — chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission — said the citation the authors used to prop up the paper’s premise deserves more scrutiny. 

“The Proximal Origins paper has no credibility,” Sachs wrote in an email. “The paper’s central claim — that SARS-CoV-2 is not related to viruses previously reported in laboratory research — offers as proof a footnote to a 2014 paper!”

“It ludicrously claims to debunk a 2019 lab emergence using a 2014 paper,” he continued. “The paper offers no real evidence whatsoever against the possible lab origin of the virus, even though it claimed to do so.” 

Lipkin himself has since acknowledged the possibility that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was experimenting with unknown viruses, contradicting the popular paper he coauthored.

“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn’t in this lab? They wouldn’t,” Lipkin said in an interview with the Washington Post last year. 

But Lipkin has not disclosed his work with EcoHealth to reporters.

Nature Medicine, the journal that published the paper, defines a “competing interest” requiring disclosure as including “personal or professional relations with organizations and individuals” — paid or unpaid. A spokesperson for parent company Springer Nature did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Lipkin’s connection to a group at the center of lab leak suspicions is the latest revelation to cast doubt on the correspondence.

Significant questions remain. It’s still unclear how the authors dispelled their own private concerns that the virus had been engineered within a couple of days.

For example, Lipkin privately voiced concerns to his coauthors about a “nightmare of circumstantial evidence” pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Vanity Fair reported. 

It’s also unknown to what extent leaders of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the EcoHealth Alliance, may have shaped the paper. 

Grant reports that led a reporter to the defunct link showing Lipkin’s partnership with EcoHealth Alliance were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Emails show scientists discussed masking their involvement in key journal letter on Covid origins

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Posted on by Sainath Suryanarayanan

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, the head of an organization involved in research that genetically manipulates coronaviruses, discussed hiding his role in a statement published last year in The Lancet that condemned as “conspiracy theories” concerns that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a research lab, emails obtained by US Right to Know show.

The Lancet statement, signed by 27 prominent scientists, has been influential in tamping down suspicions by some scientists that COVID-19 could have ties to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has a research affiliation to the EcoHealth Alliance.

Daszak drafted the statement and circulated it to other scientists to sign. But the emails reveal that Daszak and two other EcoHealth-affiliated scientists thought they should not sign the statement so as to mask their involvement in it. Leaving their names off the statement would give it “some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.

Daszak noted that he could “send it round” to other scientists to sign. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” he wrote.

The two scientists Daszak wrote to about the need to make the paper appear independent of EcoHealth, are coronavirus experts Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang.

In the emails, Baric agreed with Daszak’s suggestion not to sign The Lancet statement, writing “Otherwise it looks self-serving, and we lose impact.”

Daszak did ultimately sign the statement himself, but he was not identified as its lead author or coordinator of the effort.

The emails are part of a tranche of documents obtained by US Right to Know that show Daszak has been working since at least early last year to undermine the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute.

The first reported outbreak of COVID-19 was in the city of Wuhan.

U.S. Right to Know previously reported that Daszak drafted the statement for The Lancet, and orchestrated it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”.

EcoHealth Alliance is a New York-based nonprofit that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses, including with scientists at the Wuhan Institute.

Notably, Daszak has emerged as a central figure in official investigations of  SARS-CoV-2’s origins. He is a member of the World Health Organization‘s team of experts tracing the novel coronavirus’s origins, and The Lancet COVID 19 Commission.

See our previous reporting on this topic: 

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Written by Sainath Suryanarayanan

Scientist with conflict of interest leading Lancet COVID-19 Commission task force on virus origins

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Posted on by Sainath Suryanarayanan

Last week, U.S. Right to Know reported that an influential statement in The Lancet signed by 27 prominent public health scientists about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was organized by employees of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

The Feb. 18 statement condemned “conspiracy theories” suggesting COVID-19 may have come from a lab, and said scientists “overwhelmingly conclude” the virus originated in wildlife. Emails obtained by USRTK revealed that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the letter and orchestrated it to “avoid the appearance of a political statement.” 

The Lancet failed to disclose that four other signers of the statement also have positions with EcoHealth Alliance, which has a financial stake in deflecting questions away from the possibility that the virus could have originated in a lab.

Now, The Lancet is handing even more influence to the group that has conflicts of interest on the important public health question of the pandemic origins. On Nov. 23, The Lancet named a new 12-member panel to the The Lancet COVID 19 Commission. The chairman of the new task force to investigate the “Origins, Early Spread of the Pandemic, and One Health Solutions to Future Pandemic Threats” is none other than the EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak. 

Half the task force members — including Daszak, Hume Field, Gerald Keusch, Sai Kit Lam, Stanley Perlman and Linda Saif — were also signatories to the Feb. 18 statement that claimed to know the origins of the virus barely a week after the World Health Organization announced that the disease caused by the novel coronavirus would be named COVID-19. 

In other words, at least half The Lancet’s COVID Commission task force on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 appear to have already pre-judged the outcome before the investigation has even begun. This undermines the credibility and authority of the task force.

The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are still a mystery and a thorough and credible investigation may well be crucial to preventing the next pandemic. The public deserves an investigation that is not tainted by such conflicts of interest.

Update (November 25, 2020): Peter Daszak has also been appointed to the World Health Organization’s 10-person team researching the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Written by Sainath Suryanarayanan