A trove of newly released documents detailing U.S.-funded coronavirus research in China prior to the COVID-19 pandemic shows that Dr. Anthony Fauci was “untruthful” when he claimed that his agency did not finance gain-of-function research in Wuhan, an infectious disease expert says.
Documents published by
The Intercept on Sunday show that Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided federal funds to the U.S. nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology to construct laboratory-generated SARS- and MERS-related coronaviruses that demonstrated enhanced pathogenicity in humanized mice cells, according to Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright.
“The documents make it clear that assertions by the [National Institutes of Health] director, Francis Collins, and the [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] are untruthful,” Ebright said in a
tweet Sunday evening.
[“Gain of function”
describes a risky process of making a disease more dangerous or contagious for the purpose of studying a response.]