Suddenly, speculation that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory escalated from a conspiracy theory to a serious possibility worthy of serious exploration.
no longer.
In an op-ed published in Statistical data On Tuesday, AIDS activist Peter Staley lamented a “witch hunt” by “anti-science thugs” against the EcoHealth Alliance. Leveraging federal funds for potential gain-of-function work.
Ecological health has been a focus of bipartisan debate in recent months.
Thanks to the work of congressional investigators and investigative journalists, we know EcoHealth was creating a SARS-like coronavirus in Wuhan and even proposed creating a virus strikingly similar to SARS-CoV-2 in its grant application.
In a draft grant proposal, the nonprofit’s president, Peter Daszak, proposed doing the work in Wuhan because of its lower biosecurity precautions and being “cost-effective,” and tried to hide it from federal funders. How much of the organization’s work will be done in Wuhan.
Republicans and Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic criticized Daszak and his organization for a lack of transparency and failure to properly oversee their Wuhan partner’s experiments.
The Biden administration has since stripped EcoHealth of federal funding and launched a gag investigation that could bar it from receiving future grants. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said he agreed with the decision. So does Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Staley said all the bipartisan sanctions and scrutiny targeting EcoHealth are part of a right-wing “McCarthyite” campaign to block critical basic research the group is conducting to determine where the next disease outbreak might be.
“It scares me and it should scare you that the conspiracy theorists are winning,” he wrote. “Because of them, we will be less prepared for the next pandemic.”
He doesn’t have to worry so much.
The actual history of this epidemic shows that ecological health work will be of little use in detecting the next epidemic or helping people prepare for it. This is true even if one denies credible accusations that the nonprofit’s work led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As Staley explains in his article, EcoHealth’s mission is to monitor areas of the world where animal viruses are most likely to spread into human populations and cause the next pandemic.
It received a multimillion-dollar grant from NIAID to collect viruses from human and animal populations across China, sequence and study them in Wuhan to identify possible future pandemic pathogens.
If one believes in the natural origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, one must also believe that EcoHealth was completely unprepared for the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in its own backyard. All taxpayer-funded disease surveillance appears to be in vain.
Staley compared ecological health sanctions to a New York City fire company being stripped of funding after a fire caused the collapse of the World Trade Center.
A more accurate analogy is that we are defunding a fire company that failed to respond to a fire that destroyed the building next door.
In fact, this was the dominant criticism of ecological health efforts before the pandemic. There are so many viruses circulating in nature that the chances of disease surveillance identifying a virus that will evolve into the next human pandemic are slim.
Staley took a firmer stance, saying Fauci and Collins agreed with the Biden administration’s decision to strip the nonprofit of funding, thereby throwing ecological health under the bus.
If EcoHealth failed to properly oversee its work in Wuhan, then NIAID and NIH (the agencies that fund EcoHealth’s work) also failed to properly oversee the nonprofit’s funding efforts.
Fauci and Collins’ positions are supported by congressional Democrats who view the EcoHealth scandal as entirely blameless, a remarkable abdication of responsibility. If EcoHealth deserves the sanctions it receives, then the NIH and NIAID also have much to answer for.
A congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus is ongoing. Over time, organizations that funded gain-of-function research on the Wuhan pandemic pathogen may face some liability for knowingly failing to properly regulate the dangerous research being conducted there.
The worst thing one can say about eco-health work is that it contributes to an epidemic that should be prevented. The best thing that can be said about its work is that it has proven useless in stopping an epidemic that was supposed to be nipped in the bud.
In either case, it is not anti-science to question the value gained by taxpayers funding this work.
