The grant for controversial coronaviruses was reinstated by theNIH
Can the EcoHealth Alliance be the Third Rail of Politics? Comments on the 2020 US-Bat Coronavirus Case Study and the New York City-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention
The move caps a years-long saga that has thrust the small New York City-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into the political fray for its collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. EcoHealth’s grant to study how coronaviruses jump from bats to humans was terminated by theNIH in April 2020, after then-US President Donald Trump said that there had been a new case of the disease. The award was suspended for a few months until EcoHealth could do what the organization said was impossible.
According to Heather Fine, a spokesman for theNIH, EcoHealth is working to strengthen its administrative processes so that they comply with the NIH’s expectations.
These restrictions seem reasonable, in light of the enormous public attention to and scrutiny of gain-of-function research, says Lawrence Gostin, a health-law and policy specialist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Still, Gostin says he is surprised the agency restarted its funding for EcoHealth, given that it has been the “third rail of politics” the last few years.
Congressional Republicans have alleged that this research, which attached spike proteins from wild bat coronaviruses to an unrelated virus to determine if the wild pathogens could infect human airway cells, should have undergone HHS review. Anthony Fauci was the Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infections Disease and said the experiments didn’t meet the standards for review because they didn’t intend to enhance the viruses.
Virologists say this type of research is critical for developing vaccines and therapeutics against emerging pathogens and for understanding how likely it is that a pathogen will spark a pandemic. It will likely be tightened the oversight of such research in the U.S. after the guidance from theNIH and HHS.
In the US, new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all trending downward, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s also true of cases and deaths in the EU. As of May 11, the US will end its emergency and the CDC will stop tracking community levels of transmission and track overall hospitalization and death rates. Local data will fall off because of the emergency declaration.
The roll back of the widespread data tracking and cross-government coordination programs that were essential to the emergency phase of the epidemic raises questions about what was learned and what could be done better in the future.
It will be harder for public health officials to convey how serious a risk a future variant could be if there is a shift. Sam Scarpino, a professor of health sciences and computer science, says that if there is another variant that shows up, the messaging around “it’s over, we’ve win” is setting us up for betrayal of trust. Without that trust, it will be difficult to get significant public buy-in on taking updated vaccines or returning to masking or social distancing. In the US, 17 percent of people got the vaccine last year, while only 14 percent of people in the EU had their third booster.
