GOP leadership on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding a probe of American research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and its president after the group allegedly covered up certain Covid-19 data presented to peer reviewers to secure a grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The Republicans claim in a Monday letter to NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak that EcoHealth, under the auspices of its head and project principal investigator Dr. Peter Daszak, fudged important mice-death data that might have led peer reviewers to reconsider giving more funding to the agency.
Specifically, EcoHealth described infected mice in an experiment with a 75 percent death rate as only having “mild” clinical symptoms and deleted the word “dead” from the term “dead point” in a graph depicting viral concentration in lung tissue to avoid risking disqualification from receiving more funding, they say.
While the lung-tissue graphs for other research years included the full phrase “dead point,” the word “dead” was removed from the graph in the renewal application, the lawmakers wrote.
“Without the word “dead” with Figure 6(b), the lung tissue graph would not have implied mice deaths; it would have implied only increasing viral loads. As such, this looks suspiciously tailored to delete this word in a document that would be reviewed by subject matter experts in the peer review process who were independent of NIAID,” the letter reads.
“Further, the renewal application, unlike the Year 4 report, stated that the presented information showed that the mice infected with SHC014 only had “mild” SARS-like clinical signs that were not reduced by immune-therapeutic monoclonals that reduce SARS pathogenicity or by vaccines. However, the Year 5 report with the mice death data showed that the SHC014 produced a staggering 75 percent death rate,” it adds.
This skewed representation, namely deleting “dead” from “dead point” to avoid triggering ethical and scientific questions about the mice deaths, appears “intended to deceive the peer reviewers,” the letter continues.
The “humanized mice experiments” were conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to test chimeric SARS-like viruses, or those derived from parts of animals, such as bats. Many scientists have pointed out that this research might have qualified as gain-of-function, or the modification of pathogens to become more lethal and transmissible, but NIH and EcoHealth have categorically denied that they engaged in this type of research.
Given that EcoHealth faced a “brewing financial crisis” in 2018 at the time of the grant-renewal application, as Vanity Fair reported, the organization omitted these details to avoid raising alarm bells among peer reviewers, the GOP committee members believe.
If EcoHealth’s funding request was denied, it would have risked losing $3.7 million for five years plus a nearly $370,000 increase, the members note.
“NIH must further examine Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. Their apparent cover-up of a humanized mice experiment at the Wuhan lab was an attempt to subvert the NIH’s peer review process. Daszak has a lengthy record of discrepancies and questionable claims that must be thoroughly investigated,” Republican committee leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers told Fox News.