US documents sharpen lens on China’s Wuhan lab amid post-Covid scrutiny of coronavirus research

Amid yearslong scrutiny of risky viral research in China since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, newly-released documents have flagged more safety and transparency issues around such work.

In around 2,800 pages of communication between New York-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance and US government-funded One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis), researchers discuss pathogen research across the world, including in China, and funding for such work. The emails reveal that the work was being done without adequate safeguards and oversight.

The EcoHealth Alliance is at the centre of investigations into the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 disease. For years prior to the outbreak, the EcoHealth Alliance collaborated with Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to conduct ‘gain of function’ (GoF) research on coronaviruses. Such risky research is at the centre of suspicions that a lab accident could have led to the outbreak in Wuhan that subsequently spread to the world and caused the pandemic.

These documents have been released under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and have been published publicly by US Right to Know, a public health-centred investigative news organisation.

The One Health Institute of UC Davis ran the federal programme called ‘PREDICT’ (Emerging Pandemic Threats program). During 2014-19, it managed a federal budget of $100 million from which it made grants to institutions, including the EcoHealth Alliance which further made sub-grants to researchers abroad, including the WIV in China.

US-funded viral research lacked transparency or safeguards, show docs

The idea behind the PREDICT programme was to strengthen global capacity to detect and discover zoonotic viruses with the potential of causing pandemic — zoonotic viruses are those that jump from animals to humans.

While the purported objective of such a programme was to strengthen global disease surveillance and diagnostic capabilities for known and newly-discovered viruses, and surely lot of such work was done, the programme has come under the scanner for funding researchers who handled viruses poorly.

On August 1, 2019, One Health Project Scientist Corina Grigorescu Monagin wrote to Ava Sullivan, the coordinator of PREDICT in India, and inquired about the safety and nature of work being done in China and India along with Southeast Asian and African nations. She also inquired about the return of these samples.

This indicates that Monagin, who led the Global Monitoring and Evaluation at PREDICT, was not aware of the kind of work that her institute was funding and was unaware how virus samples collected from such work were being handled.

In China, Monagin asked who would be handling the samples at GDCDC, which appears to be a reference to Guangdong Centres for Disease Control. She further asked whether any samples were collected in Yunnan province.

This indicates that Monagin was unaware of the scale of viral research that her institute was funding, raising questions of transparency.

Monagin also inquired how samples would be returned from China, India, Liberia, and Congo after the completion of a project. In Liberia, she asked whether facilities had back-up generators and “will the samples be secure, who will be responsible for them? (sic)”, indicating that the One Health Institute lacked basic information about the facilities where samples from the research it funded were being kept.

Monagin went on to flag damning safety concerns at the lab in Congo.

“LNSP has not had stable power or a secure facility for 10 years. Is it realistic to think this will occur before September 30, 2019? If not, what is the plan? It is unclear how long INRB will hold PREDICT samples, are there other options for these samples?” asked Monagin, referring to the Laboratoire National de Santé Publique in Congo’s capital Brazzaville.

Commenting on these revelations, US RTK’s Emily Kopp wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It shows EcoHealth Alliance may have left novel viruses in the freezers of other countries. That may explain why the U.S. underwrote the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus hunting expeditions, yet cannot reach a conclusion about whether the lab had a progenitor to Covid.”

The scale of US funds flowing into China

Even as the US Department of State, which funds US AID which in turn funded PREDICT at UC Davis, cut all grants for distribution to China and India, the flow of money from the United States to China was so extensive that grants continued to flow, according to documents released under the FOIA to US RTK and Congressional reports reviewed by Firstpost.

On June 25, 2019, Elizabeth Leasure, the One Health Institute’s Financial Operations Manager, said in an email that the US AID had cut all funds for China and India and “only minimal funds” had been released for Congo and Bangladesh.

While the batch of documents released under FOIA do not show why funds to China and India were stopped, a separate report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2023 said that funds were stopped finally over “biosafety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)”.

The UC Davis suspended “the subaward at the direction of the National Institutes of Health in May 2020 due to biosafety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) cited by the agency. The University did not disburse funds to WIV, including for work already performed from August 2019 and through February 2020”, said the GAO in its report.

However, the suspension of funds to China by UC Davis-run One Health Institute at the directions of the federal government did not mean funds stopped going to China.

In November 2019, the documents show that Prof. Xiangming Xiao of Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology at the University of Oklahoma had secured a grant to “study avian influenza viruses in China” from the federal National Science Foundation (NSF). In another email, a staffer whose name has been redacted identified Xiao as a Chinese national and said his NSF-funded research involves artificial intelligence (AI) and big data.

Hongying Li, a Senior Program Manager and Senior Research Scientist at EcoHealth Alliance, told this unnamed staffer that Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, knew Xiao well. He had also sought to be connected with Daszak and was eventually put in touch with Daszak and Li.

What came out of their association is not known.

This shows that even as the Department of State, headed by China hawk Mike Pompeo at the time under the first Trump administration, cut funds for China, US government funds continued to flow into China through other routes as the linkages were widespread. The widespread linkages were later revealed in greater detail in GAO audit of US funding of Chinese institutions in 2023.

Failure of check US funding of GoF research in China

China’s Wuhan is home to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is the world leader in research on viruses including coronaviruses, including the ‘gain of function’ (GoF) research.

The GoF research refers to the kind of research that gives an organism characteristics it does not naturally have. In context of viral or pathogen research, the GoF research refers to modifying a virus or any pathogen to insert characteristics, such as more transmissibility or severability, or giving it features it does not have, such as the capability to infect organisms it would not have naturally infected.

Right up to the outbreak of Covid-19, the WIV was conducting GoF research on coronaviruses, led by Shi Zhengli, world’s leading authorities on coronaviruses nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’. Such research at WIV and other Chinese institutions was being funded in part by US government funds and EcoHealth Alliance was at the centre of disseminating these funds to these institutions.

During 2014-21, the GAO found that US government funds of over $2 million were received by WIV, Wuhan University, and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

The GAO noted that the total amount could be much more than that as “information on sub-awards that fall below $30,000 and those below the first tier (e.g., second tier or third tier) is not required to be reported in government-wide systems”.

In the same report, the GAO said that US government failed to stop the flow of funds for GoF research during the three-year period when funding of GoF research was banned.

In October 2014, the-then Obama administration had banned the government funding of GoF research. The ban was later lifted in 2017 by the first Trump administration. However, even when the ban was in place, the US government could not enforce it, according to GAO.

While the US grants before October 2014 could be used for GoF research as the ban had not yet been imposed, the follow-up grants in 2016 had conditions that grantee EcoHealth Alliance and sub-grantee WIV had to “stop experiments with the specified viruses [under GoF framework] and provide relevant data to NIH [National Institutes of Health] if the bat coronaviruses under experiment at WIV showed increased viral growth above a certain threshold”, according to GAO.

Later, in 2021, the NIH concluded that EcoHealth Alliance had violated these two directions and again asked for unpublished data from experiments at WIV. No such data was provided. Then, the NIH suspended the grants on the basis of “material non-compliance for, among other reasons, WIV’s failure to turn over that data”, according to the GAO report.

EcoHealth Alliance’s centrality to Covid-origin probe

Nearly five years after the Covid-19 outbreak in China, little is known for sure around its origin.

Even though it was said in the beginning, even by the World Health Organization (WHO), that the SARS-CoV-2 likely came from a bat, no animal source has been found in nearly five years since the outbreak.

Meanwhile, the hypothesis that the virus could have leaked from a lab has acquired traction as it has been learnt that WIV, next door to where the first outbreak was reported, was conducting GoF research on coronaviruses for years up to the first reported outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan.

It has also been learnt that a bunch of top US scientists and EcoHealth Alliance were collaborating with WIV researchers on such risky research.

Just before the Covid-19 outbreak was reported in November, scientists connected to the GoF research at the WIV fell sick with Covid-like symptoms, according to later reports by the US Department of State and the intelligence community.

In 2022, a separate report by the US Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) reported that the WIV had reported a series of biosafety concerns in the run-up to the first Covid-19 outbreak in 2019.

With such a body of evidence, more and more public figures and scientists have called for a deeper systemic investigation of the possibility of a lab leak at Wuhan causing the Covid-19 pandemic.