The National Institutes of Health announced a new policy that puts under scrutiny foreign collaborations on research projects, especially when foreign partners receive sub-awards.
The new policy will take effect in October this year.
According to its requirements, the primary grantee, or the American partner, should receive from the foreign partner copies of the lab notebooks, their data, and documentation relevant to the research, at least once every 3 months.
The announcement comes after the lab leak theory for the spread of COVID-19 became more widely accepted after it was revealed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded—by way of sub-awards—gain-of-function research for bat coronaviruses in China. The research was conducted on how new, hybrid coronaviruses can be transmitted to humans.
The NIH funded the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance to do research on coronaviruses, and part of the funds—a sub-award—was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study bat coronaviruses in the wild, and their potential to infect humans.
Part of this research was to create hybrid bat coronaviruses that could be transmitted to humans, or gain-of-function research.
Some scientists said that the new policy could have a chilling effect on foreign collaborations.
David Relman, a microbiologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, has concerns that the new policy is not clearly stating the elements of the lab notebooks that will need to be shared, according to Nature.
EcoHealth Alliance reported two years late to the NIH on the transmissibility of the hybrid coronaviruses their Chinese partners were creating or researching. EcoHealth said the failure to report on time was because of miscommunication and a technical glitch.
The renewed grant is to be administered through the NIH’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the research arm headed for several decades by the recently retired Dr. Anthony Fauci. NIH’s statement on the renewal was made public by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
“This project seeks to understand what factors allow bat-origin coronaviruses, including close relatives to SARS, to jump into the human population by studying their evolutionary diversity, the patterns of spillover in people that live in high-risk communities, and analyzing characteristics of bat coronaviruses that could allow them to emerge,” the grant description on NIH’s website says.
EcoHealth issued a celebratory statement declaring that the NIH decision “reflects a reversal of the previous termination and suspension of a [grant] awarded in 2019, but halted in April 2020 due to concerns about continuing collaborative laboratory research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIH).”
The NIH has awarded seven grants totaling more than $4.1 million to EcoHealth to study various aspects of SARS, MERS, and other coronavirus diseases. Part of this money funded the gain-of-function research at the WIV in China.
EcoHealth said in its statement that its agreement with NIH requires researchers to conduct all of their studies outside of China and in conjunction with a Singapore-based health facility, as well as other measures designed to address concerns about the lack of proper safety procedures at WIH and its connection with the Chinese military.
$1.3 Billion Unaccounted Grants
Sen. Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) and her staff investigators, working with auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service, as well as two nonprofit Washington watchdogs—Open The Books (OTB) and the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP)—recently discovered dozens of other grants to China and Russia that weren’t counted on the federal government’s USASpending.gov internet database.While the total value of the uncounted grants found by the Ernst team is $1.3 billion, that amount is just the tip of the iceberg, the GAO reported.
The problem is that federal officials don’t rigorously track sub-awards made by initial grant recipients, according to the Iowa Republican. Such sub-awards are covered by a multitude of federal regulations that stipulate many conditions to ensure that the tax dollars are appropriately spent.
The GAO said in an April report that “limitations in sub-award data is a government-wide issue and not unique to U.S. funding to entities in China.”
“GAO is currently examining the state of federal government-wide sub-award data as part of a separate review,” the report reads.
The Eco-Health sub-awards to WIV illustrate the problem.
“Despite being required by law to make these receipts available to the public on the USAspending.gov website, EcoHealth tried to cover its tracks by intentionally not disclosing the amounts of taxpayer money being paid to WIV, which went unnoticed for years,” Ernst said in the statement.
“I was able to determine that more than $490 million of taxpayer money was paid to organizations in China [in] the last five years. That’s ten times more than GAO’s estimate! Over $870 million was paid to entities in Russia during the same period!”
