NIH$$$ to EcoHealth to Wuhan Lab

EcoHealth Alliance lost funding during the Trump administration, but can now proceed with its research — under extensive restrictions.

Max Kozlov


Research organization EcoHealth Alliance plans to investigate coronaviruses in bats.Milehightraveller/Getty

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant to a highly scrutinized research organization that studies bat coronaviruses — but the agency has placed severeal stipulations on the scope of the research and on the organization’s accounting practices.

The move caps a years-long saga that has thrust the EcoHealth Alliance, a small non-profit organization in New York City, into the political fray for its collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. In April 2020, after then-US-president Donald Trump hinted that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a WIV laboratory, the NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant. Its goal was to study how coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, jump from bats to humans. A few months later, the NIH reinstated and immediately suspended the award until certain conditions were met that, at the time, EcoHealth said were impossible to complete.

The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research

Researchers who spoke to Nature applaud the renewal, adding that this type of research is essential to avert the next pandemic. They claim that the NIH’s termination and subsequent suspension were politically motivated, and that, although long overdue, this renewal ends — for now — a drama-filled exchange between the agency and EcoHealth.

“It’s about goddam time,” says Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University in Massachusetts, who organized researchers to push back against EcoHealth’s grant termination in 2020. “The integrity of science requires a barrier against political interference,” he says.

Lengthy list of conditions

Although the organization will now be able to continue its bat coronavirus research for the first time since the saga began, the NIH placed an extensive list of restrictions on the four-year, US$2.9-million award. None of the researchers who spoke to Nature had ever seen a grant with so many stipulations.

Among other things, EcoHealth is specifically forbidden from performing any in-country research in China, including with the WIV, or collecting any new samples from vertebrates — such as bats. The revised grant also mandates greater scrutiny of EcoHealth’s finances and accounting practices, driven in part by a federal watchdog report, released in January, finding that EcoHealth had misreported about $90,000 in expenses. The report also faulted the NIH for improperly terminating EcoHealth’s grant.

Disputed research

Congressional Republicans have alleged that this research, which involved attaching spike proteins from wild bat coronaviruses to an unrelated virus to determine whether the wild pathogens could infect human airway cells, should have undergone HHS review. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, has said the agency concluded that these experiments did not meet the bar to undergo such review, and noted that the WIV did not intend to enhance the viruses.

Virologists say this type of research is essential for developing vaccines and therapeutics against emerging pathogens and for understanding how likely a pathogen is to spark a pandemic. The NIH and HHS have been finalizing guidance that will probably tighten the oversight of such research in the United States.

Third rail of virology

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.

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, says she is pleasantly surprised to see the grant renewed, but worries about the “terrible precedent” that the NIH set by “arbitrarily” terminating an award on the basis of “unfounded rumours” regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. She hopes that these same restrictions will not apply to other scientists doing similar work, but is encouraged by the number of research groups that are now studying coronaviruses following the COVID-19 pandemic.

doi: doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01566-0
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