Fauci Hearing Brings Renewed Scrutiny to Risky Gain-of-Function Research

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s dramatic if unenlightening appearance before a Senate panel this week called renewed attention to the dangers posed by gain-of-function research, in which scientists deliberately enhance the transmissibility, virulence or resiliency of biological agents in a lab setting to make them easier to study.According to the American Society for Microbiology, the research speeds up natural processes that would normally be too slow for scientists to productively observe, contributing to lifesaving developments and new treatments. But if those agents escape from the lab, they can expose the public to previously unknown and highly virulent health threats.That is exactly what might have happened in the case of Covid-19, according to one of two major theories about the origin of the virus. Many believe it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Communist China, where a procedure that many consider gain-of-function research had been indirectly funded through a National Institutes of Health grant.“The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions,” said Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chaired Wednesday’s hearing. “Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”Mr. Paul and Trump administration officials are among those who believe the influenza-type virus causing Covid-19 escaped from containment in the Wuhan lab, eventually spreading throughout the globe and killing 15 million people. But the lab leak theory was routinely dismissed by Dr. Fauci and other virologists during the first Trump and Biden administrations. Instead, they theorized that the virus spread from animals to humans via the Wuhan wet market, where a variety of exotic fresh meats were sold.Other than a brief opening statement in which he dismissed Wednesday’s hearing as a consequence of Mr. Paul’s “obsession” with prosecuting him, Dr. Fauci exercised his constitutional right against self-incrimination 111 times. He answered no questions directly.Nevertheless, Republican senators including Ron Johnson described Dr. Fauci’s actions as “self-incriminating.”During a 38-year career as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci was the nation’s top scientific adviser on a host of public health issues, concluding with work as an adviser to Mr. Trump and then President Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Fauci retired in 2022.In his diaries, Dr. Fauci for years dismissed the focus on gain-of-function research and a Covid lab leak as a right-wing effort to smear him. “The far right continues to accuse me of fostering dangerous gain-of-function research,” he wrote on May 3, 2021.Three days later he wrote: “The usual cast of characters that had been bugging us about gain of function research are at it again claiming incorrectly that we have funded gain of function research for the Wuhan lab.“Somehow or other they’re trying to connect funding gain of function with a Chinese investigator getting infected with the spread of COVID-19 throughout the world. They seem to be hung up on the fact that they believe that we have funded gain of function research for the lab when in fact we have not. Nonetheless, they will certainly be up to mischievous behavior.”Mr. Paul has said Mr. Fauci’s denials amount to a cover-up, accusing him of blaming Covid-19 on a natural occurrence in order to divert suspicion from an accidental lab leak.“You could not hide that your agency had funded the Wuhan research,” Mr. Paul said Wednesday. “Or your long history of defending gain-of-function research. The only alternative left was to argue that Covid-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab.”In October 2014, the Obama administration announced a pause of gain-of-function research “following recent biosafety incidents at Federal research facilities.”“During this pause, the U.S. Government will not fund any new projects involving these experiments and encourages those currently conducting this type of work — whether federally funded or not — to voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed,” the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced.The pause specifically mentioned experiments on the influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses that would improve disease transmission “in mammals via the respiratory route.” The pause was relaxed in 2017.On July 20, the Trump White House issued new restrictions on gain-of-function research. An official government policy document says research institutions that receive federal life sciences funding will implement fresh oversight on gain of function, determine when the research is “dangerous,” and develop risk-benefit plans to govern research.“Federal funding agencies will not fund life sciences research involving entities of concern (i.e., research conducted in a country of concern; or research conducted outside the United States by an institution of concern or an individual of concern),” the document reads.Dr. Fauci continued to accuse his critics of fostering conspiracy theories in an April 20, 2021, diary entry, where he wrote, “They are saying that I deliberately worked with the Chinese together with Peter Daszak to create a virus that would be released to the world. This sounds very much like a way-out conspiracy theory, which it is. However, there are enough crazy people around to make this a problem.”In another diary entry a month later, Dr. Fauci acknowledged the funding of a study associated with bat viruses but said those viruses were genetically different from the Covid-19 virus.“Whether or not one agrees as to the conduct of gain of function research, when you look at the bat viruses that were studied under the grant and compare the genetic sequences with SARS- CoV-2 it becomes clear that SARS-C0V-2 could not have come from the bat viruses associated with the grant that was funded,” Mr. Fauci wrote on May 19, 2021.

Fauci Hearing Brings Renewed Scrutiny to Risky Gain-of-Function Research

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