Suspicions raised in Congress over White House interference in termination of coronavirus research grant
Leading figures in the United States Congress have expressed “strong concerns” over the cancellation of a National Institutes of Health grant for research on bats and coronaviruses in China, raising suspicions of political interference.
The NIH grant was awarded to the not-for-profit EcoHealth Alliance in 2019 but abruptly withdrawn on 24 April. Some of the grant money had gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility that some people, including senior US politicians, have speculated, without evidence, could be the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“If this theory is the basis for the grant termination, it would be an egregious example of the administration politicising scientific decision-making in order to further a politically convenient narrative,” Eddie Bernice Johnson, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and Frank Pallone Jr, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, wrote in a letter on 26 June.
The committee chairs requested clarification from the Department of Health and Human Services on how the decision to cancel the grant was made and whether the White House or other federal bodies were involved.
The letter follows claims by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a committee hearing on 23 June that the grant was cancelled “because the NIH was told to cancel it”. Fauci, one of the US government’s leading scientists during the Covid-19 crisis, later told the news website Politico that it was the White House that had ordered the NIH to cut the grant.
A week after president Donald Trump told a press conference that “we will end that grant very quickly”, the NIH told the EcoHealth Alliance that the grant was being terminated because the research project did not “align with…agency priorities”.
The research community has rallied round the EcoHealth Alliance, with 77 US Nobel laureates and 31 learned societies expressing their concern to NIH director Francis Collins.
“We are puzzled by how research into the coronavirus that has caused the current pandemic is not aligned with NIH priorities,” the president, chair and chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in a joint statement on 24 June, adding that the cancellation of research projects without input from funding agencies would “undermine the integrity of science funding and public trust”.
Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, said on Twitter: “Eventually, we’ll all know the shoddy truth of how a conspiracy theory pushed by this administration led [Collins] to block the only US research group still working in China to analyse Covid origins.”
The NIH told Research Professional News that it does not discuss internal deliberations on grant terminations. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.