Katherine Eban on COVID-19 Origin

Peter Attia interviewed Katherine Eban about the origin of the COVID-19 disease (link to podcast), an investigative reporter who's done some amazing work on generic drugs in the past.

While I have a few issues with her argument about the COVID-19 disease's origins (hence this short post) let me say that I think this is in general an excellent interview, and a very good introduction to the issue if you are not familiar with it already. Eban and Attia go through the key points, and a number of rather uncomfortable points are included. So I recommend it, but with the caveats addressed below (which is not comprehensive).

Attia sells the transcript to these podcasts to subscribers, and I do not subscribe, so I did these brief snippets myself. Timestamps are mine, as are any errors.

00:05:47: "One might say [the origin] was settled a while ago, or seemingly settled..."

So, a little bit of my background on looking into this:

1/3 The first credible evidence I've seen that Covid-19 may have come from a lab.

"US-funded $3.7 million project approved by Trump's Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on 'monster-germ' research"https://t.co/PwTaiGJPzR

— Tucker Goodrich (@TuckerGoodrich) May 4, 2020

2/3 Fauci was paying the Wuhan lab to, "Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission."https://t.co/OhT0S7uBVk

— Tucker Goodrich (@TuckerGoodrich) May 4, 2020

3/3 "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus"https://t.co/I5flRc8qUE

— Tucker Goodrich (@TuckerGoodrich) May 4, 2020

So over a year before Vanity Fair published Eban's article, it was pretty obvious that the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab (WIV) was a possible, if not likely source of the disease.

"“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the [Trump administration] official said."

That quote was from an OpEd in the Washington Post published on April 14, 2020. This podcast contains nothing that adds to or subtracts from that conclusion.

So, disagreements.

The Moratorium

The Asian Times article from April 22, 2020 makes a mistake that Eban repeats in her own analysis:

"Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research – altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious – as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs."

Lin, the author, links to an article that says: 

"[The White House] is halting all federal funding for so-called gain-of-function (GOF) studies that alter a pathogen to make it more transmissible or deadly so that experts can work out a U.S. government-wide policy for weighing the risks. Federal officials are also asking the handful of researchers doing ongoing work in this area to agree to a voluntary moratorium."

Eban's Vanity Fair article states:

"In October 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible. But a footnote to the statement announcing the moratorium carved out an exception for cases deemed “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

Eban sent me an article similar to Lin's source via twitter: 

Thx for listening. Tell me more about no moratorium for Gain of Function research: https://t.co/AakJCIoyZu

— Katherine Eban (@KatherineEban) July 20, 2021

Which stated (correctly) that:

"...the US government is temporarily halting funding for new studies aiming to give novel functions to influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses."

Despite it's erroneous title: "Moratorium on Gain-of-Function Research".

NIAID funding of EcoHealth, including WIV.

The relevant definition of "moratorium" here is "a suspension of activity". As the 2014 White House order makes clear, this was not a moratorium, as all existing research projects were grandfathered, only "new" projects were prohibited. Further, there's no evidence whatsoever that anyone asked or that Ecohealth refused to "voluntarily" halt its gain-of-function (GoF) research project. (As I discussed in this twitter thread, based on NIAID and HHS documents, the WIV research was clearly GoF.)

It's clear from the language of the White House order that someone from NIAID should have asked EcoHealth to pause its research!

And indeed, as HHS documents make clear, the research project, which was not "new", continued to receive funding.

Even NIAID Director Fauci states that funding continued:

""About $600,000 was spent over a five-year period," Fauci said during a congressional budget hearing. "That comes to anywhere between $125 (thousand) and $150,000 per year that went to collaboration with Wuhan."

So there was never a moratorium that applied to or was followed by the NIAID and the WIV.

Further evidence that there was no moratorium for WIV is that the "pause" was lifted on December 13, 2017, while on November 30, 2017, Zheng-Li Shi (the 'bat woman') published a paper that listed the NIAID grant as a funding source:

"Funding: This work was jointly funded... the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964)..."

And it was GoF, using the "reverse genetic" technique:

"Recombinant viruses with the S gene of the novel bat SARSr-CoVs and the backbone of the infectious clone of SARSr-CoV WIV1 were constructed using the reverse genetic system..."

As Eban had noted, in the VF article: "The grant was not halted under the moratorium or the P3CO framework." Which is quite obvious, as it was never subject to the "pause", however none of this nuance is discussed in the podcast.

00:31:53: "...led the US Government to impose a moratorium on funding of any kind of gain of function research of SARS and MERS pathogens."

This is clearly not accurate.

00:32:10: "Interestingly, in the very beginning of the Trump Administration, in January of 2017, that moratorium was lifted. But it was replaced by this [P3CO] framework..."

Obviously since the pause never applied to WIV, and was never followed by WIV, it is incorrect to imply, as she does here, that it was lifted by the Trump Admin. There was nothing to lift.

Her discussion of the P3CO framework is well worth reading, as NIAID Director Anthony Fauci had apparently decided to ignore it, just as he had ignored the Obama-administration request to voluntarily halt the SARS research conducted by WIV. However she never makes this connection, despite (inaccurately) quoting part of the footnote noting who at NIAID had the authority to waive the pause for WIV funding: 

"An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security."

Did NIAID Fund Gain-of-Function Research? 

Attia then asks her (00:32:47) about NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci denying they funded GoF work (in at least one case for Fauci, under oath). "Can you evaluate the veracity of those statements?"

00:33:44, Eban: "So here is where we enter this true semantic marshland, because the feeling of, and I'm not talking about wingnuts who want to fire Fauci, credible people who have evaluated this say that there is some sort of rhetorical grey area here. First of all... well the Government hasn't funded research at the [WIV] directly, they have funded, basically, an intermediary non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has given sub-grants to the [WIV]. So, yeah, no direct funding, but yeah, indirect funding. 

"Now, part of the obligation of EcoHealth Alliance was to report back to the NIH [actually, the NIAID] and say, here's our progress reports, here is what the [WIV] was doing with some of your grant money, and we ensure that they have been doing this safely. We don't know what's in those progress reports, because NIH [again, NIAID] has not released them. 

Attia: "That sounds like a FOIA waiting to happen..."

Well, we really don't need a FOIA to come to a conclusion about this, and it's not a semantic marshland, because sufficient information to draw a conclusion is already available.

For starters as I detailed here, NIAID defines GoF research as: 

"...any selection process involving an alteration of genotypes and their resulting phenotypes is considered a type of Gain-of-Function (GoF) research, even if the U.S. policy is intended to apply to only a small subset of such work.

"...To answer these questions, virologists use gain- and loss-of-function experiments to understand the genetic makeup of viruses and the specifics of virus-host interaction. For instance, researchers now have advanced molecular technologies, such as reverse genetics, which allow them to produce de novo recombinant viruses from cloned cDNA, and deep sequencing that are critical for studying how viruses escape the host immune system and antiviral controls. Researchers also use targeted host or viral genome modification using small interfering RNA or the bacterial CRISPR-associated protein-9 nuclease as an editing tool."

WIV was clearly doing reverse genetics research, a type of GoF, per the NIAID definition, as detailed above and reported in a publicly-available, peer reviewed paper, or, as the State Department put it recently:

"The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses."

Second, NIAID monitors what award grantees and sub-award grantees are doing:

"The work was a collaboration among scientists from EcoHealth Alliance, Duke-NUS Medical School, Wuhan Institute of Virology and other organizations, and was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIAID], part of the National Institutes of Health. The research is published in the journal Nature."

Third, NIAID requires that sub-award grantees be approved:

"While principal investigators (PIs) can perform a range of grant actions under the NIH standard terms of award, they must get prior approval from NIAID for the following things: ...Addition of a new foreign site or foreign subaward."

Fourth, the Government was notified that the WIV was not meeting standards:

"Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats."

Eban seems to be paltering here: the distinction that she attempts to present as a justification for Fauci's and Collins' statements falls apart simply when looking at the NIAID documents about their supervisory role in sub-award grants.

"“I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab, we can’t do that,” Dr. Fauci said..."

It's the NIAID's self-declared responsibility to ensure basic protocols are followed, and he is the Director. If he has doubts (as he should have) about the WIV, he should have pulled the grant. He could also have implemented the pause and the protocols outlined above, which he failed (or declined) to do. Collins is similarly culpable.

In light of the evidence, it's simply impossible to answer Attia's question in any other way than to acknowledge they were likely being dishonest.

Bias

00:06:11 Eban: "...with Trump out of office... it was a good time to begin to look into..."

Why is the fact that Trump is out of office relevant to where a disease that has killed millions come from? It shouldn't be, unless you are putting politics ahead of people's health.

Identifying the cause of this disease, if it was human-caused, as seemed likely even a year ago (and as Eban notes, even the Chinese came to the conclusion that the labs in Wuhan were likely the cause of it), is rather crucial if we're going to avoid another apparently iatrogenic pandemic.

From Vanity Fair:

"As the pandemic raged, the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV wound up in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. At a White House COVID-19 press briefing on April 17, 2020, a reporter from the conspiratorial right-wing media outlet Newsmax asked Trump a factually inaccurate question about a $3.7 million NIH grant to a level-four lab in China. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?” the reporter asked.

Eban in the podcast:

00:35:45: "In my investigation there are credible questions about that funding. Why were we allowing taxpayer dollars to a high-level Chinese laboratory, where we now believe there were was actually military scientists working in there. They're obviously an adversary..."

The Newsmax question was not "factually inaccurate", the grant did indeed go to China and the NIAID oversight process makes it clear that they would have known where it was going. It's actually a damn good question, and had it come from "the mainstream media" which had "studiously avoided" the topic, as she noted, Eban would doubtless have approved of it. 

Eban did excellent work, as far as she went, but it appears her political bias prevented her from drawing the obvious conclusions above—comments about conspiracy theories are used repeatedly, even as her reporting demonstrates that the 'conspiracy theorists' were working off the known facts most effectively in this particular case.

Conclusion

From the Vanity Fair article:

""Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”"

From Fauci's FOIA'ed emails:

"Auchincloss replied to Fauci, saying, “The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain of function pause but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH. Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework ... She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.”"

Concluding that a manager who presides over what seems likely to be a gross violation of safety protocols, ignores policies designed to enhance safety, and then attempts to hide his culpability should be fired isn't a "wing nut" response, it's management 101. 

00:35:07 Eban: "The NIH now is being buried up to their eyeballs in FOIAs, absolutely. People want to know, what did they know about this research."

This is what happens when you're not forthrightly trying to find out what went wrong. It's a red flag.

The conclusion I have gotten to, which she provides a good bit of evidence to support, is that the fellow who has been leading our response to COVID-19 likely financed its creation, and the fellow who was tasked with finding out where it came from likely created it. Both are doing their very best to distract us from those conclusions. And there's little chance either will pay a price.

That's a pretty grim conclusion to come to.

Hopefully Eban will continue this line of research, but put the bias to the side.