N.I.H. Says Bat Research Group Failed to Report Findings on Time

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PERSON

HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES DEPARTMENT

Healthcare

INIWIX30

National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland 20892

October 20, 2021

The Honorable James Comer Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight and Reform U.S. House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear representative commentator:

Thank you for your continued interest in the work of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I am writing today for additional information and documents regarding the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc.

It's important to note at the outset that published genomic data shows that the bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and the sub-grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) did not SARS-CoV- 2. Both the progress report and the analysis attached here confirm this conclusion again, since the sequences of the viruses are genetically very far apart.

The fifth and final progress report for Grant RO1AI1 10964, awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., is included with editorial changes for personally identifiable information only. This progress report was submitted to the NIH in August 2021 in response to the NIH's efforts to enforce compliance. It contains data from a research project carried out during the 2018-19 funding period that used bat coronavirus genome sequences that are already present in nature.

The limited experiment described in the final progress report from the EcoHealth Alliance tested whether spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China could bind to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model. All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, remained unchanged. In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with bat coronavirus SHC014 WIV1 became sicker than those infected with bat coronavirus WIV1. As sometimes happens in science, this was an unexpected result of research, as opposed to something the researchers set out to do. Regardless of this, the viruses examined as part of this fellowship were genetically very far removed from SARS-CoV-2.

The research plan was reviewed by the NIH prior to funding, and the NIH found that it did not meet the definition of research on augmented pathogens with pandemic potential (ePPP) because these bat coronaviruses have not been shown to infect humans. Therefore, the research was not subject to any departmental review under the HHS P3CO framework. Out of caution and as an additional level of supervision, however, a formulation was included in the conditions for the award of scholarships to EcoHealth, which outlines criteria for a secondary review, such as increased growth. These