EXCLUSIVE — Sens. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) are aiming to block all funding for risky gain-of-function pathogen and biomedical research at labs owned by foreign adversaries following the mishaps leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID-19 claimed the lives of over 1 million Americans, demonstrating the deadly nature of risky gain-of-function research,” Marshall told the Washington Examiner. “We must ensure this never happens again. That starts by stopping the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to fund these dangerous projects.”
The senators proposed on Thursday an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would explicitly prohibit spending on “gain-of-function research of concern” from the Departments of Defense and Energy.
The biomedical research community has had a long-standing debate over the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research, which, simply put, is the genetic manipulation of a pathogen to either give it a new property or make it more infectious.
The term “gain-of-function research of concern” has developed into a shorthand for research experiments that involve genetic manipulation of pathogens with pandemic potential, including SARS, MERS, and bird flu strains.
This type of gain-of-function has become a central feature of the debate over the origins of COVID-19, turning into the focal point of the theory that the virus originated from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Both the WIV and the nonprofit research firm EcoHealth Alliance have faced significant public scrutiny since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 for using funds from the National Institutes of Health to conduct potentially dangerous bat coronavirus research.
Former NIH Director Francis Collins and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci testified before the House Oversight Committee this year that no NIH funds could have been used to create SARS-CoV-2 due to the genetic difference between the virus and other coronaviruses studied at the WIV under the NIH’s EcoHealth grant.
EcoHealth has maintained that it has never funded projects that could be classified as gain-of-function research of concern.
In 2018, however, EcoHealth Alliance, along with researchers at the WIV and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, proposed to the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency a project that would have added a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus and then tested the chimeric virus in human cells. This is the same characteristic that makes SARS-CoV-2 bind to human lung tissue.
Although the project, known as the DEFUSE proposal, was ultimately rejected by DOD, EcoHealth President Peter Daszak acknowledged before Congress in May that there would be no way to verify whether WIV researchers independently took on the DEFUSE project without U.S. funding.
Last month, a report from the DOD Office of Inspector General confirmed that the department was unable to determine the extent to which its grants, contracts, or any other type of agreement had gone to Chinese research labs due to “limitations in the DOD’s system used to track contracts and grants.”
The NDAA amendment proposed by Marshall and Ernst would prevent any DOD or DOE funds from being directed toward the WIV, or any other laboratory controlled by any country “determined by the Secretary of State to be a foreign adversary.”
Adversaries explicitly listed in the amendment include China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela under the Maduro regime.
“Our amendment puts a full-scale moratorium on funding gain-of-function research and any projects in laboratories owned or controlled by a foreign adversary — this should not be controversial and is a matter of national security,” Marshall said.
The amendment would also prohibit any federal dollars from the departments from being directed toward the WIV or EcoHealth. The WIV has been debarred from all federal funding for a minimum of three years, and EcoHealth is fighting debarment procedures.
Similar language was included in the House appropriations legislation funding the Department of Health and Human Services that passed out of committee this week. The bill prevents the NIH from giving grant funds to EcoHealth, the WIV, and other animal labs in hostile nations.
Curbing the dangers of gain-of-function research is a topic of increasing bipartisan agreement for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has hosted two hearings on the controversial topic in biomedical science in recent weeks.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the ranking member of the committee, introduced a bill Wednesday that would establish an independent review board outside of the NIH that would be tasked with approving projects fitting the definition of gain-of-function research of concern.