The net around the Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to tighten. A letter from Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, has shed more light on the grant which the institute made to the EcoHealth Alliance for work at the Wuhan Institute.
One of the experiments, it reveals, involved testing to see whether the spike protein of a naturally-occurring coronavirus found in the bat population was capable of attaching itself to a human receptor, via experiments with mice engineered with a human gene. The experiment amounted to ‘gain of function’ research (something the NIH has denied) – modifying viruses so that they have qualities which don’t exist in nature. According to the Republican group on the oversight committee which received the letter, Tabak’s note contradicts an earlier one sent on 28 July which claimed that no funding had been provided for gain of function research.
What the letter confirms is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in experiments which played around with naturally-occurring viruses
The letter also reveals that mice which became infected with the modified virus became sicker than those infected with the naturally-occurring one.
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