by Note to the Editor: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Anyone who wants to relive the craziness, insanity and danger of the early Covid-19 pandemic might want to watch a few hours of Monday’s House Oversight Subcommittee hearing on the Corona Pandemic.
Members spent a good part of the day questioning Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and, among many other government roles, former chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden on Covid-19. The subcommittee previously grilled Fauci during two days of closed-door testimony in January.
In their announcement of the hearing, the Republican majority made it clear that, rather than a standard after-action review to gather lessons learned as a way to inform the next public health crisis, their goal was to get Fauci the hot seat again. . As the chairman of the subcommittee, Dr. Brad Wenstrup, who is a podiatrist, said, the purpose of the hearing was, among other things, to review Fauci “promoting dubious singular stories about the origins of Covid-19.”
During the long and agitated hearing (I watched more than 3 hours), the Republicans seemed hell-bent on linking US support for virus research that began in the Obama administration to the initiation of the Covid- 19 2019. Fauci was repeatedly asked questions that tried to understand the role that the United States and/or Fauci himself played, which is thought to be terrible. The story of the still unsolved virus (SARS-CoV-2) seems to be viewed as a matter of promise for political gain.
Many articles have already been written and argued about this issue. In one corner is the group who, like me, regard the pandemic as another natural occurrence resulting from the exchange of normal-issue genes across animals and humans – back and forth until, by accident, a really bad strain of the virus is inadvertently created .
The other argument, which has the admittedly irresistible feeling of James Bond if far less credibility, sees the virus as a man-made construct. Perhaps the bad guys (the Chinese, in this screenplay) with evil intentions somehow deliberately hit the jackpot of evil by creating the modern doomsday virus. To this theory there are two subversions: one in which the bad people were just bad and did a bad thing, and the other in which the funds of the United States were part of the evil plan as the money was used (to inadvertently or inadvertently) to start the whole evil program back in 2014 and 2015.
Most of the hearing was spent trying to connect the origin of the pandemic to a small grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) given to the New York-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, which, as intended, gave the funds for the Wuhan laboratory to study coronaviruses i. bats. No one disputes that this happened. The plot thickens (or, in my opinion, thins) when genetic fingerprint evidence is applied.
The Republicans seem convinced that the doomsday virus came from the grant by supporting “gain of function” research. This term refers to work that explores the consequences of playing with genetic material to add new or improved abilities to an organism. In fact, “gain of function” was a term heard frequently at the hearing, a new meme of the kind spoken by people who had no knowledge of this research area until recently they were familiar with.
As the audience learned, “gain of function” means different things to different people. In one sense, an experiment that manipulates the genetic structure of a virus or bacteria or plant or animal could be viewed as “functional benefit” research. Heavy regulation of such routine business would kill all research. To prevent this, the NIH has gone through the painstaking work of defining exactly what it means from a narrow regulatory perspective that guarantees safety to the public through appropriate levels of scrutiny.
One of Fauci’s explanations for why the U.S.-funded “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan work was simple: The genetic fingerprint of the Chinese bat coronavirus studied with U.S. dollars was too much a distant coronal cousin to SARS-CoV-2 to make a plausible explanation for sequential trial-and-error manipulation. Simply put, the fingerprint of pandemic pain is too similar to that of a bat.
As Fauci put it, the lab-origin theory of NIH funding is “molecularly impossible.”
The important thing is that this conclusion depends on insights from experts in the field of phylogenetics of viral evolution, which has been used extensively to track the pandemic strain. The science is mature and reliable, and it offers the conclusion without reasonable doubt to those who believe in the science.
As Fauci explained, this does not mean that other scientists in Wuhan using other funds may have taken other strains of the coronavirus and tweaked and tweaked the genetic makeup to create the disaster (it seems it’s very unbelievable to me, but who knows?). “None of us know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan… I keep an open mind about what the origin is,” Fauci told lawmakers. But there is no way this could be linked to the US, the NIH or Fauci.
A 15-month dragnet investigation by a House subcommittee into thousands of emails and documents also uncovered practices apparently leaked by a few scientists associated with some research conducted in Wuhan. One, Dr. David Morens, worked on academic projects with Fauci and the other, Dr. Peter Daszak, a colleague of Morens, heads the EcoHealth Alliance and worked with the Wuhan laboratory. First, they seem to have used personal email for government work due to non-compliance with policy and, even worse, they may have developed some incomprehensible environments to oversee their work on like deleting messages. None of this, however, relates to US funds or research funded by NIH or Fauci.
I suspect Morens and Daszak will be subject to further congressional investigation that will create more headlines. Meanwhile, as the committee continues to mull more emails, these lawmakers will not stop trying to make the public safer.
Of course, even if they were hard at work updating and optimizing the government’s response to a pandemic, there would be no guarantee that a future administration would follow the experts’ cumulative wisdom. As we learned in the early days of Covid-19, then President Donald Trump did not consult the “pandemic playbook” developed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
But gee whiz, the Covid subcommittee could at least try. As Fauci — we hope — said about the hearing, “It’s the reason we’re here [to determine] how can we do better next time.” Unfortunately, this was a path that was not taken at this subcommittee’s hearing.
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