Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, acknowledged Wednesday that newly released documents show that the National Institutes of Health funded research in Wuhan, China, that created circumstances that could have led to a dangerous engineered virus possibly escaping from a lab.
Speaking on CNBC, Gottlieb said that whether the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other laboratories in the Wuhan area meets the government’s technical definition of gain-of-function research is a “political and legal discussion.”
“The bottom line is they were doing research on viruses in that institute that was making those viruses potentially more dangerous to humans. And handling the viruses in ways that could potentiate their release, particularly by infecting transgenic animals that have fully-humanized immune systems,” Gottlieb said. “They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolved in ways that it could be more dangerous to humans could have escaped,” he continued.
Earlier this week, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents that detail how the NIH awarded grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that turned those grants around and handed them to Chinese researchers to study coronaviruses.
One […]
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, acknowledged Wednesday that newly released documents show that the National Institutes of Health funded research in Wuhan, China, that created circumstances that could have led to a dangerous engineered virus possibly escaping from a lab.
Speaking on CNBC, Gottlieb said that whether the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other laboratories in the Wuhan area meets the government’s technical definition of gain-of-function research is a “political and legal discussion.”
“The bottom line is they were doing research on viruses in that institute that was making those viruses potentially more dangerous to humans. And handling the viruses in ways that could potentiate their release, particularly by infecting transgenic animals that have fully-humanized immune systems,” Gottlieb said. “They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolved in ways that it could be more dangerous to humans could have escaped,” he continued.
Earlier this week, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents that detail how the NIH awarded grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that turned those grants around and handed them to Chinese researchers to study coronaviruses.
One […]
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