Editor’s Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. Opinion more views on CNN.
Anyone who wants to re-experience the brutality, madness and danger of the early Covid-19 pandemic may want to watch Monday’s several-hour hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on Oversight on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Members spent most of the day meeting Dr. Joe Biden, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s former chief medical adviser on Covid-19, among many other government posts. He spent his time questioning Anthony Fauci. The subcommittee previously grilled Fauci behind closed doors for two days in January.
In their announcement for the hearing, the Republican majority made clear that their goal was to put Fauci in the hot seat once again, rather than a standard after-action review to glean lessons learned to inform the next public health crisis. . Subcommittee chairman Dr. is a podiatrist. The purpose of the hearing, as Brad Wenstrup said, was to review, among other things, Fauci’s “promotion of singular, dubious narratives about the origins of Covid-19.”
During the long and exasperating hearing (I watched for more than 3 hours), Republicans appeared determined to link US support for virus research, which began under the Obama administration, to the origins of the 2019 Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci was repeatedly hit with questions that sought to insinuate the supposedly treacherous role played by the United States and/or Fauci himself. The still unclear background of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) is apparently seen as a promising topic for political gain.
Many articles have been written and discussions have been held on this subject before. In one corner, there’s the group like me who see the pandemic as just another natural event resulting from standard gene exchange between animals and humans – until, by accident, a really bad strain of virus is unintentionally created.
The other argument, which is less convincing but admittedly has an irresistible James Bond feel, sees the virus as a man-made construct. Maybe the malevolent bad guys (the Chinese in this movie scenario) have somehow deliberately hit the evil jackpot by creating a modern apocalypse virus. There are two sub-versions of this theory: one where the bad guys just act bad and do something bad, and the other where the US funds are part of the evil plan where the money is used (intentionally or unintentionally) to start the world. The entire evil program in 2014 and 2015.
Much of the hearing was spent trying to tie the origin of the pandemic to a small National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which gave the funds as planned to the Wuhan lab to study coronaviruses. bats. No one disputes that this happened. The plot thickens (or thinner, in my view) when genetic fingerprint evidence emerges.
Republicans appear convinced that the donor intentionally or unintentionally led to the apocalypse virus by supporting “gain-of-function” research. This term refers to the study of the consequences of manipulating genetic material to add a new or improved ability to an organism. Indeed, “gain of function” was a term heard frequently at the hearing; It was a new meme spoken with practical familiarity by people who until recently knew nothing about this field of research.
As hearing listeners learned, “gain of function” came to mean different things to different people. From one perspective, an experiment that alters the genetic structure of a virus or bacterium or plant or animal can be viewed as “gain of function” research. Imposing heavy regulations on such routine work will bring all research to a halt. To prevent this from happening, NIH has done painstaking work to define exactly what this means from a narrow regulatory perspective that promises safety to the public through the appropriate level of scrutiny.
One of Fauci’s explanations for why the US-funded Wuhan study was not “gain of function” research was simple: The genetic fingerprint of the Chinese bat coronavirus studied by US dollars was far from being a coronavirus cousin of SARS-CoV-2. Make sequential, sinister trial-and-error manipulation a plausible explanation. The fingerprint of the pandemic strain is very different from that of the bat strain.
As Fauci said, the laboratory origin theory linked to NIH funding is “molecularly impossible.”
More importantly, this conclusion is based on the opinions of experts in the field of phylogenetics of viral evolution, which is extensively used in tracking the pandemic strain. The science is mature and reliable, and its conclusion is beyond reasonable doubt for those who believe in science.
As Fauci explains, this does not mean that other scientists in Wuhan could have taken other strains of coronavirus using other funds and tweaked and tweaked the genetic structure to create the disaster (seems very implausible to me, but who knows?). “None of us will know everything that’s going on in China or Wuhan… I’m open-minded about what the origins of this are,” Fauci told lawmakers. However, there is no way to attribute this to the USA, NIH or Fauci.
The House subcommittee’s rigorous 15-month investigation of thousands of emails and documents also revealed the seemingly sketchy practices of several scientists involved in some of the research done in Wuhan. Dr. One person, David Morens, worked on academic projects with Fauci, and the other, Morens’ colleague Dr. Peter Daszak led the EcoHealth Alliance and worked in the Wuhan laboratory. In the first place, they appear to have used personal email for government business, not adhering to policy, and worse, have developed some reprehensible workarounds, such as deleting messages, presumably to avoid scrutiny of their work. But none of this has to do with U.S. funding, NIH-funded research, or Fauci.
I suspect there will be more congressional investigations into Morens and Daszak that will create more headlines. Meanwhile, while the committee remains undecided on more emails, these lawmakers won’t bother trying to make the public safer.
Of course, even if they work hard to update and optimize the government’s response to a pandemic, there will be no guarantee that a future administration will follow the accumulated wisdom of experts. As we learned in the early days of Covid-19, then-President Donald Trump did not resort to the “pandemic playbook” developed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
But wow, the Covid subcommittee could have at least tried. As Fauci said – I hope – about the hearing, “The reason we’re here is [to determine] How can we do better next time? Unfortunately, this was a path not taken at the subcommittee hearing.
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