NIH head rebuts lab-leak talk

The acting head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that viruses studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, didn't show any resemblance to the COVID-19 virus that eventually spread around the world.

Dr Lawrence Tabak, told a US House of Representatives panel Wednesday that to suggest otherwise would be like "saying that a human is equivalent to a cow".

He made his comments at a hearing before members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Republicans who now control the House.

The NIH is a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the largest biomedical research agency in the world.

The suspicions put forth by Republicans at the hearing revolve around $8 million in NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was collaborating on coronavirus research with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the city where the pandemic was first reported.

NIH officials have long maintained that the viruses studied in Wuhan couldn't have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic, which Tabak reiterated on Wednesday, and said there is no direct evidence linking the Wuhan laboratory to the start of the pandemic.

Republicans accused Tabak and two other top Biden administration officials — Dr Robert M. Califf, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — of blocking their requests for information, imposing unnecessary vaccine mandates and eroding Americans' faith in public health institutions. China has frequently rebutted accusations that the pandemic originated in Wuhan. China has accused those critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.

In February 2021, a team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was "extremely unlikely" that the coronavirus leaked from the lab. The head of a team of experts — Dr Peter Ben Embarek — released the first details of its fact-finding mission into the virus' origins. Embarek said it was more likely that the virus had jumped to humans from an animal.

"Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research," he said at a news conference.

The theory that the virus was introduced into the human population as a result of a lab accident didn't warrant future study, he added.

In July 2021, China said it couldn't accept a WHO plan for a second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19.

Zeng Yixin, vice-minister of the National Health Commission, said then that he was "rather taken aback" that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.

He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.

"It is impossible for us to accept such an origin-tracing plan," he said at a news conference called to address the COVID-19 origins issue.

Zeng said then that the Wuhan lab has no virus that can directly infect humans. He added that speculation that staff and graduate students at the lab had been infected and might have started the spread of the virus in the city was untrue.

Yuan Zhiming, the director of the biosafety lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said they hadn't stored or studied the new coronavirus before the outbreak.

"I want to emphasize that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has never designed, made or leaked the novel coronavirus," he said.

In May 2021, President Joe Biden directed the US intelligence community to produce a report on COVID-19's origin within 90 days. The two-page, unclassified summary of the report was released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The summary stated that US investigators "judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon", but they do not rule out natural exposure to the virus, nor a laboratory accident as the origin of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"Justice will prevail, and injustice is doomed to fail," Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement about the report, noting that Beijing had made serious protests to Washington over it.

Washington has failed to respond to global concerns and the calls for a complete investigation of more than 200 US biolabs located across the globe, he said.

In so doing, the US "attempts to cover up facts and shirk its responsibilities", and it should "face up to the global community with a clear response", he said.