The National Institute of Health (NIH) has restarted the bat virus research grant it canceled three years ago under former President Trump’s administration.
The original 2014 version of the grant funded research into mixing various bat viruses to study severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that caused an outbreak in the early 2000s. The grant also funded research at the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan, China.
NIH has now brought back the same research grant, three years after Trump’s administration suspended it amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The new version of the award, once again granted to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), will not focus on mixing live bat viruses.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology will also no longer be directly involved in research. Instead, it will provide more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection for research by EHA, according to Science.org.
Many Republicans in Congress blasted the original grant for appearing to fund “gain of function” (GOF) research at the Wuhan lab. GOF is a scientific term for adjusting an existing pathogen to make it more capable of causing disease.
The original NIH grant awarded some $600,000 to the Wuhan lab over eight years.
Several researchers jumped in to praise NIH’s decision to restart the grant, arguing they can “finally get back to work.”
“It is long overdue. Unfortunately, the original cancellation reflects the ongoing partisan politics where first Trump and now many Republicans are attacking science unfairly,” Nobel Prize winner Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs told Science.org.
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The EHA will now partner with the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and use the simulated genomes of already-collected viruses to identify how coronaviruses might infect human cells, the outlet reported.