by Greg Piper
President Clinton’s infamous analysis of the word “is” remains relevant 26 years after his testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment trial.
National Institutes of Health deputy director Lawrence Tabak picked up on Clinton during a Thursday hearing of the House subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic on NIH’s oversight of funding that may have helped unleash the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s kind of like the definition of ‘is’,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, D-Iowa, deadpanned that Tabak distinguished a broad definition of gain-of-function research on the NIH news and events page deleted between Oct. 19 and 21 2021 and the narrow definition used by its regulators to approve grants and compliance on the proxy site.
The former “modifies a biological agent in such a way that it imparts new or enhanced activity,” while the latter sets the bar much higher: “research that can reasonably be expected to produce, transmit, or exploit potential pandemic pathogens resulting from the enhanced ability transmissibility and/or virulence of the pathogen in humans.”
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services immediately suspended and proposed expulsion of EcoHealth Alliance, which passed through U.S. funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for violating the terms of its reinstated NIH grant by failing to report that the WIV experiment had exceeded the threshold for “increased viral activity” – presumably research GoF.
This came more than two years after Tabak told House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. – just as the NIH was scrubbing the broad definition – that EcoHealth’s long-delayed final progress report revealed that a modified bat coronavirus unexpectedly made mice “sicker” than the original virus.
Tabak demonstrated ignorance when Meeks asked whether EcoHealth could have exploited “inconsistencies” between NIH definitions to maintain continuity of virus research.
“Oversight of grant management is crucial, regardless of anyone’s ‘operational definition’ of gaining office,” subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said Thursday in his opening remarks, giving partial credit for HHS’s actions in a subcommittee staff report issued two weeks ago that previously accused NIH for violating WIV’s prior exclusion by continuing to fund EcoHealth.
Democrats on the panel turned against EcoHealth President Peter Daszak at a hearing hours after that report, claiming he had previously misled Congress about the nature of his relationship with WIV.
The GOP majority continued its pre-publication practice on Thursday by using a transcript of an interview with former NIH director Francis Collins, claiming he contradicts statements made by a lawyer for former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci in connection with a February 1, 2020 conference call. , which arguably set the mainstream narrative against the lab leak theory.
Tabak admitted on Thursday what Republicans and scientists critical of GoF have been waiting to hear from him for years: NIH funded such research under its own abbreviated definition.
“If you’re talking about a generic term” rather than a regulatory definition, “yes, we did it” by funding GoF research at WIV, said Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., repeatedly emphasizing “virtually every lab” in the U.S. conducts such research without significant concerns related to security.
“The broad definition is laboratory jargon,” Tabak replied when Meeks asked why the NIH didn’t employ the “widely applicable” definition. “That’s just what scientists say,” while a narrow definition “is important” for surveillance purposes, he said.
Tabak would only say that the “communications department” has purged the broad definition to eliminate “ambiguities” about what it has regulatory significance. “The content has been reviewed” by “subject matter experts,” he said.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, D-N.Y., told him to provide specific names.
Republicans repeatedly read unpublished emails they received, a subcommittee spokesman confirmed. They include the most damning evidence yet that Fauci’s science adviser, David Morens, chronically and knowingly violated the Freedom of Information Act.
“I learned from our FOIA lady how to make emails disappear after getting the FOIA notice but before doing the search, so I think we’re all safe,” Morens told Daszak, according to Comer’s reading. “Also, I deleted most of my previous emails after sending them to Gmail.”
Another from Morens: “We are all smart enough to know that we should never have firearms, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in our emails, and if we found them, we would delete them.” Comer said Morens showed Daszak discussions about upcoming FOIA releases and helped write the response.
All of this would be a violation of NIH policy, and “I sincerely hope” its FOIA office isn’t helping employees evade the law, Tabak replied.
Republicans expressed outrage that Morens remains employed at the NIH, as well as Tabak’s refusal to say whether Morens experienced any “repercussions” at all, calling it a “personnel issue” that he could not discuss.
“It seems very convenient that you can’t tell us anything,” Lesko snorted.
Daszak also seemed to contradict his claim, which EcoHealth once showed to Just the News, that the NIH reporting system had locked down the nonprofit and that’s why its fifth-year report was so tardy.
According to Wenstrup, “here’s the truth behind the mystery,” he wrote to Morens’ private email. After the NIH funded another grant, “we assumed we didn’t have to” report, and when the Trump administration terminated it, EcoHealth “assumed we definitely wouldn’t have to,” Daszak said. The NIH system worked, and Daszak’s assumptions are wrong, Tabak said.
Concern over the contrasting definitions used by the NIH was the closest Democrats came to criticizing Tabak, praising him and NIH’s “diligent work in fighting the pandemic,” as the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee’s top Democrat, Rep. Kathy Castor, R-Fla., put it.
Tabak admitted to Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., it would be prudent for an ordinary person to visit the NIH’s “news and events website,” which included a broad definition of GoF, to find out how the feds define it.
But he said Ecohealth relied on the regulatory definition to assess whether the WIV studies were compliant, and NIAID also used it, which convinced Ross. She accused Republicans of doing a “disservice” by judging regulators “outside of the regulatory context.”
Democrats joined forces with Tabak to explain why WIV could not have played a role in the emergence of Covid-19. Ranking member Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., read from Tabak’s 2021 letter, which concluded that NIH-funded bat coronavirus experiments were “evolutionarily removed” from the SARS-CoV-2 virus by decades.
However, Tabak admitted to Malliotakis that he “certainly did not” know WIV’s full research portfolio and “personally” did not know that the Chinese military worked there. NIH relies on USAspending.gov to confirm that WIV has not received further funding since the exclusion, and EcoHealth confirms that WIV has focused on “non-human pathogens” that pose no threat, it said.
Democrats stuck to talking points from several hearings that the GOP wasted a year and a half by shedding no more lightweight on the origins of Covid-19.
Ruiz called it “an attempt to use concerns about lab origins to inflame sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain” and asked Republicans to stop “spreading extreme conspiratorial accusations” that “public health leaders” caused the pandemic and then covered up his origins.
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Greg Piper is a reporter for Just the News
Photo “Lawrence Tabak” by National Institute of Health and “Francis Collins” by National Institute of Health. Cover photo “Wuhan Institute of Virology” by Ureem2805.
