A U.S. senator has thrown a political spotlight on yet another U.S.-Chinese research collaboration that critics suggest includes dangerous experiments that could create “superviruses” capable of sparking a pandemic. But contrary to assertions raised by Senator Joni Ernst (R–IA), none of the U.S. funding for the project goes to foreign researchers, and scientists who are part of the collaboration challenge other concerns she raised. And the U.S. funding agency she questioned this week issued a blistering response.
Prompted by information given to her by a group that opposes animal research, the White Coat Waste Project, Ernst on 14 February sent a letter to the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that said she was “troubled” to learn about an avian influenza study its researchers are conducting with scientists at the United Kingdom’s Roslin Institute and China’s Institute of Microbiology. USDA approved the $1 million grant in 2020 to better understand the evolution of newly emerged avian influenza viruses, such as the one now causing widespread death around the world in wild birds and poultry. Although they have devastated ecosystems and cost agricultural industries billions of dollars, these viruses rarely infect people and do not transmit between humans. But they could mutate into more dangerous strains that pose a threat to people.
The letter focuses on experiments in the study that repeatedly pass viruses through birds and laboratory cell cultures, which Ernst writes is a “‘gain-of-function’ technique that can create a pathogen that can more easily jump species.” For more than a decade, debates have focused on defining what constitutes a gain-of-function study, and the question has recently heated up because of unproven assertions that researchers working with bat coronaviruses created SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus.
Ernst sits on an agriculture committee that oversees USDA. Her letter explicitly links the USDA study to U.S.-funded work with bat coronaviruses that took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. She notes some U.S. intelligence experts contend SARS-CoV-2 escaped, or leaked, from the facility, although a 23 June 2023 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said there was wide agreement the virus was not engineered in a lab. “Alarmingly,” she adds, the “Biden USDA” grant is funding a Chinese researcher who is affiliated with WIV.
In an email, a USDA spokesperson said, “USDA’s funding is only being committed to the specific components carried out by our own team located in Athens, Georgia, and is not any way contributing to research taking place in the U.K. or China.” What is more, the spokesperson added, “what Senator Ernst lays out in her letter is far off base from what’s actually transpiring, and on top of that is based on approval decisions that predate this Administration.” If the senator has concerns about USDA research, the spokesperson advised, “she should reach out to us directly before putting misinformation in a press release or public letter.”
The collaboration’s Chinese partner, Liu Wenjun, is with the Institute of Microbiology, and though he was part of a multi-institution project with WIV, Liu says that has ended. “The purpose of three countries collaborating is to exchange the research data through the surveillance and transparency to combat this global infectious virus transmission,” Liu said in an email. “We hope the public understands the purpose of our collaboration is to control global diseases.”
Roslin virologist Paul Digard, the lead U.K. investigator in the collaboration, says there are several other misleading details in the letter. “Not only is there no transfer of money between the countries, there’s no transfer of reagents or materials,” Digard says.
As important, Digard says the collaborators are not attempting to passage viruses to make them more transmissible in birds or mammals, as occurred with the now famous ferret experiments that a dozen years ago kicked off the international debate about the risks of gain-of-function research. “The overall goal is to be able to forecast the ways in which the virus can evolve,” he says. “This is very much focused on transmission from wild birds to poultry, and how the long-range dynamics of that reflects the sequences of the virus.” The researchers are also evaluating the impact of influenza vaccines on poultry.
Ernst’s letter focused on one experiment that uses Japanese quail, an unusual avian species that has receptors for both human and bird flu viruses. The quail, the researchers note, can be an “indicator species” of the potential a flu virus has to jump into mammalian hosts. Digard says concerns about the quail studies are misplaced as the critics confuse the dangers posed by different types of flu viruses, only some of which can cause serious disease. The quail studies only involve flu viruses with so-called low pathogenicity.
Critics of gain-of-function research, however, say the intent of an experiment isn’t the key factor. If an experiment could create more dangerous viruses, they contend it should be subject to intensive review before being allowed to proceed.
As far as the dangers posed by the collaborations, Digard stresses that all the partners conduct the riskier experiments in biosafety level-2 and -3 laboratories. (Level 4 is the highest and reserved for the most dangerous pathogens such as the Ebola virus.) “Everything is risk assessed and is done under the appropriate containment by people who are skilled in it and who have pretty rigorous oversight.” Liu adds that biosecurity laws in China require that “all research activity is done safely and is not harmful to animals and humans, or even to the environment.”
The researchers wrote their grant proposal in 2019, before COVID-19 surfaced. “Given the current levels of anxiety,” Digard says, if they were to write the proposal today, they might more clearly spell out some details. Some experiments that appear risky, for example, actually aim to introduce “loss of functions” to viruses.
Digard says he’s not “fit to comment” on whether the scrutiny of the grant is driven by politics. “The politics are American politics,” he says. “They’re not mine.”