‘Absolutely Reckless’: NIH Allows EcoHealth Alliance to Resume Coronavirus Research
May 11th, 2023Via: The Defender:
The National Institutes of Health this week reinstated a controversial federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk of bat coronavirus spillover, sparking criticism from lawmakers and bioweapons experts.
From the Nature article on this:
A key priority for the newly released funds will be analysing nearly 300 partial or complete genomes of SARS-related coronaviruses from samples that the organization collected before the funding halt, he says.
And Statnews:
EcoHealth’s portion of the five-year, $82 million award will focus on Southeast Asia and the emergence of coronaviruses; filoviruses, the family responsible for Ebola; and paramyxoviruses, a family of viruses that includes measles and mumps.
And the Telegraph:
According to the grant award, the main thrust of the research is to “understand what factors allow bat-origin coronaviruses, including close relatives to Sars, to jump into humans” by studying their evolutionary diversity, patterns of spillover and genetic diversity.
I thought I’d read somewhere that they would be analyzing all the coronavirus variant genomes too.